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 …

Civilized Elders And Isolated Ancestors: The Multiple Histories Of Contemporary Amazonia, Casey High

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

In this article I consider the impact of Peter Gow’s writing on indigenous histories as a key area of research on Amazonia. Building on his study of kinship as history on the Bajo Urubamba (1991) he presented a regional perspective on the dynamic social categories by which Amazonian people understand their relations with various “others.” Focusing on indigenous agency and modes of thought, Gow challenged certain lines of historical thinking that dominated anthropology at the time. I explore how his ethnographic approach to history has influenced a generation of regional scholarship, including my own work on memory and social transformation …

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 …

Navigating The Cairene Table: Food And Family Between What Is Ideal And What Is Real, Iman Afify

Theses and Dissertations

Our daily encounters with food, especially during our childhood, play a crucial role in shaping and informing our identity and our habitus. In this research, by using multimodal and auto ethnography, I argue that due to the guiding path that our senses carve for us, we make sense and contextualise our surroundings through our senses, and not only the five senses of vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch, but also through our inner senses of time and temporality, and how time and memory play an important role in the registration of our surroundings through our bodies and senses. I am …

Fraternity, Martyrdom And Peace In Burundi: The Forty Servants Of God Of Buta, Jodi Mikalachki

Journal of Global Catholicism

During Burundi's 1993-2005 civil war, students at Buta Minor Seminary were ordered at gunpoint to separate by ethnicity—Hutus over here, Tutsis over there! They chose instead to join hands and affirm their common identity as children of God. The forty students killed were quickly proclaimed martyrs of fraternity. Their costly solidarity defused the cry for reprisals and continues to inspire Burundians and others on the path of reconciliation. Drawing on fifty interviews with survivors, parents of martyrs, neighbors, religious leaders and other Burundian intellectuals, this essay examines how Burundian Catholics understand the significance of the Buta martyrdom to their …

Passing Down The Rolling Pin: Lefse, Memory, And A Norwegian-American Identity, Rebecca Garbe

Scandinavian Studies Student Award

This paper explores the intersections between memory and food-making and how they inform a Norwegian-American cultural identity. Based on fieldwork done in June and July of 2019 in Fosston, Minnesota, I use lefse, a Norwegian potato-based flatbread, as a focal point, for analysis. I argue that lefse-making in Fosston acts as a medium through which residents engage with a collective memory of an immigrant heritage. This traditional food-making, I assert, relies on knowledge passed down through and across family lines allowing food-makers and eaters to experience an embodied connection to their cultural past. Investigating my own Norwegian heritage, I draw …

Village-Temple Consciousness In Two Jaffna Tamil Villages In Post-War Sri Lanka, Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

This dissertation investigates how community rebuilding is occurring in a gravely damaged, post-conflict society. Specifically, it looks at how people in two villages in Tamil, Hindu, Jaffna, Sri Lanka, are using their ‘sense of place’ and ‘place-making practices’ or what I call here their ‘village-temple consciousness’ or village consciousness, to maintain and rebuild their communities after war to make them, once again, places in which they feel a comfortable sense of belonging. This is a comparative study because Inuvil and Naguleswaram were affected differently by the Sri Lankan civil war. That is, while Inuvil, was physically damaged and socially disrupted …

The Public And The Personal: Mapping The Nyc Subway System As An Urban Memoryscape, Soledad O. Tejada

Library Map Prize

No abstract provided.

The Political Work Of Memory In Collaborative Caribbean Archaeology, Elena Sesma

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is the product of a community-based research project that sought to understand how descendants of the 19th century Millars Plantation on the southern end of Eleuthera, Bahamas continue to use and reinterpret the landscape that they have called home for over a century and a half. In 1871, the last owner of the Millars Plantation left the estate in her will to the descendants of her former slaves and servants. That descendant community still upholds their right to this land today, although in recent years, a Bahamian developer has attempted to gain title to the acreage through the …

Recollections: Memory, Materiality, And Meritocracy At The Dr. James Still Historic Office And Homestead, Marc Lorenc

Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation explores how memory, materiality, and meritocracy articulate together to create a meritocratic subjectivity at the Dr. James Still Historic Office and Homestead. This subjectivity frames how we experience and promote the history of Dr. James Still through an authorized heritage discourse (AHD) (Smith 2006) that promotes and re-ingrains American meritocracy, specifically the “bootstrap myth”, as a “common sense”. Using a combination of archaeological excavations, documentary analysis, and ethnography conducted under the Dr. James Still Community Archaeology Project (DJSCAP), I explore how cultural artifacts shape and influence our subjectivities at the site and more broadly in everyday interactions with …

Commemorative Bodies: (Un)Making Racial Order And Cuban White Supremacy In Little Havana's Heritage District, Corinna Jeanne Moebius

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation unearths memory- and place-making practices, processes and “racializing regimes of representation” in Little Havana’s heritage district, now a major tourism destination in Miami, Florida. It draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and consultations of various archives that span decades back to the 1960s and trace the origins of the district in plans for a “Latin Quarter.”

My analyses borrow from and combine various bodies of scholarly work to examine and deconstruct the use of always multi-vocal “commemorative bodies” for the production of racial narratives that are embedded in--and give shape to--acts of memorialization and commemoration.

By examining the …

Intergenerational Teenage Motherhood: Memory And Material Culture, Aspen Christian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores how memories and material culture can be used to understand intergenerational teenage motherhood. Intimate, feminist ethnography is used to explore the experiences of my mother and my grandmother who were both teenage mothers. Teenage mothers are blamed for perpetuating a cycle of poverty in the United States by conservative and neoliberal adherents, yet women were young mothers throughout the history of the United States. In their minds, teenage mothers have daughters who become teenage mothers themselves, which then maintains poverty across generations. This project counters that false narrative by focusing on the experiences of intergenerational teenage mothers …

The Holographic Principle Of Mind And The Evolution Of Consciousness, Germine, Mark

Journal of Conscious Evolution

The Holographic Principle holds the information in any region of space and time exists on the surface of that region. Layers of the holographic, universal “now” go from the inception of the universe to the present. Universal Consciousness is the timeless source of actuality and mentality. Information is experience, and the expansion of the “now” leads to higher and higher orders of experience in the Universe, with various levels of consciousness emerging from experience. The brain consists of a nested hierarchy of surfaces which range from the most elementary field though the neuron, neural group, and the whole brain. Evidence …

Unsettling The Homeland: Fragments Of Home And Homeland Among Iraqi Exiles In Amman, Jordan, Abdulla Majeed

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

For the past 30 years, imperial military invasions and political meddling in Iraq, and a long history of a repressive Ba’athist regime disfigured the nation, displaced Iraqis from their homeland, and unsettled their relationship to it. By examining the narratives of Iraqi exiles who have diverse migration genealogies, socioeconomic backgrounds, and political trajectories in Amman, Jordan, this thesis looks at how exile shapes how the homeland is imagined, remembered, and performed. Based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Amman between May and September of 2017, the thesis explores: 1) Why certain narratives and elements of the past are employed, while …

Together Without Consensus: Class, Emotions And The Politics Of The Rule Of Law In The Lawyers’ Movement (2007-09) In Pakistan, Salman Hussain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of how political emotions, historical memory and notion(s) of the rule of law are mobilized in postcolonial Pakistan. It examines how liberal legality (the rule of law, judiciary and courts) and discourses of rights have become popular hegemonic languages for mobilizing political protests and legal claims in South Asia. In particular, the dissertation studies a protest movement, the Lawyers’ Movement for the Restoration of Judiciary and Democracy (2007-09), that was led by the lawyers and their allied educated and professional middle-classes, and investigates how the lawyers successfully galvanized Pakistanis against the then prevalent military …

Memory And History In South Eleuthera: A Report To The People Of South Eleuthera, Elena Sesma

Archaeological Project Reports

Over the past 5 years, archaeologists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have made several short-term trips to South Eleuthera to research the history of this portion of the island. Our main interests have been in understanding how the landscape has changed over the past 150 years, and especially in the past few decades as tourism has fallen off in the south. Through a combination of ethnographic research and pedestrian survey of the South Eleuthera landscape, we have gained a clearer understanding of the history of this region, and of contemporary life today. This report offers a summary of findings …

Food And Negotiation Of Identity Among The Russian Immigrant Community Of Brighton Beach, Elena Starkova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the construction of ethnic identity among Russian immigrants in New York, by examining how it has been negotiated and articulated through foods, including traditional and non-native foods as a vehicle for their shifting identities and for reaffirming their position and participation in mainstream American society.

Washing Machine Races, Gulag Pizza, And Mc Lenin: Kitsch-Ification In Post Socialist Hungary, Lisa Pope Fischer

Publications and Research

During the cold war, material culture could symbolically mark conflicts between the East and West. Lenin, Marx, the sickle and hammer symbolized communist strength. Household items and electronics were marveled at as new and advanced in contrast to the Western capitalist exotic “Other.” In Hungary today these symbols become Communist kitsch that can undermine former tensions and illustrate a collective ambivalence towards the post-socialist condition by (1) reinterpreting time and space, (2) symbolizing the cold war ‘other,’ (3) creating fantasized spaces, (4) and by representing a generational divide. Making former symbols of Communist strength ‘kitschy’ illustrates a mockery of the …

From Cow Pasture To Cul-De-Sac: The Intersection Of Rural Values, Memory, And Nostalgia Amidst Suburban Development In The American South, Emily F. Ramsey

Theses and Dissertations

How do residents of a once small farming community react to rapid suburbanization? By examining rhetoric on growth, progress, and rurality, this thesis argues a complex landscape forms where longtime residents weave among pragmatism, disaffection, and nostalgia, with efforts to preserve memories of the past for themselves and future generations.

Change Of Sight, Sites Of Creativity: The Visual Arts In Albania After Socialism, Sofia Kalo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines Albania’s fine art world after the end of state socialism in 1991. Drawing on two years of anthropological fieldwork (January –August 2006 and January 2010-August 2011) in Tirana, Albania’s capital city, this study investigates how the withdrawal of state support and oversight on the arts, the introduction of a market economy and efforts toward European belonging have been reflected, responded to and challenged in the discourses and practices of aesthetic production. Viewing art as a productive site of social meaning, where people perform and struggle over their identities, their pasts and futures, this dissertation explores the social …

The Ethnography Of Rhythm: Orality And Its Technologies [Table Of Contents], Haun Saussy

Literature

“Only Haun Saussy—with his historical range, theoretical breadth, and fine close-reading—could have pulled off this brilliant comparative history of ‘the perturbation caused by the idea of oral literature.’ The disciplinary range of this dazzling scholarly performance takes us from linguistics and philology to ethnography and religious studies, from physiology and psychiatry to the history of graphic and sound technologies. Be prepared to marvel—and learn.” —Linda Hutcheon, University Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Death, After-Death And The Human In The Internet Era: Remembering, Not Forgetting Professor Michael C. Kearl (1949-2015), Connor Graham, Alfred Montoya

Alfred Montoya

Today, humans have remains that are other than physical, generated within and supported by new information communications technologies (ICTs). As with human remains of the past, these are variously attended to or ignored. In this article, which serves as the introduction to this special issue, we examine the reality, meaning and use of enduring digital remains of humans. We are specifically interested in the evolving practices of remembering and forgetting associated with them. These previously posited considerations of ‘human remains’ and ‘what remains of the human’ are useful for exploring the relationship between the Internet, the body, remembering and forgetting. …

‘Reclamation Road’: A Microhistory Of Massacre Memory In Clear Lake, California, Jeremiah J. Garsha

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article is a microhistory of not only the massacre of the indigenous Pomo people in Clear Lake, California, but also the memorialization of this event. It is an examination of two plaques marking the site of the Bloody Island massacre, exploring how memorial representations produce and silence historical memory of genocide under emerging and shifting historical narratives. A 1942 plaque is contextualized to show the co-option of the Pomo and massacre memory by an Anglo-American organization dedicated to settler memory. A 2005 plaque is read as a decentering of this narrative, guiding the viewer through a new hierarchy of …

Death, After-Death And The Human In The Internet Era: Remembering, Not Forgetting Professor Michael C. Kearl (1949-2015), Connor Graham, Alfred Montoya

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Research

Today, humans have remains that are other than physical, generated within and supported by new information communications technologies (ICTs). As with human remains of the past, these are variously attended to or ignored. In this article, which serves as the introduction to this special issue, we examine the reality, meaning and use of enduring digital remains of humans. We are specifically interested in the evolving practices of remembering and forgetting associated with them. These previously posited considerations of ‘human remains’ and ‘what remains of the human’ are useful for exploring the relationship between the Internet, the body, remembering and forgetting. …

Response To The Unthinkable: Collecting And Archiving Condolence And Temporary Memorial Materials Following Public Tragedies, Ashley R. Maynor

UT Libraries Faculty: Peer-Reviewed Publications

From Oklahoma City to Columbine to the Boston Marathon finish line, individuals around the world have responded to violent mass deaths publicized in mainstream media by creating ever-larger temporary memorials and sending expressions of sympathy—such as letters, flowers, tokens, and mementos—by the tens and even hundreds of thousands. Increasingly, there is an expectation that some, if not all, of the condolence and temporary memorial items will be kept or saved. This unusual and unexpected task of archiving so-called “spontaneous shrines” often falls to libraries and archives and few protocols, if any, exist for librarians and archivists in this role. This …

Recreational Segregation: The Role Of Place In Shaping Communities, Iyshia Michelle Lowman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Institutionalized racial segregation in the United States has had a significant impact on many aspects of American culture. Segregation was practiced in every aspect of public life, even in areas of recreation. For those labeled as "nonwhite," even going to the beach was legally restricted. The events between the 1950s and 1960s at Homestead Bayfront Beach in Homestead, Florida are evidence that social stratification based on the social categorization of race has a significant effect even today. This research examines how legalized segregation in the past impacted society and contributed to the development of a place and identity at Homestead …

Faithful Remembering: Constructing Dutch America In The Twentieth Century, David E. Zwart

Dissertations

The people of the Dutch-American community constructed and maintained a strong ethnoreligion identity in the twentieth despite pressures to join the mainstream of the United States. A strong institutional completeness of congregations and schools resulted from and contributed to this identity. The people in these institutions created a shared identity by demanding the loyalty of members as well as constructing narratives that convinced people of the need for the ethnoreligious institutions.

The narratives of the Dutch-American community reflected and reinforced a shared identity, which relied on a collective memory. The framing, maintaining, altering, and remodeling of the collective memory from …