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Native Diaspora And New Communities: Algonkian And Wôbanakiak, Margaret Bruchac Dec 2016

Native Diaspora And New Communities: Algonkian And Wôbanakiak, Margaret Bruchac

Margaret Bruchac

During the 1600s, Algonkian and Wôbanaki peoples in present-day New England and Canada found themselves in what has been called "the maelstrom of change," as Euro-American settlers started flooding into Native homelands. (1) The settlers were preceded by explorers and traders, who had carried not only trade goods but diseases. Population losses from influenza, smallpox, measles and other sicknesses caused a disruption in Native communities. Existing tensions between tribes led some coastal Native groups, such as the Wampanoag, to initially welcome small groups of European settlers and traders, who could provide trade goods, guns, and potential allies. European settlement led …


Schaghticoke And Points North: Wôbanaki Resistance And Persistence, Margaret Bruchac Dec 2016

Schaghticoke And Points North: Wôbanaki Resistance And Persistence, Margaret Bruchac

Margaret Bruchac

The popular versions of New England's Native American Indian history often contain a gap in reporting on the Native peoples of the middle Connecticut River Valley after Metacom's War, also known as King Philip's War (1675-1676). Some nineteenth century historians have suggested that the Agawam, Nonotuck, Pocumtuck, Quaboag, Sokoki, and Woronoco peoples vanished altogether after this tumultuous event. A closer look at the surviving documentary records, however, reveals a far more complex story as Native families chose various paths of resistance and persistence. The Native families that remained in the valley, pursuing traditional lifeways, were poorly documented by European colonists …


International Museum Repatriation Issues In The News, Margaret Bruchac Dec 2016

International Museum Repatriation Issues In The News, Margaret Bruchac

Margaret Bruchac

No abstract provided.


Iñupiaq Smoking And Siberian Reindeer, Margaret Bruchac Dec 2016

Iñupiaq Smoking And Siberian Reindeer, Margaret Bruchac

Margaret Bruchac

This semester, my students in Museum Anthropology conducted close examinations of objects from Arctic locales in the collections of the Penn Museum. During our object analysis of this walrus tusk ivory Iñupiaq pipe (item# 39-10-1) in the Collections Study Room, I was intrigued by the idea that it was used for smoking opium, given the absurdly small hole in the bowl. After further research, a very different story emerged. The pipe’s shape was, indeed, inspired by Chinese opium pipes, but a survey of Arctic scholarship revealed cultural exchanges from Siberia. Iñupiaq pipes like this—with a curved tusk shape, wide bowl, …


In Search Of The Indian Doctress, Margaret Bruchac Dec 2016

In Search Of The Indian Doctress, Margaret Bruchac

Margaret Bruchac

No abstract provided.


The Speck Connection: Recovering Histories Of Indigenous Objects, Margaret Bruchac Dec 2016

The Speck Connection: Recovering Histories Of Indigenous Objects, Margaret Bruchac

Margaret Bruchac

Frank Gouldsmith Speck (1881–1950), acknowledged as one of the most prolific anthropologists of the early 20th century, served as chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania for nearly four decades (1913–1949). He conducted ground-breaking ethnographic research, working closely with Indigenous informants from a wide range of communities (Cherokee, Haudenosaunee, Mohegan, Nanticoke, Penobscot, etc.) and amassed thousands of objects. Although his collections contain seminal data on tribal nations, languages, art, technology, and customs, public understandings of that data and those peoples are often flawed or incomplete, and the objects he collected are widely distributed among various museums.


Wôbanaki Lifeways - Circa 1600, Margaret Bruchac Dec 2016

Wôbanaki Lifeways - Circa 1600, Margaret Bruchac

Margaret Bruchac

The term Wôbanakiak includes many culturally related groups of Native peoples who were the original inhabitants of present-day Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, parts of Massachusetts, parts of southern Canada, and the Maritimes. Wôbanakiak means “people of the east” or “Dawnland people.” Linguistically, the word includes the morphemes for dawn (wôban), and land (-aki), combined with an animate plural ending (-ak) to indicate people. English, French, and Dutch attempts to pronounce the Native language resulted in different spellings and pronunciations such as Wabanaki, Abenaki, Abénaquis, and Abnaki.


Abenaki Indian Families, Tribes, Bands, And Legislation, Margaret Bruchac Dec 2016

Abenaki Indian Families, Tribes, Bands, And Legislation, Margaret Bruchac

Margaret Bruchac

No abstract provided.


De L'Affaire Katanga Au Contrat Social Global: Un Regard Sur La Cour Pénale Internationale, Juan Branco Nov 2016

De L'Affaire Katanga Au Contrat Social Global: Un Regard Sur La Cour Pénale Internationale, Juan Branco

Juan Branco

No abstract provided.


Heterogeneous Immunological Landscapes And Medieval Plague : An Invitation To A New Dialogue Between Historians And Immunologists., Fabian Crespo, Matthew B. Lawrenz Nov 2016

Heterogeneous Immunological Landscapes And Medieval Plague : An Invitation To A New Dialogue Between Historians And Immunologists., Fabian Crespo, Matthew B. Lawrenz

Fabian Crespo

Efforts to understand the differential mortality caused by plague must account for many factors, including human immune responses. In this essay we are particularly interested in those people who were exposed to the Yersinia pestis pathogen during the Black Death, but who had differing fates—survival or death—that could depend on which individuals (once infected) were able to mount an appropriate immune response as a result of biological, environmental, and social factors. The proposed model suggests that historians of the medieval world could make a significant contribution to the study of human health, and especially the role of human immunology in …


Folk Music In A Digital Age: The Importance Of Face-To-Face Community Values In Filk Music, Sally Childs-Helton Oct 2016

Folk Music In A Digital Age: The Importance Of Face-To-Face Community Values In Filk Music, Sally Childs-Helton

Sally Childs-Helton

Filk is broadly defined as the traditional folk-based music and related community created by and for a sub-community of science fiction and fantasy fans. Born in the 1950s, filk today includes international participants of various experience levels and musical styles. Social context and music are equally important in this tradition; prominent values include self-expression, play and building a face-to-face co-creative, collaborative group experience. This article, founded on Textual Poachers (1992), assumes that filk remains a folk music in many ways, and that filkers still prefer face-to-face musical and personal interaction in spite of a lively, diverse online filk community. I …


Continuity And The Open Whole: A Comparison Of Recent (Peircian) Ethnographies, Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Continuity And The Open Whole: A Comparison Of Recent (Peircian) Ethnographies, Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

A comparison of Eduardo Kohn's "How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human" and David Pedersen's "American value: Migrants, money, and meaning in El Salvador and the United States" which explores their relationship to the continuist ontology of the philosopher Charles S. Peirce and its implications for contemporary anthropology.


Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence , Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence , Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

I offer a counterpoint to the prevailing risk literature that focuses not on (mis)perceptions of danger but on the production and circulation of different forms of evidence and the environmental claims they promote. Rather than reproduce the epistemic dichotomies associated with risk discourse, I discuss attempts by waste-industry technicians, government inspectors, lawyers, area residents, and activists to generate persuasive accounts of a large, U.S. landfill and its porous boundaries. I argue that the differential influence of their various claims is best understood by examining what it means to know and care for a place.


Waste And Waste Management, Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Waste And Waste Management, Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

Discard studies have demonstrated that waste is more than just a symptom of an all-too-human demand for meaning or a merely technical problem for sanitary engineers and public health officials. The afterlife of waste materials and processes of waste management reveal the centrality of transient and discarded things for questions of materiality and ontology and marginal and polluting labor and environmental justice movements, as well as for critiques of the exploitation and deferred promises of modernity and imperial formations. There is yet more waste will tell us, especially as more studies continue to document the many ways that our wastes …


Toward A New Theory Of Waste: From "Matter Out Of Place" To Signs Of Life , Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Toward A New Theory Of Waste: From "Matter Out Of Place" To Signs Of Life , Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

This paper offers a counterpoint to the prevailing account of waste in the human sciences. This account identifies waste, firstly, as the anomalous product of arbitrary social categorizations, or ‘matter out of place’, and, secondly, as a distinctly human way of leaving behind and interpreting traces, or a mirror of culture. Together, these positions reflect a more or less constructivist and anthropocentric approach. Most commonly, waste is placed within a framework that privileges considerations of meaning over materiality and the threat of death over the perpetuity of life processes. For an alternative I turn to bio-semiotics and cross-species scholarship around …


The Life And Times Of Landfills, Joshua O. Reno Oct 2016

The Life And Times Of Landfills, Joshua O. Reno

Joshua Reno

American landfills are primarily understood as distinctly human and spatial creations, when in practice they are as much temporal as spatial and as much non-human as human. Based on a large landfill on the rural periphery of Detroit, this paper explores the emergent and polychronic forms of life fostered by controlled dumping. Landfill employees work with their ecological surroundings to satisfy regulatory directives and assemble ever-growing mountains of waste. The paper introduces the complex, practical negotiations that result by isolating and diagraming the distinct temporal scales at which nonhuman beings and powers aid in and disrupt the process of landfilling.


Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure: The Politics Of Value At A Michigan Landfill , Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure: The Politics Of Value At A Michigan Landfill , Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

This article discusses scavenging and dumping as alternative approaches to deriving value from rubbish at a large Michigan landfill. Both practices are attuned to the indeterminacy and power of abandoned things, but in different ways. Whereas scavenging relies on acquiring familiarity with an object by getting to know its particular qualities, landfilling and other forms of mass disposal make discards fungible and manipulable by stripping them of their former identities. By way of examining the different ways in which people become invested in the politics of value at the landfill, whether as part of expressions of gender and class or …


Managing The Experience Of Evidence England’S Experimental Waste Technologies And Their Immodest Witnesses, Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Managing The Experience Of Evidence England’S Experimental Waste Technologies And Their Immodest Witnesses, Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

This article explores the technoenvironmental politics associated with government-sponsored climate change mitigation. It focuses on England’s New Technologies Demonstrator Programme, established to test the “viability” of “green” waste treatments by awarding state aid to eight experimental projects that promise to divert municipal waste from landfill and greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The article examines how these demonstrator sites are arranged and represented to produce noncontroversial and publicly accessible forms of evidence and experience and, ultimately, to inform environmental policy and planning decisions throughout the country. As in experimental science, this process requires that some bear witness to the demonstrators, but …


From Biopower To Energopolitics In England's Modern Waste Technology, Joshua Reno, Catherine Alexander Oct 2016

From Biopower To Energopolitics In England's Modern Waste Technology, Joshua Reno, Catherine Alexander

Joshua Reno

Two energy-generating technologies in Britain which transform waste into a resource are compared. One is the (in)famous Combined Heat and Power incinerator in Sheffield, the other a forgotten biological digester in Devon utilizing anaerobic microbes. Both sites are early exemplars of experimental and biopolitical waste disposal technologies—incineration and anaerobic digestion—now regarded as leading alternatives for reducing the United Kingdom’s dependence on landfill and fossil fuel; both sites also inspired public resistance at critical moments in their development. The analysis here relates how activists and technicians struggle to demonstrate competing truths about alternative energy. Through comparison, it becomes clear that, beyond …


Motivated Markets: Instruments And Ideologies Of Clean Energy In The United Kingdom , Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Motivated Markets: Instruments And Ideologies Of Clean Energy In The United Kingdom , Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

This article examines efforts to reconcile capitalist and ecological values, focusing in particular on the instruments and ideologies that pervade the United Kingdom's developing renewable energy sector. In keeping with neoliberal models of economic knowledge and practice, renewable energy instruments target the motivations of individuals by using incentive programs to reach environmental policy goals. The argument focuses especially on the way newly implemented market devices shape and represent the motivations of energy producers, suppliers, and traders. The centerpiece of the U.K. government's initiative is the creation of an artificial market in renewability, bought and sold as a virtual commodity. Although …


Continuity And The Open Whole: A Comparison Of Recent (Peircian) Ethnographies, Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Continuity And The Open Whole: A Comparison Of Recent (Peircian) Ethnographies, Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

A comparison of Eduardo Kohn's "How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human" and David Pedersen's "American value: Migrants, money, and meaning in El Salvador and the United States" which explores their relationship to the continuist ontology of the philosopher Charles S. Peirce and its implications for contemporary anthropology.


Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence , Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence , Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

I offer a counterpoint to the prevailing risk literature that focuses not on (mis)perceptions of danger but on the production and circulation of different forms of evidence and the environmental claims they promote. Rather than reproduce the epistemic dichotomies associated with risk discourse, I discuss attempts by waste-industry technicians, government inspectors, lawyers, area residents, and activists to generate persuasive accounts of a large, U.S. landfill and its porous boundaries. I argue that the differential influence of their various claims is best understood by examining what it means to know and care for a place.


Technically Speaking: On Equipping And Evaluating “Unnatural” Language Learners , Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Technically Speaking: On Equipping And Evaluating “Unnatural” Language Learners , Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

This article compares different communicative trials for apes in captivity and children with autism in order to investigate how ideological assumptions about linguistic agency and impairment are constructed and challenged in practice. To the extent that Euro-American techniques of “unnatural” language instruction developed during the Cold War era have been successful, it is because communicative interactions are broken down into basic components, and would-be language learners are equipped with materials, devices, and habits that make up for their distinct bio/social deficits. Such linguistic equipment can present a challenge to the ideological presumption of a subject inherently gifted with the rudiments …


Why “Good Welfare” Isn’T “Good Enough”: Minding Animals And Increasing Our Compassionate Footprint, Marc Bekoff Sep 2016

Why “Good Welfare” Isn’T “Good Enough”: Minding Animals And Increasing Our Compassionate Footprint, Marc Bekoff

Marc Bekoff, PhD

In this brief essay I take a broad perspective on the notion of unraveling welfare and consider animals living in different conditions ranging from caged individuals in laboratories and zoos to free-living or almost free-living wildlife. I’ll step outside of the laboratory because billions of animals are slaughtered for food in an industry that tortures them on the way to their reprehensible deaths and at the places at which they are slaughtered. Furthermore, government agencies around the world kill millions of free-living and wild animals because they’re supposedly “pests”. This is a different sort of essay but I hope it …


Animal Welfare And Individual Characteristics: A Conversation Against Speciesism, Marc Bekoff, Lori Gruen Sep 2016

Animal Welfare And Individual Characteristics: A Conversation Against Speciesism, Marc Bekoff, Lori Gruen

Marc Bekoff, PhD

It seems impossible for a human being not to have some point of view concerning nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) welfare. Many people make decisions about how humans are permitted to treat animals using speciesist criteria, basing their decisions on an individual's species membership rather than on that animal's individual characteristics. Although speciesism provides a convenient way for making difficult decisions about who should be used in different types of research, we argue that such decisions should rely on an analysis of individual characteristics and should not be based merely on species membership. We do not argue that the concept of …


Minding Animals, Minding Earth: Science, Nature, Kinship, And Heart, Marc Bekoff Sep 2016

Minding Animals, Minding Earth: Science, Nature, Kinship, And Heart, Marc Bekoff

Marc Bekoff, PhD

This paper emphasizes the importance of broadening behavioral, ecological, and conservation science into a more integrative, interdisciplinary, socially responsible, compassionate, spiritual, and holistic endeavor.2,3 I will stress the significance of studies of animal behavior, especially ethological research concerned with animal emotions, in which individuals are named and recognized for their own personalities and temperaments, for helping us not only to learn about the nonhuman animal beings (hereafter animals) with whom we share Earth, but also for learning about who we are, our place in Nature, our humanness. We can be best understood in relationship to others. I will also develop …


Naturalizing Anthropomorphism: Behavioral Prompts To Our Humanizing Of Animals, Alexandra C. Horowitz, Marc Bekoff Sep 2016

Naturalizing Anthropomorphism: Behavioral Prompts To Our Humanizing Of Animals, Alexandra C. Horowitz, Marc Bekoff

Marc Bekoff, PhD

Anthropomorphism is the use of human characteristics to describe or explain nonhuman animals. In the present paper, we propose a model for a unified study of such anthropomorphizing. We bring together previously disparate accounts of why and how we anthropomorphize and suggest a means to analyze anthropomorphizing behavior itself. We introduce an analysis of bouts of dyadic play between humans and a heavily anthropomorphized animal, the domestic dog. Four distinct patterns of social interaction recur in successful dog–human play: directed responses by one player to the other, indications of intent, mutual behaviors, and contingent activity. These findings serve as a …


Gender Differences In Attitudes Toward Animal Research, Jennifer J. Eldridge, John P. Gluck Aug 2016

Gender Differences In Attitudes Toward Animal Research, Jennifer J. Eldridge, John P. Gluck

John P. Gluck, PhD

Although gender differences in attitudes toward animal research have been reported in the literature for some time, exploration into the nature of these differences has received less attention. This article examines gender differences in responses to a survey of attitudes toward the use of animals in research. The survey was completed by college students and consisted of items intended to tap different issues related to the animal research debate. Results indicated that women were more likely than men to support tenets of the animal protection movement. Likewise, women were more likely than men to favor increased restrictions on animal use …


Canada’S Commercial Seal Hunt: It’S More Than A Question Of Humane Killing, David M. Lavigne, William S. Lynn Aug 2016

Canada’S Commercial Seal Hunt: It’S More Than A Question Of Humane Killing, David M. Lavigne, William S. Lynn

William S. Lynn, PhD

No abstract provided.


Animals, Ethics And Geography, William S. Lynn Aug 2016

Animals, Ethics And Geography, William S. Lynn

William S. Lynn, PhD

No abstract provided.