Digital Commons Network^™

Beyond Burial - Transforming Death: A New Ritual Of Farewell And The Ecological Return Of The Body To Nature, Chang Xie

Masters Theses

Burial and funeral culture have been shaped by human self-awareness and reflect an anthropocentric worldview. The modern funeral industry's multi-billion-dollar enterprise is based on the principle of protecting, sanitizing, and beautifying the corpse to promote the idea of human exceptionalism. However, this practice overlooks the natural process of decay and the potential beauty in returning the body to the earth, with which the body shares the same chemical basis as the earth itself. Modern science has provided Eco-friendly green burial methods, such as soil modification, ice burial, and water burial, making it suitable to contribute to natural ecology using human …

What’S Good: Sharing Food And Meaning-Making Among Commensals, Lucor Jordan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To explore how systems of meaning are formed and reformed over an individual’s lifetime in the context of food, meals, and commensality, this research applies a critical phenomenological lens to food-centered life histories centered on the life experiences of childhood, adulthood and the diffusion of food knowledge within a food centric community between individuals within age cohorts and across generations. Through reflective interviewing community members within Denver metropolitan area anti-hunger organization, this research is able to provide insight into several secondary questions, including: Is childhood a formative space for the cementation of these systems of meaning and value and do …

Don't Forget Me: A Discussion On Social Memory And Commemoration, Anfernee Murray

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis examines the relationship between social memory and social identity development among groups who share contested interpretations of their shared social memory. With social memories being a collaborative process that requires consensus and compromise, there arises conflict when groups are divided in deciding on what event of their shared history is relevant to remember - for it is these memories that influence and shape how a group identifies itself.

For Black Americans, this contention arises in the conversations surrounding the difficult and traumatic histories of their enslaved ancestors by the ancestors of their white counterparts. This is further complicated …

“Man, I Will Miss This Place”: An Ethnographic Account Of Place-Making On Dickson Street Through Men’S Bathroom Graffiti, Ethan S. Brown

Anthropology Undergraduate Honors Theses

Walking into a public bathroom, often we are faced with interesting, unique, and easily ignorable cases of residual humanity: bathroom graffiti. These writings, academically known as latrinalia, offer scholars a unique portrait of the people who form an immediate culture and community. By providing opportunities to produce individual and collective identities, local folklore, and contesting narratives of space, latrinalia allows authors to carve out personal or cultural place out of the impersonal materiality of space. Utilizing traditional methods of ethnographic fieldwork, latrinalia in the men’s bathrooms of three bars along the famed Dickson Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas is approached …

Culturally Modified Trees In Western Washington: Impact And Perspective From The Stillaguamish Cultural Resources Department, Kelsey Maloy

WWU Graduate School Collection

This study braids qualitative and quantitative views of CMT studies to explore meanings and relationships with Culturally Modified Trees (CMT) with a concern for the ethnographic perspective currently absent in dominant structures. This research showcases community value when combining different CMT ontologies (Stillaguamish and Western Academic Definitions). Ethnohistorical methods and grounded theory help organize semi-structured interviews at five previously recorded archaeological CMT sites. There is a lack of feedback concerning Indigenous philosophy about classifying eco-facts or vivio-facts, specifically CMT. This study comprises an interdisciplinary team within the Stillaguamish Cultural Resources Department to reassess five previously documented cedar use sites in …