ANTHROPOLOGY Chapter Showcase
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ANTHROPOLOGY Chapter Showcase LEXINGTON BOOKS An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield LEXINGTON BOOKS CHAPTER SHOWCASE FROM THE EDITOR Lexington Books is committed to publishing the highest quality anthropology scholarship. Our books engage with research from around the globe and feature the latest research in cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology. Our scholarly and applied works are united by a cross-cultural understanding of the human experience and critical social awareness. We publish a wide range of works that draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and examine topical and traditional areas of study, including immigration, tourism, education, health and well-being, gender and social identities, religion, and kinship. Lexington Books offers the most current and premium academic thought in the field for scholars, researchers, and students. The chapters in this showcase look at the role of manliness and money in suburban drug dealing, gender issues in an indigenous medical system in Nepal, the resettlement of Guatemalan Mayan refugees in the American Midwest, the relationship between capoeira mestres and students in an age of global mobility, and popular media representations of the culture and heritage of Native peoples. These chapters provide a sense of the depth of critical thought and engagement found in our publications and the breadth of our anthropology list. I invite you to publish your next scholarly book with Lexington Books. We publish monographs, edited collections, revised dissertations, and ethnographies by emerging and established scholars, including interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary works. While we publish many standalone titles, we also publish books in series that bring together incisive scholarship around key subjects, such as Crossing Borders in a Global World: Applying Anthropology to Migration, Displacement, and Social Change; Anthropology of Well-Being: Individual, Community, and Society; and Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility, and Society. Click here to see a full list of our series. Lexington Books offers an expedited decision-making process, peer review, and a rapid production process to ensure that your research is published expediently. We publish high-quality books with full-color covers and we market our new titles aggressively around the world. Our titles are regularly reviewed in scholarly journals and have received significant awards and honors for academic scholarship. To submit a proposal for a book project, please review our submission guidelines and email a full prospectus to me at [email protected]. Or, if you prefer to discuss your project with me first, please email me to set up a time for a phone call. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, KASEY BEDUHN Associate Acquisitions Editor LEXINGTON BOOKS contents 4 – 18 David Crawford, “Gendered Ambivalence: Cocaine, Money, and Manliness,” in Dealing with Privilege: Cannabis, Cocaine, and the Economic Foundations of Suburban Drug Culture 19 – 45 Mary M. Cameron, “Gender, Culture, Science, and Ayurvedic Medicine: Five Women Ayurvedic Doctors,” in Three Fruits: Nepali Ayurvedic Doctors on Health, Nature, and Social Change 46 – 72 Martin Renzo Rosales and Juana Domingo Andrés, with commentary by Claire Herzog, “Guatemalan Mayas in the American Midwest: Creative Intercultural Networking,” in The Crux of Refugee Resettlement: Rebuilding Social Networks 73 – 93 Sergio González Varela, “The Mestre-Student Relationship in the Age of Tourism,” in Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World 94 – 113 J. Brett Hill, “Popular Media,” in From Huhugam to Hohokam: Heritage and Archaeology in the American Southwest The pagination of the original chapters has been preserved to enable accurate citations of these chapters. These chapters are provided for personal use only and may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. David Crawford, “Gendered Ambivalence: Cocaine, Money, and Manliness,” in Dealing with Privilege: Cannabis, Cocaine, and the Economic Foundations of Suburban Drug Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 61–75. All Rights Reserved. FIVE Gendered Ambivalence Cocaine, Money, and Manliness The previous chapter explored the cultural confusion inherent to con- ducting business with friends. In suburban drug dealing profit is derived from people you know, sometimes people you know well, and calcula- tion of interests is entangled with camaraderie. Given that friendship involves an implicit interest in the person—and not what you can get out of them—extracting material benefits from friendship is a vexing endeav- or. In a typical drug deal the roles and motives of buyer and seller, user and provider, gift-giver and recipient mix and contradict in the space of a single transaction. This gets no easier in the context of romance and sex. Most of us would agree that sexuality is complicated, and by many accounts, cocaine is associated with sex. Cannabis and LSD might have been culturally linked to “free love” and the hippie movement, but the rise of cocaine brought with it a different sexual ethic. Some make the argument that the chemical substance of cocaine lends itself to this. Some report that arousal is a feature of the drug, arguing that it lowers inhibi- tions for women and increases stamina for men. Note, however, that this assessment of how the drug impacts sex depends on a specific under- standing of how sex works in humans, with women requiring induce- ment and men needing, or at least appreciating, help with what is called, without irony, “performance.” This is a very culturally specific way of understanding sexuality. This model has little to do with the iconic orgies of Imperial Rome or 1960s Connecticut key-swapping parties, never mind other understandings of pleasure, for instance societies that treat male/male sex as a desirable norm (like parts of ancient Greece or Papua New Guinea), or those that consider the female libido to be stronger than the male.1 The “coke is 61 4 Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase 62 Chapter 5 good for sex” assertion envisions sexuality in conventional American terms, in other words. It seems a retreat from the more androgynous sexual identity of the 1960s, where men and women wore similar clothes and had similar hairstyles. This suggests that in the 1980s the role of cocaine in courtship and mating represents a return to a more traditional American understanding of sexuality, with an emphasis on sexual dimor- phism rather than an extension of the sexual revolution begun in the 1960s. The cocaine-sex nexus operates two main ways. First, the use of a drug to facilitate sexual connection fits squarely with our mechanical understanding of ourselves. Americans tend to view their bodies as so- phisticated machines that can be directed to behave one way or another with calculated instructions in the form of chemicals. We are perhaps only an extreme example of Western, mechanistic understanding of the mind/body relationship, but from this vantage it makes perfect sense that a thing external to us (in this example, cocaine) can change fundamental things about us. It “makes us” do things or want things, or makes us capable of things that we would not otherwise desire or achieve. However, a second way that cocaine relates to sex is through money and power. Male sexuality in our culture is augmented by power, and power is connected to money. We expect rich men to have beautiful wives, which demonstrates that female sexuality emerges from what we consider physical attractiveness while male sexuality relies on at least an element of status. This is not true everywhere for everyone, but in the American context wealth is often believed to serve as an aphrodisiac for women. If it does not conjure genuine desire, it at least inspires women to accommodate powerful men. In the 1980s context, where women were considered to have naturally less powerful sex drives, men used money and its crystalline avatar, cocaine, to attract mates. This is all relative, of course. In the context of middle class lives, where most young men make minimum wage or something close to it, having any cocaine at all was a form of conspicuous consumption. Whoever had it was claiming disposable wealth, and was thus com- manding attention, including sexual attention. If someone was giving coke away for free, that was notable. Yet not everyone connected sex to cocaine in this way. Doug had a long-term girlfriend, we recall, though even he noted that he “missed his chance” to use cocaine for sexual advantage. He understood that cocaine was connected to sex, but he personally did not use it that way. Art, by contrast, never mentioned the opposite sex or sexuality at all. For him the bonds formed by cocaine were entirely homosocial—powerful, but pla- tonic. By the time Brad was a dealer cocaine had come down in price and had lost its exotic allure, including its sexual allure. As he made clear, people even denied taking it. Cocaine had become less expensive and unglamorous, even shameful. But in its heyday men like Wayne saw Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase 5 Gendered Ambivalence 63 cocaine as a prime way to build masculine attractiveness. We will begin with what Wayne had to say about this, then we meet Woody and Pete. Wayne represents a pretty typical story, I think, a common way men attempted to provide cocaine to women as part of the process of wooing them. Woody explains this further. Pete connects cocaine to sex (and money) in a different way than the other two, but he is insightful about the connection between sex, drugs, money, and masculinity. WAYNE’S COCAINE SELF Recall that Wayne’s initial response to my question of why he sold drugs was that “It was about fucking fun! Financing the fun!” And his answer to why he gave away coke was that “no one wants to party alone.