Digital Commons Network^™

Frequency Of Phytoestrogen Consumption And Symptoms At Midlife Among Bangladeshis In Bangladesh And London, Lynnette Leidy Sievert, Taniya Sharmeen, Khurshida Begum, Shanthi Muttukrishna, Osul Chowdhury, Gillian R. Bentley

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

There is a longstanding interest in the relationship between diet and hot flash symptoms during midlife, especially in whether phytoestrogens ease menopausal symptoms. The purpose of this study was to examine hot flashes, night sweats, trouble sleeping, and vaginal dryness in relation to the intake of foods rich in phytoestrogens among Bangladeshi women aged 35 to 59 years who were living either in Sylhet, Bangladesh (n = 157) or as migrants in London (n = 174). Consumption ranges for phytoestrogens were constructed from food frequencies. We hypothesized that diets rich in isoflavones, lignans, and coumestrol would be associated with lower …

Ecological Consequences Of A Millennium Of Introduced Dogs On Madagascar, Sean W. Hixon, Kristina G. Douglass, Laurie R. Godfrey, Laurie Eccles, Brooke E. Crowley, Lucien Marie Aimé Rakotozafy, Geoffrey Clark, Simon Haberle, Atholl Anderson, Henry T. Wright

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Introduced predators currently threaten endemic animals on Madagascar through predation, facilitation of human-led hunts, competition, and disease transmission, but the antiquity and past consequences of these introductions are poorly known. We use directly radiocarbon dated bones of introduced dogs (Canis familiaris) to test whether dogs could have aided human-led hunts of the island's extinct megafauna. We compare carbon and nitrogen isotope data from the bone collagen of dogs and endemic fosa (Cryptoprocta spp.) in central and southwestern Madagascar to test for competition between introduced and endemic predators. The distinct isotopic niches of dogs and fosa suggest that any past antagonistic …

When Does Fertility End? The Timing Of Tubal Ligations And Hysterectomies, And The Meaning Of Menopause, Lynnette Leidy Sievert, Laura Huicochea-Gómez, Diana Cahuich-Campos, Lynn Morrison, Daniel E. Brown

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

We applied a biocultural lens to examine the temporal order of biological, behavioral, and medical events related to fertility across the female reproductive lifespan in three sites, two in Mexico and one in the United States. Using a mixed-method design, we expanded our thinking about the end of fertility in order to examine the timing of hysterectomies and tubal ligations. We discovered that menopause is not the end of fertility for a surprisingly high number of women. Across the three sites, between 43% and 50% of women underwent tubal ligations at mean ages of 32 years (in Campeche, Mexico) and …

Dominance Style Is A Key Predictor Of Vocal Use And Evolution Across Nonhuman Primates, Anna H. Weyher, Eithne Kavanagh, Sally E. Street, Felix O. Angwela, Thore J. Bergman, Maryjka B. Blaszczyk, Laura M. Bolt, Margarita Briseño-Jaramillo, Michelle Brown, Chloe Chen-Kraus

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Animal communication has long been thought to be subject to pressures and constraints associated with social relationships. However, our understanding of how the nature and quality of social relationships relates to the use and evolution of communication is limited by a lack of directly comparable methods across multiple levels of analysis. Here, we analysed observational data from 111 wild groups belonging to 26 non-human primate species, to test how vocal communication relates to dominance style (the strictness with which a dominance hierarchy is enforced, ranging from 'despotic' to 'tolerant'). At the individual-level, we found that dominant individuals who were more …

How The Demographic Composition Of Academic Science And Engineering Departments Influences Workplace Culture, Faculty Experience, And Retention Risk, Eric E. Griffith, Nilanjana Dasgupta

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Although on average women are underrepresented in academic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments at universities, an underappreciated fact is that women’s representation varies widely across STEM disciplines. Past research is fairly silent on how local variations in gender composition impact faculty experiences. This study fills that gap. A survey of STEM departments at a large research university finds that women faculty in STEM are less professionally satisfied than male colleagues only if they are housed in departments where women are a small numeric minority. Gender differences in satisfaction are largest in departments with less than 25% women, smaller …

A Tale Of Two Courses: Challenging Millenials To Experience Culture Through Film, Katie Kirakosian, Virginia Mclaurin, Cary Speck

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

In this article, we discuss how adding a final film project to a revised 'Culture through Film' course led to deeper student learning and higher rates of student success, as well as increased student satisfaction. Ultimately, we urge social science educators to include experiential projects in their courses that connect to all learning styles. Such projects should also challenge students to 'create', a task that requires generating ideas, planning and ultimately producing something, which, according to Bloom's taxonomy, engages students in the highest cognitive process (Anderson and Krathwohl 2000). Although this class focused on the intersections of culture and film …

Climate And Species Richness Predict The Phylogenetic Structure Of African Mammal Communities, Jason M. Kamilar, Lydia Beaudrot, Kaye E. Reed

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

We have little knowledge of how climatic variation (and by proxy, habitat variation) influences the phylogenetic structure of tropical communities. Here, we quantified the phylogenetic structure of mammal communities in Africa to investigate how community structure varies with respect to climate and species richness variation across the continent. In addition, we investigated how phylogenetic patterns vary across carnivores, primates, and ungulates. We predicted that climate would differentially affect the structure of communities from different clades due to between-clade biological variation. We examined 203 communities using two metrics, the net relatedness (NRI) and nearest taxon (NTI) indices. We used simultaneous autoregressive …

Fistful Of Tears”: Encounters With Transnational Affect, Chinese Immigrants And Italian Fast Fashion, Elizabeth L. Krause

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

In the made in italy fast-fashion sector, the ultimate flexible workers are Chinese migrants, whose parenting practices include circulating children back to China. This paper draws on collaborative research in Prato, Italy, to grasp how Chinese families and individuals encounter the Italian state and negotiate the terms of transnational capitalism. The project innovates an encounter ethnography framework to guide research. This paper investigates the dialectic between economics and affect. Chinese immigrants’ desires to make money are situated in three structural encounters, each at a different level of scale: the Wenzhou regional model of economic development; a Central Italian small-firm environment …

Toward An Ecology Of Cultural Heritage, Elizabeth Brabec, Elizabeth S. Chilton

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Around the globe, the impacts of climate change are increasing the risk of catastrophic events and the resulting loss of human life and communities. Until now, responses to these events and planning for future occurrences have focused on ecological and social impacts, to the almost total exclusion of the impacts on heritage. Cultural heritage includes archaeological sites, historic buildings, and artifacts, but—more importantly—it also includes the meanings, values, and contemporary social behavior associated with these tangible forms of heritage. Thus, place attachment, sense of place, and associated forms of intangible heritage are major societal factors that must be integrated into …

Strategic Authenticity And Voice: New Ways Of Seeing And Being Seen As Young Mothers Through Digital Storytelling, Aline C. Gubrium, Elizabeth L. Krause, Kasey Jernigan

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

This paper presents the Ford Foundation-funded Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice project, which explores the subjective experience of structural violence and the ways young parenting Latinas embody and respond to these experiences. We prioritize uprooted young parenting Latinas, whose material conditions and cultural worlds have placed them in tenuous positions, both socially constructed and experientially embodied. Existing programs and policies focused on these women fail to use relevant local knowledge and rarely involve them in messaging efforts. This paper offers a practical road map for rendering relevant and modifying notions of voice as a form …

Plus Ça Change: From Postprocessualism To “Big Data”, Elizabeth S. Chilton

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Eastern Atlantic Coast, Elizabeth S. Chilton, Meredith D. Hardy

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Digging And Destruction: Artifact Collecting As Meaningful Social Practice, Siobhan M. Hart, Elizabeth S. Chilton

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Collected sites are commonly seen as places requiring expert intervention to ‘save the past’ from destruction by artifact collectors and looters. Despite engaging directly with the physical effects of collecting and vandalism, little attention is given to the meanings of these actions and the contributions they make to the stories told about sites or the past more broadly. Professional archaeologists often position their engagement with site destruction as heritage ‘salvage’ and regard collecting as lacking any value in contemporary society. Repositioning collecting as meaningful social practice and heritage action raises the question: in failing to understand legal or illegal collecting …

“Calling The Question” The Politics Of Time In A Time Of Polarized Politics, Elizabeth L. Krause, Anurag Sharma

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

In this paper, we examine the role of time in shaping decision-making processes in a town meeting, a type of legislative body common in many New England towns. Town meetings are one of the oldest and most democratic institutions of local governance in the United States, and they provide a rich arena in which to investigate how large groups of people convene and make decisions together. A mixed-methods approach enabled our team of researchers to gain insight into the processes and dynamics that played out in one town meeting. We analyze the tensions between democratic values of “taking time” vs. …

Visual Interventions And The “Crises In Representation” In Environmental Anthropology: Researching Environmental Justice In A Hungarian Romani Neighborhood, Krista Harper

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Participatory visual research, or "visual interventions" (Pink 2007) allow environmental anthropologists to respond to three different “crises of representation”: 1) the critique of ethnographic representation presented by postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist anthropologists, 2) the constructivist critique of nature and the environment, and 3) the “environmental justice” critique demanding representation for the environmental concerns of communities of color. Participatory visual research integrates community members in the process of staking out a research agenda, conducting fieldwork and interpreting data, and communicating and applying research findings. Our project used the Photovoice methodology to generate knowledge and documentation related to environment injustices faced by …

Host Longevity And Parasite Species Richness In Mammals, Jason M. Kamilar, Natalie Cooper, Charles L. Nunn

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Hosts and parasites co-evolve, with each lineage exerting selective pressures on the other. Thus, parasites may influence host life-history characteristics, such as longevity, and simultaneously host life-history may influence parasite diversity. If parasite burden causes increased mortality, we expect a negative association between host longevity and parasite species richness. Alternatively, if long-lived species represent a more stable environment for parasite establishment, host longevity and parasite species richness may show a positive association. We tested these two opposing predictions in carnivores, primates and terrestrial ungulates using phylogenetic comparative methods and controlling for the potentially confounding effects of sampling effort and body …

Runx2 Tandem Repeats And The Evolution Of Facial Length In Placental Mammals, Jason M. Kamilar, Marie A. Pointer, Vera Warmuth, Stephen G.B. Chester, Frédéric Delsuc, Nicholas I. Mundy, Robert J. Asher, Brenda J. Bradley

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Background

When simple sequence repeats are integrated into functional genes, they can potentially act as evolutionary ‘tuning knobs’, supplying abundant genetic variation with minimal risk of pleiotropic deleterious effects. The genetic basis of variation in facial shape and length represents a possible example of this phenomenon. Runt-related transcription factor 2 (RUNX2), which is involved in osteoblast differentiation, contains a functionally-important tandem repeat of glutamine and alanine amino acids. The ratio of glutamines to alanines (the QA ratio) in this protein seemingly influences the regulation of bone development. Notably, in domestic breeds of dog, and in carnivorans in general, the ratio …

The Archaeology Of Immateriality, Elizabeth S. Chilton

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Despite changes in archaeological theory and practice over the past 40 years, most archaeologists are still not very good at acknowledging that “significance” is context-dependent and non-material. In this paper I present two cases studies from New England where archaeologists collaborated with Native peoples on sites that had significant preservation concerns. I evaluate to what extent these projects were successful in their goal of decolonizing archaeology. I call for a definition of materiality that acknowledges that tangible objects and their intangible contexts and meanings are inextricable, and that values are continuously created and recreated in the present by a variety …

The Climatic Niche Diversity Of Malagasy Primates: A Phylogenetic Approach, Jason M. Kamilar, Kathleen M. Muldoon

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Background

Numerous researchers have posited that there should be a strong negative relationship between the evolutionary distance among species and their ecological similarity. Alternative evidence suggests that members of adaptive radiations should display no relationship between divergence time and ecological similarity because rapid evolution results in near-simultaneous speciation early in the clade's history. In this paper, we performed the first investigation of ecological diversity in a phylogenetic context using a mammalian adaptive radiation, the Malagasy primates.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We collected data for 43 extant species including: 1) 1064 species by locality samples, 2) GIS climate data for each sampling locality, …

Teaching Heritage Values Through Field Schools: Case Studies From New England, Elizabeth S. Chilton

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

New Directions In Participatory Visual Ethnography: Possibilities For Public Anthropology, Krista Harper

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

New visual technologies are changing the ways that anthropologists do research and opening up new possibilities for participatory approaches appealing to diverse audiences. Participatory digital methodologies include digital storytelling, PhotoVoice, and participatory geographic information systems (GIS), as well as community-based filmmaking, and participatory digital archival research. Over twenty years ago, feminist and postmodern anthropologists led a discipline-wide discussion of the ways that we produce and represent culture through ethnographic fieldwork and writing. Few of these critics, however, challenged the notion of the written text as the central medium of anthropological knowledge. More recently, public anthropology has reinvigorated discussion of the …

Lives, Images, Audiences, Intentions: Participatory Visual Anthropology In A Hungarian Romani Neighborhood, Krista Harper

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Participatory visual methodologies open up new possibilities for community collaboration in the research process, appeal to diverse audiences, and produce rich visual and narrative data guided by participant interests and priorities. Presenting a recent research collaboration with a grassroots Romani (Gypsy) community organization in northern Hungary, I discuss ethical and epistemological questions raised in participatory visual research. In this project, our team used the PhotoVoice method to generate knowledge and documentation related to environment, health, and the lived experiences of social exclusion. I explore power relationships in the research process as well as historical and contemporary issues of documentary photography …

Environmental Justice And Roma Communities In Central And Eastern Europe, Krista Harper, Tamara Steger, Richard Filcak

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Environmental injustice and the social exclusion of Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has roots in historical patterns of ethnic exclusion and widening socioeconomic inequalities following the collapse of state socialism and the transition to multi-party parliamentary governments in 1989. In this article, we discuss some of the methodological considerations in environmental justice research, engage theoretical perspectives on environmental inequalities and social exclusion, discuss the dynamics of discrimination and environmental protection regarding the Roma in CEE, and summarize two case studies on environmental justice in Slovakia and Hungary. We argue that when some landscapes and social groups are …

Across The Bridge: Using Photovoice To Study Environment And Health In A Romani Community., Krista Harper, The Sajó River Association For Environment And Community Development, Hungary

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

This photo essay is the product of a partnership between Prof. Krista Harper, the Sajó River Association for Environment and Community Development, and community organizer Judit Bari. The project took place in a small city in northeastern Hungary hit hard by factory closings since the collapse of state socialism in 1989. The Roma community, about 20% of the town’s population, has been especially vulnerable. A team of six young people participated as photographers and discussion participants, working closely with Harper and Bari. Other community members joined discussions of the images. The team held a photo exhibition in the neighborhood where …

A Photovoice Participatory Evaluation Of A School Gardening Program Through The Eyes Of Fifth Graders, Catherine Sands, Krista Harper, Lee Ellen Reed, Maggie Shar

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

In the springtime, fifth grade students at the Williamsburg Elementary School in rural Western Massachusetts ask to snack on sorrel and chives from the school garden, between planting potatoes and building a shade structure for their outdoor classroom. They are members of the first cohort of the curriculum-integrated program initiated by Fertile Ground, a grassroots organization in western Massachusetts. The children’s delight in the fresh greens they have grown marks a national phenomenon: the farm-to-school movement. With limited resources, parents, teachers, students, administrators, and community activists are developing inroads to better school food and food education, by constructing school teaching …

Crafting Collaborative Archaelogies: Two Case Studies From New England, Elizabeth S. Chilton, Siobhan M. Hart

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

From Democratization To Globalization To Justice: Political Generations In Hungarian Environmentalism From The 1980s To The 2000s, Krista Harper

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

This presentation applies sociologist Nancy Whittier's concept of "political generations" to explore political identities and strategies appearing over time in the Hungarian environmental movement. I discuss the rise of democratic environmentalism in the 1980s, the shift to a more professionalized and globally oriented activist stance in the 1990s, and the emergence of social justice frames associated with the newest cohort of environmental activists of the 2000s.

Do Japanese American Women Really Have Fewer Hot Flashes Than European Americans? The Hilo Women's Health Study, Daniel E. Brown, Lynnette Leidy Sievert, Lynn A. Morrison, Angela M. Reza, Phoebe S. Mills

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Objective

Many studies have found a significantly lower frequency of reported hot flashes (HFs) in Japanese and Japanese American (JA) populations, leading to speculation about possible dietary, genetic, or cultural differences. These studies have relied upon subjective reports of HFs. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to compare both reported and objective HFs measured by sternal and nuchal skin conductance among JA and European American (EA) women.

Design

Two surveys of hot flash frequencies were carried out among women of either EA or JA ethnicity, aged 45-55, living in Hilo, Hawaii, and not using exogenous hormones. The first was …

Queer Archaeology, Mathematical Modeling, And The Peopling Of The Americas, Elizabeth S. Chilton

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Issues of chronology, technology, and subsistence have long dominated discussions of the peopling of the Americas, to the near exclusion of more anthropological topics. For example, little attention has been given to the social implications of an unpeopled landscape for understanding and indigenous sex roles and gendered relationships of the first Native Americans. There has been some recent discussion of the sexual division of labor among Paleo-Indians—and even women’s fertility (MacDonald 1998; Surovell 2000; Waguespack 2005). However, many of these approaches are fraught with biological and environmental determinism as well as gender stereotypes. Taking a page from queer theory, in …

From The Shoulders Of A Giant: Perspectives On The Legacy Of William White Howells (1908-2005), Lr Godfrey

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.