Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Dying Of Pestilence: Gender, Stature, And Mortality From The Black Death In 14th Century Kyrgyzstan, David Wayne Hansen Ii

Theses and Dissertations

Bioarchaeological studies have provided important information about mortality patterns during the Second Pandemic of Plague, including the Black Death, but to date have focused exclusively on European contexts. This study represents a temporal and spatial expansion of plague bioarchaeology, focusing on Central Asia, the origin of the Second Pandemic. I examine the relationship between stature, gender, and plague mortality during an outbreak of plague at two fortified settlements in northern Kyrgyzstan in 1338-39, the earliest archaeological sites known to contain victims of the Black Death in Eurasia.

Stature is frequently used in bioarchaeology as a proxy for exposures to developmental …

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 …

Facing The Past: Engendering The Study Of Iron Age Celtic Human Imagery In Continental Europe, Christopher Ray Allen

Theses and Dissertations

Iconography is an important tool in understanding the past because it may express apeople’s understanding of the world through representations of stories or figures, including human beings. The continental early Iron Age Celts left behind no written sources but did leave iconographic representations of humans in the form of full bodies as well as heads. How the Celts saw their world and how they perceived and gendered other humans or anthropomorphic beings can be partially accessed via these representations. This thesis examines a representative sample of statues and figures from Iberia, Gaul, and Central Europe from an intersectional perspective focused …

Archaeological Representation In Speculative Fiction: The Image Of The Archaeologist In Star Wars, Karissa A. Annis

Theses and Dissertations

The public presentation of archaeology in various media, especially fictional representations in print, film, TV, and video games, is a complex and slippery subject that has been an issue since the field’s inception. This thesis compares analyses of popular representations of archaeology in conventional media such as feature films to new examples of such representations that have not yet been studied. The focus of the analysis is how archaeology and archaeologists are represented in the Star Wars franchise in products that were published or released on or after 2014. These texts and images are analyzed through the multiple lenses of …

German-American Wpa Murals At The Milwaukee Public Museum And National Socialist Schultafeln: A Comparative Analysis, Katherine J. Santell

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis was to systematically examine and compare the themes and styles present in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) paintings housed in the Milwaukee Public Museum to a selection of National Socialist Schultafeln in Germany. The research conducted on the WPA paintings concentrated on pieces from the A.O. Tiemann collection and other works by painters who emigrated from Germany in the early 20th century or were of German descent. This was further narrowed to an in-depth analysis of pieces that depict lake dwelling sites of the European Neolithic and Bronze Ages in both US Museums and selected …

Puruhá Fashion As Aesthetic Sovereignty: Identity Making And Indigenous Dress In Ecuador, Anaïs M. Parada

Theses and Dissertations

Puruhá fashion designers, vendors, and sellers have used their cultural heritage to create an emerging dress market that is both locally productive and nationally disruptive. These entrepreneurs have combined traditional dress with contemporary elements to create a new style that is distinctly recognizable as Puruhá, and thus acts as both a cultural and an individual brand. In a nation-state that offers its Indigenous people tokenism and concessions that don’t otherwise challenge the status of existing governmental and legal systems, having control over one’s own narrative through branding is a revolutionary act. In fact, the fight for economic autonomy against state …

A Bite Of The Big Apple: The Anthropology Of Pesticide Use In New York City, Faye O'Brien

Theses and Dissertations

Pesticide exposure in the developing world is well described in anthropology. How pesticide use and exposure is ordered and experienced socially, economically and culturally in Western urban communities is less well studied. The long-term consequences of synergistic pesticide exposure is not easily measurable, which this research addresses through social inquiry.

Grieving Behaviors During Parental Bereavement In Western Societies, Victor A. Luna

Theses and Dissertations

This paper will examine the grieving behaviors of parents who have lost a child. More specifically, it will discuss how grieving behaviors that are deemed appropriate depend on one’s gender, and how societal norms discourage behaviors that are deemed inappropriate. The focus will be on industrialized Western societies.

'Mother Bring The Henna': Kına Gecesi And Fragmented Imaginations Of The Nation-State, Alexandra Catrina Vieux Frankel

Theses and Dissertations

This research articulates kına gecesi (henna night) as a critical site for the production and reproduction of gendered politics in Turkey. Kına gecesi, as a women’s pre-wedding ritual, is situated at the margins of civil wedding ceremonies, and thereby intersects with wedding’s politicization in pronatalist discourses. Tropes of fertility in this ritual in concert with its proximity to marriage show it to be salient to biological, cultural, and national reproduction. I argue that women’s discourses on kına gecesi engender frangemented imaginations of the nation-state. This notion of fragmentation follows Dipesh Chakrabarty’s understanding of “provincializing” which advocates direct translation of experience …

Individual Thought Patterns: Women In New York's Extreme Metal Music Scene, Joan M. Jocson-Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Extreme metal music (EMM) is both an umbrella term and a sub-category of heavy metal. Although women have a small but steady presence in heavy metal, this number shrinks when applied to the EMM scene. Using ethnographic research, participant-observation and interviews, this study surveys women in New York's EMM scene to address participation, gender performativity and feminist musicology.

Gender Reflections: A Reconsideration Of Pictish Mirror And Comb Symbols, Traci N. Billings

Theses and Dissertations

The interpretation of prehistoric iconography is complicated by the tendency to project

contemporary male/female gender dichotomies into the past. Pictish monumental stone sculpture

in Scotland has been studied over the last 100 years. Traditionally, mirror and comb symbols

found on some stones produced in Scotland between AD 400 and AD 900 have been interpreted

as being associated exclusively with women and/or the female gender. This thesis re-examines

this assumption in light of more recent work to offer a new interpretation of Pictish mirror and

comb symbols and to suggest a larger context for their possible meaning. Utilizing the Canmore

database, …

Unpacking Empowerment Discourse Within A Women's Reentry Organization, Amanda Nicole Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Through ethnographic research with a small organization, Jareth, that helps women transition from prison to the community, this work unpacks discourses of empowerment within reentry organizations. I argue that Jareth’s empowerment discourse works on a pragmatic level to help women become employed but it does not work well to completely meet the needs of women offenders because businesses do not want to employ former prisoners and because the general public thinks that prison can meet all of women's needs. I also argue that empowerment defines 'power' and dependence' in particular ways - through appropriate and inappropriate forms of power and …

Head And Shoulders Above The Rest: Birch-Bark Hats And Elite Status In Iron Age Europe, Cara Melissa Reeves

Theses and Dissertations

As competition between Celtic elites increased in Iron Age continental Europe (c. 800-25/15 BC), ornamentation of the head figured prominently in status displays across the Celtic world. Mortuary and iconographic contexts reveal that headgear made of both metal and organic materials marked elite status, but materials varied regionally by gender and age throughout the Iron Age. The purpose of this project was to capitalize on the rare opportunity provided by birch-bark hats from west-central European elite burials to investigate organic headgear and the possibility that different types of headgear may have marked different social positions within the elite class. Birch-bark …

Embodying Ritual Performance: An Iconographic Analysis Of Burial 38 At The Etowah Site, Amy M. Goldstein

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an iconographic study of Burial 38 from Mound C at the Etowah, a Mississippian mound site in present-day Northwest Georgia. The goal of this study was to gain an understanding of the iconographic meaning of the artifacts in Burial 38 as well as the significance of the arrangement of individuals within the burial and its relationship with Mound C more broadly. Applying theories of relational ontology, performance, and gender, I build on King’s (2010) interpretation of Mound C’s final construction phases as a ritual event that transformed the mound into a sacred center, melded foreign and local …