Digital Commons Network^™

On The Transportation Of Material Goods By Enslaved Africans During The Middle Passage: Preliminary Findings From Documentary Sources, Jerome S. Handler

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Murambi Et Moisson De Crânes Ou Comment La Fiction Raconte Un Génocide, Josias Semujanga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article shows how literary fiction is able to narrate the event of genocide so as to shatter the rational explanations of the world that are the accepted framework for discourse. It studies two texts written on the Rwandan genocide: Murambi by Boubacar Boris Diop and Moisson de crânes by Abdourahman Waberi.

La Représentation Du Politique Dans La Littérature Gabonaise, Jean René Ovono Mendame

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

From which viewpoint do Gabonese writers relate to the realities of the political and social policies of their country and what place do political players occupy in their works? Why do they hesitate so much to denounce the problems of their society? Why is there such a pronounced silence within their literary works? This article raises these delicate and complex questions. The report produced on the evolution of Gabonese writing affirms that writers’ silence is the product of self-censorship. They are condemned to fear saying anything, not only because of potential reprisals, but because they are, for the majority, political …

L’Espace Sexué Dans Riwan Ou Le Chemin De Sable De Ken Bugul, Antje Ziethen

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Riwan ou le chemin de sable by Ken Bugul, the protagonist lives in the interstice between her own house and that of her husband’s, between the life of a woman educated in Europe and the life of a wife subjected to the laws of mouridism. In her circular movement along the sandy road evoked in the novel’s title, she gradually creates a space that allows her to reconcile the two facets of her identity. Merging different genres, stories and languages, the text itself enacts the symbolism of the road as a transitional sphere.

Réécritures Romanesques Du Mythe De Médée Chez Maryse Condé Et Marie N’Diaye, Jean-Luc Manenti

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The mythical figure of Medea, made notable by child murder, has had a significant diffusion in contemporary fiction. A comparative analysis of her apparition in some novels by Maryse Condé and by Marie N’Diaye demonstrates the transposition and the updating of the myth according to varied cultural contexts. Situated between transgression and sublimation, the renovated figure of the infanticidal genitrix associates the imaginary of the beneficent mother to the one of the harmful mother. This hybrid status allows her to reveal a different specificity, one that goes beyond manichean classifications.

Geoarcheological And Historical Investigations In The Comal Springs Arrea, Lcra Clear Springs Autotransformer Project, Comal County, Texas, John E. Dockall, Douglas K. Boyd, Lannie Ethridge Kittrell

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

Prewitt and Associates, Inc. conducted testing and data recovery investigations at five archeological sites in the city of New Braunfels, in Comal County, Texas. The work was done in August and September 2005 for the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) for its Clear Springs Autotransformer Project, which involves the replacement of high-voltage electrical transmission towers through the New Braunfels area. A transmission tower location at prehistoric site 41CM286, located on an upland ridge overlooking the Guadalupe River, was investigated with a shovel test. Deposits were limited to 10 cm overlying bedrock limestone. In a preliminary report, the site was recommended …

Archeological Impact Evaluations And Surveys In The Texas Department Of Transportation's Abilene, Brownwood, Fort Worth, And Waco Districts, 2003-2006, Jennifer K. Mcwilliams, Ross C. Fields, Karl W. Kibler, E. Frances Gadus, Douglas K. Boyd, Timothy B. Griffith

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

This document constitutes the final report of work done by Prewitt and Associates, Inc. (PAI), under a contract from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to provide archeological services in four TxDOT districts—Abilene, Brownwood, Fort Worth, and Waco. Under this contract, PAI completed Impact Evaluations and Surveys to assist TxDOT in meeting the requirements of their Memorandum of Understanding with the Texas Historical Commission and a Programmatic Agreement between the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the Federal Highway Administration, the Texas Historical Commission, and TxDOT. The contract began on 26 September 2003. A total of 77 projects were conducted. The …

Transplanted Traditions: An Assessment Of Welsh Lore And Language In Argentina, Maria Teresa Agozzino

e-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies

For more than a hundred years, Welsh language and culture have survived in the Chubut province of Patagonia, Argentina. While the various stages of Welsh settlement have been well recorded in English, Welsh and Spanish, little or no research has been published concerning the folklore of the pioneers' descendants who have clung to their Welsh heritage while unreservedly accepting an Argentine identity. During May and June of 1999, I spent five weeks immersed in the Welsh communities in order to test my hypothesis of survivals and/or marginal survivals of Welsh folklore. However, traditional Welsh elements are waning as active-bearers age …

Of Demolition And Reconstruction: A Comparative Reading Of Manx Cultural Revivals, Breesha Maddrell

e-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies

This paper accesses Manx cultural survival by examining the work of one of the most controversial of Manx cultural figures, Mona Douglas, alongside one of the most well loved, T.E. Brown. It uses the literature in the Isle of Man over the period 1880-1980 as a means of identifying attitudes toward two successive waves of cultural survival and revival. Through a reading of Brown's Prologue to the first series of Fo'c's'le Yarns, 'Spes Altera', "another hope", 1896, and Douglas' 'The Tholtan' – which formed part of her last collection of poetry, Island Magic, published in 1956 – the differing nationalist …

Introduction: Amerindian Modes Of Knowledge, George Mentore, Fernando Santos-Granero

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

No abstract provided.

The Stench Of Death And The Aromas Of Life: The Poetics Of Ways Of Knowing And Sensory Process Among Piaroa Of The Orinoco Basin, Joanna Overing

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

The Piaroa are people, living along tributaries of the middle Orinoco, who recognize that the dance of every bodily process participates in a poisonous, primordial design of things. This paper explores the relation of sensory processes and the cosmic to Piaroa ways of knowing and doing their arts of the culinary. In so doing it is an expedition into ethnopoetics. My focus is upon the interplay of two contrasting narrative genres—the sublime and grotesque realism—as used by shamanic chanters to unfold the manifold ways in which bodily processes and sensory life are intimately involved in ways of knowing. The imagery …

From One To Metaphor: Toward An Understanding Of Pa’Ikwené (Palikur) Mathematics, Alan Passes

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This article addresses an aspect of Pa’ikwené knowledge called púkúha, which means both “to understand” and “to count.” It explores the indigenous numerology and the close relationship,no less imaginative than empirical,between mathematics and linguistics that is not always apparent in non-oral societies such as ours. The Pa’ikwené mathematical system is conceptually inventive and lexically profuse, some numerals having over two hundred different forms in current usage thanks to an intensive, affix-based process of morphemic transformations. Thereby, a number word can belong to twenty-one numerical classes relating to five distinct semantic categories incorporating diverse discrete states or qualities (male/female, concrete/abstract, …

The Triumph And Sorrow Of Beauty: Comparing The Recursive, Contrapuntal, And Cellular Aesthetics Of Being, George Mentore

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

The principal assumption put forward in this paper will be that for the Waiwai the privileging of lateral visibility brings ideas about a fractal individual into association with recursive power, while for coastal Guyanese and U.S. societies, respectively, the privileging of axial visibility brings concepts about an autonomous individual into association with contrapuntal and cellular relations of power. It will be argued that, contrary to the Waiwai situation, in its agenda to achieve a greater efficiency for the workings of its political relations with its citizens, the desire of the modern state, expressed through its privileged use of axial visibility, …

“Purús Song”: Nationalization And Tribalization In Southwestern Amazonia, Peter Gow

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Starting from a statement about knowledge and power by a Piaroa informant of Joanna Overing, the article analyses two descriptions of a meal on the Purús river in the early twentieth century: a Piro song and a short essay by Euclides da Cunha. Contrasting these two pieces in the context of how the ancestors of the Piro people of today came to meet the famous Brazilian writer, I propose the concepts of “nationalization” and “tribalization” as modes of symbolic action. Nationalization takes local events and escalates them into the space-time of the nation state, while tribalization deactivates the dangerous ramifications …

“The Effectiveness Of Symbols” Revisited: Ayoreo Curing Songs, John Renshaw

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This essay considers a specific field of Amerindian knowledge, namely the sarode, or curing songs, of the Ayoreo of the Gran Chaco. It attempts to elucidate some of the taken-for-granted metaphysical assumptions that underlie Ayoreo epistemology. Following the approach taken in Joanna Overing’s introduction to Reason and Morality (1985), I will suggest that even these apparently simple, repetitive curing songs have to be understood as part of a broader corpus of “mythical” knowledge. They acquire their effectiveness or power, not through suggestion or metaphor but rather by harnessing the power of the “mythical” world of the jnani bajade, the …

Laughing At Power And The Power Of Laughing In Cashinahua Narrative And Performance, Elsje Lagrou

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

The grotesque humor of pantomime and myth, the festive humor of play, and the humor used to criticize excesses in myth and comic sketches, can all be read as modes of native knowledge of the world and of the relationships holding this world together. Native exegesis of humorous imagery reveals crucial values related to Cashinahua concepts about sociality and ritual agency. These are iconic discourses about the quality of relations between people and between people and the animated world. The humor of the grotesque body, which is composed of parts of the body acting as autonomous forces, and the festive …

Bororo Funerals: Images Of The Refacement Of The World, Sylvia Caiuby Novaes

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

In this article I analyze Bororo funerals as moments of defacement and refacement. Death triggers a series of transformations that involve the dead person, the corpse itself, the soul, the making of the deceased’s representative, and the relationships among the living. All these transformations—which are the object of public secrecy—take place during the various rituals that compose the funerary cycle. The text is accompanied by a selection of photographs taken during thirty years of field research among the Bororo Indians of Mato Grosso, Brazil, in order to illustrate Bororo funerals as moments of re-creation of the world, following the theoretical …

Instrumental Speeches, Morality, And Masculine Agency Among Muinane People (Colombian Amazon), Carlos David Londono Sulkin

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Individuals among People of the Center (Colombian Amazon) produced numerous discursive depictions of themselves and of others, regarding their own competence and morality and others’ lacks thereof. Here, I attend particularly to a set of portrayals that pertained mostly to men: those concerning forms of knowledge that each People of the Center deemed uniquely their own. Individuals stressed the great amount of knowledge they possessed, the propriety of their processes of acquisition and the legitimacy of their use of it, its effectiveness and authentically patrilineal character, and the respect and fear others had of them because of it. They also …

The Politics Of Shamanism And The Limits Of Fear, Robert Storrie

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

The Hoti are a small group of hunter-horticulturalists living in the highlands of central Venezuelan Guiana. In this article I examine Hoti understandings of equality, hierarchy and power and the coercive use of fear by individuals who cultivate a reputation as “Light Ones”—that is people especially skilled in their interaction with the powerful beings of the shamanic environment—a role that is essential for the safety and fertility of the community. Hoti people are highly egalitarian and anti-hierarchical in their moral understandings and for them all power is ambiguous, and all claims to authority can arouse suspicion. For this reason it …

The Strength Of Thoughts, The Stench Of Blood: Amazonian Hematology And Gender, Luisa Elvira Belanunde

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This paper lays the grounds for an Amazonian hematology aiming to unlock the significance of blood with relation to gender, knowledge, and cosmology. Drawing guidance from Overing’s critique of patriarchy theory and her examination of Piaroa understandings of menstruation, it explores cross-cultural ideas about the embodiment and gendering of spirits, thought and strength in the blood, arguing that the flow of blood is conceived of as a relationship, for it transports knowledge to all body parts, both uniting and differentiating men and women, and constituting the hub of a person’s existence throughout his or her lifecycle. Through an examination of …

Sensual Vitalities: Noncorporeal Modes Of Sensing And Knowing In Native Amazonia, Fernando Santos-Granero

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Yanesha people of eastern Peru would agree with Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas that knowledge can only be achieved through sense perception. They would, however, disagree on what exactly “sense perception” means. In the Western tradition the senses are considered to be the “physiological” modes of perception. We can only know, it is asserted, through the body and its senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. In contrast, Yanesha people view bodily senses as imperfect means of knowing, unable to grasp the true, spiritual dimension of the world. Only one of the noncorporeal components of the self, yecamquëñ or “our …

Matsigenka Corporeality, A Nonbiological Reality: On Notions Of Consciousness And The Constitution Of Identity, Dan Rosengren

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Departing from the specific case of Matsigenka people in the Montaña of southeastern Peru, this article challenges some of the assumptions associated with predominant conceptions of Amazonian perspectivism. Examining different cultural registers such as birth rituals and mythology, Matsigenka peoples’ notions about being, soul, and self are discussed in relation to the importance that often is ascribed to physical shape for conceptualizing the world. In contrast to this stress on the corporeal, it is argued that Matsigenka people consider the noncorporeal cognizant self to determine outlook and identity. In accordance, corporeal transformation is seen as a result of “the self …

On Body And Soul, Guilherme Werlang

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

The notions of “body”and “soul,” within the dual universe of the Marubo from southwestern Amazonia, intersect other contributions to this volume: first, in view of the present concern, from a universalizing perspective, on epistemological issues in Amazonia; and second, in view of a now ever-present relevance of indigenous ontology (here more as the “presentation,” rather than the “investigation” or “account” of the origins of the cosmos and all forms of being therein) vis-à-vis the knowledge, with a particularizing tenor, of the performance of a cognitive ethos.

As noções de “corpo” e “alma,” dentro do universo dual dos Marubo do Sudoeste …

Disclosure Interviews Ida Susser. Women's Autonomy And The Political Contours Of Hiv/Aids In Southern Africa

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Cubans In Costa Rica: A Collection Of Life Stories, Adriana Solis Black

McNair Scholars Research Journal

This ethnographic essay examines the experiences of Cuban immigrants living in Costa Rica. The study aims to examine the degree of adjustment, adaptation, integration and/or assimilation of Cubans living in the small city of San Isidro del General in southern Costa Rica. This group represents a minor body of immigrants for whom Costa Rica serves as a country of first asylum and potentially as their new, adoptive homeland. Some major theoretical considerations and analytic themes that emerge out of this work are the issues of immigrant identity through the displaced people’s perspective; issues of separation from one culture and introduction …

Gender And Resistance At North Bend Plantation: The Beginnings Of An Interdisciplinary Study Of An Enslaved Community, Kelley Deetz

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Writing African History, Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

The Promise And Peril Of Public Anthropology, Ben Feinberg

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson. University of California Press: Berkeley, 2005. 282 pp.

and

Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power edited by Roberto J. González. University of Texas Press: Austin, 2004. 288 pp.

and

Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists by David H. Price. Duke University Press: Durham, 2004. 426 pp.

Data Recovery Excavations Ar The J.B. White Site (41mm341), Milam County, Texas, E. Frances Gadus, Ross C. Fields, Karl W. Kibler

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

In summer and fall 2002, personnel with Prewitt and Associates, Inc., undertook data recovery excavations at prehistoric site 41MM341 for the Texas Department of Transportation, Environmental Affairs Division, to address the requirements of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and the Texas Antiquities Code. Site 41MM341 is in central Milam County, Texas, just southeast of the town of Cameron, on a low rise in the modern floodplain of the Little River. The excavations were necessitated by the planned replacement of the State Highway 36 bridge spanning the Little River floodplain, which will directly affect the archeological deposits at …

Walters Farm, Smith County, Texas, Mark Walters

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

"I had a farm in Africa," the opening line of the movie Out of Africa, always reminds me of my little farm in East Texas and what it has meant to me during the 25 years we have been associated. Owning land, particularly when you are relying on it to provide your livelihood, can be a very gratifying (and humbling) experience. Since the land and I are now enjoying a well-deserved rest, I have had time to reflect on our relationship and to wonder how people before me related to the land, especially on these upland settings. Why people choose …