Anthropology Commons^™

The Embodied Rhetoric Of Cognitive Labour, Shubhayan Chakrabarti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation traces the roots of neoliberal selfhood to the rationalist ontology of modernity in the 1600s. The historical tension between materialism and immaterialism is expressed in the historicisation of work into Fordism and post-Fordism where embodied factory toil is apparently replaced by immaterial work, recalling Descartes’ mind-body split. If post-Fordist work addresses the Marxist critique of alienation in its emphasis on entrepreneurial inner selves, it does not explain the post-Fordist preoccupation to efficiently “Taylorise” the body through obsessive productivity. I argue that the factory prevails in the entrepreneur’s adoption of factory efficiency as a learnt behaviour from the Fordist …

The Forgetting Of Fire: An Archaeology Of Technics, Thomas A. Doerksen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation applies the methods of Bachelard and Foucault to key moments in the development of science. By analyzing the attitudes of four figures from four different centuries, it shows how epistemic attitudes have shifted from a participation in non-human, natural realities to a construction of human-centred technologies. The idea of an epistemic attitude is situated in reference to Foucault’s concept of the episteme and his method of archaeology; an attitude is the institutionally-situated and personally-enacted comportment of an epistemic agent toward an object of knowledge. This line of thought is pursued under the theme of elemental fire, which begins …

Applying 3d Structured Light Scanning To Roman Leather Insoles From Vindolanda: A Novel Approach To Podiatric Data Collection, Maria Lorene Glanfield

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis research introduces a novel 3D structured light scanning and digital, post-processing enhancement methodology influenced by digital approaches used in anthropological archaeology, ichnology, and forensic podiatry to the analysis of Roman leather insoles from Vindolanda. The primary objective was to capture 2D and 3D footprint impression evidence on the surface of 81 insoles for enhanced visualization and analysis in order to refine the quality of podiatric data that can be extracted from Roman footwear. I conducted three case studies (pointed toe, sandal, and children’s insoles) based on a set of distinct, but related research questions concerning the refinement of …

Shoe Modifications And Foot Health: A Case Study From Roman Britain, Casey Elizabeth Kay Boettinger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, I undertake an examination of foot care practices in Antiquity. The majority of the discussion surrounding foot care comes from evidence of shoe modifications at Vindolanda, a Roman auxiliary fort located in northern Britain. I provide a general discussion about herbal and non-herbal remedies for foot conditions, as recorded by medical authors. This discussion precedes a case study of selected shoes from Vindolanda, where I write about five modification types that demonstrate the sort of knowledge that existed at Vindolanda. The findings from this thesis suggest that podiatric knowledge and foot care existed as early as the …

Stories Of Words, Numbers, And Communities: My Usri Research And Speak Fluent Marketing Internship Experiences, Choi Sze Leung

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

This report illustrates my experiential-learning opportunities, which took the form of two internships. In the summer of 2021, I worked as a marketing intern at Speak Fluent Speech Services, a speech clinic that provides speech and communication training for adults. Aside from designing posters for the clinic’s social-media campaigns, I also had the opportunity to write creative and professional copy and compile a campaign's key performance metrics into a marketing report. In my second internship, I was a research student in the Undergraduate Student Research Internship (USRI) program in the Anthropology department. In this internship, I conducted linguistics anthropology research …

Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of …

Colombian Women’S Experiences Of The Canadian Refugee And Asylum Adjudication Process, Camila N. Parra Carrillo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The present thesis “Colombian women’s experiences of the Canadian refugee and asylum adjudication process” is an ethnographic description and analysis of the experiences of Colombian refugee women as they move through the refugee and asylum adjudication system in Ontario, Canada. Using concepts such as liminality, politics of waiting, hermeneutics of suspicion and arbitrariness, the refugee and asylum adjudication system is shown to be a site of power and domination that creates negative emotions in the people who face it, especially in the oral hearing as a central event in the process. Centering Colombian refugee women’s voices, their experiences and emotions …

Women And Western Mission: A Case Study On The Christian Khasi And Garo Tribal Women, Rosemary Philip

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Western mission justified a mission to the Global South that was ingrained with the dominance of its culture and values. Women’s mission, as a tool of this mission, patronized themselves as the ‘care-taker’ of the ‘subjugated’ women of the Global South. This mission promulgated new ways of thinking and prescribed new gender roles and values to the Global South. In doing so, it framed the traditional roles and cultural values of the non-Western world as oppressive and replaceable. Subsequently, Women’s mission along with Western feminism and Feminist theology as a broad idea has been challenged by feminists from the Global …

Life In Between: Prehispanic Settlement Patterns Of The Carabamba Valley, Northern Peru, Amedeo Sghinolfi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is an archaeological study of the Carabamba Valley (ca. 150 - 3,500 m.a.s.l.) in Northern Peru, which aims to reconstruct settlement patterns through the longue durée (ca. 1800 B.C. - A.D. 1532). This study also documents the relations occupants of this frontier zone maintained with neighboring polities on the Peruvian North Coast (Virú Valley) and in the Northern Highlands. The valley features the resource-rich ecological niche called chaupiyunga, fed by rainwater that flows towards the Pacific Ocean and by a number of springs, where crops like coca, fruits, and vegetables can be easily grown. The Carabamba Valley also …

Evaluating Cranial Nonmetric Traits In Mummies From Pachacamac, Peru: The Utility Of Semi-Automated Image Segmentation In Paleoradiology, Cameron J. Beason

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Anthropologists employ biodistance analysis to understand past population interactions and relatedness. The objectives of this thesis are twofold: to determine whether a sample of five mummies from the pilgrimage centre, Pachacamac, on the Central Coast of Peru comprised local or non-local individuals through an analysis of cranial nonmetric traits using comparative samples from the North and Central Coasts of Peru and Chile; and to test the utility of machine-learning-based image segmentation in the image analysis software, Dragonfly, to automatically segment CT scans of the mummies such that the cranial nonmetric traits are visible. Results show that while fully automated segmentation …

Quebec’S Uninhabitable Community: Identity And Community Among Anglo-Quebecer Out-Migrants, Evan A. Mardell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

How do Anglo-Quebecers who have migrated to Ontario in the past 45 years perceive and negotiate their identity in relation to Quebec? Since 1971, 600 000 anglophones have left Quebec for other parts of Canada. This out-migration coincided with political tensions that influenced a complete economic and linguistic shift in power from English to French. The symbolic and literal reclamation of Quebec as a French province set the conditions for the partial erasure of the Quebec anglophone (Anglo-Quebecer) community and sense of identity. From a series of semi-structured interviews with anglophones who left Quebec within the past 45 years, I …

Music Sounds Better With You, M Gillian Carrabre

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is a catalyst for creative expression, from the solo dance form known as shuffling, to “Flow Arts” activities (forms of self-expression inducing a flow state) like poi, hula hooping, orbiting, and gloving. Gloving is a subcultural practice and artform that couples LED lights with dexterous finger movements. It is a method of expression for dance music enthusiasts (also known as ravers) and has become an important component of the EDM scene, particularly over the past decade. Glovers engage in “secondary” performances to live music (DJs) using complex techniques such as symbolism, word painting, and what the …

Social Stratification & Mummification In Ancient Egypt: The Inevitability Of Variability In The Post-New Kingdom Mummification Program, Andrew Arsenault

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study examined the connection between social status and mummification in post-New Kingdom Egypt using a sample of sixty-one (n=61) adult non-royal Egyptian human mummies archived in the IMPACT radiological database. The purpose of this research was two-fold. First, as they have been uncritically accepted by both the academic community and popular literature, the validity of Classical mummification accounts offered by Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus was assessed. Second, four features of mummification with status connotations (arm position, amulets, cranial resin, estimated stature) were tested using exploratory data analysis in search of any potential connections with each other or specific time …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

Finding Those Once Lost: The Analysis Of The Potter's Field At Woodland Cemetery, London, On

Archaeology eBook Collection

Mortuary archaeology is the archaeological study of death and burial. In North America, the anthropological, cross-cultural, and deep temporal perspectives are employed (cf. Martin et al. 2013a). The myriad ways that societies deal with death are the product of complex and intertwined social, economic, and environmental factors such as class, gender, ethnicity, subsistence practice, and social complexity, to name a few. Therefore, the study of mortuary rituals sheds important light on social complexity and organization. This makes it an excellent topic for an advanced course in a Department of Anthropology. The research described in this report is the result of …

Interdisciplinary Lens On Indigenous Health Iniquities: Planning, Nursing, Anthropology, Geography, Education, Chantal Francouer, Alana Kehoe, Ivy Tran, Steven Vanloffeld, Lillian Woroniuk, Jacob Renaud

2019 Cohort

Indigenous peoples experience poorer health outcomes on almost every measure of health and wellbeing, when compared to the rest of Canada. For decades researchers have been working independently on addressing health inequalities, yet little progress has been made on closing the gap. This Discipline-specific way of thinking is too narrow and neglects indigenous ideologies of holistic approaches to health. An interdisciplinary approach to indigenous health research provides a more collaborative and integrated opportunity to address the multidimensional aspects of health. This paper has the goals to contribute to the limited research on interdisciplinary indigenous health research.

Interdisciplinary Lens On Indigenous Health Iniquities: Planning, Nursing, Anthropology, Geography, Education, Chantal Francouer, Alana Kehoe, Ivy Tran, Steven Vanloffeld, Lillian Woroniuk, Jacob Renaud

Head and Heart Posters 2019

Indigenous peoples experience poorer health outcomes on almost every measure of health and wellbeing, when compared to the rest of Canada. For decades researchers have been working independently on addressing health inequalities, yet little progress has been made on closing the gap. This Discipline-specific way of thinking is too narrow and neglects indigenous ideologies of holistic approaches to health. An interdisciplinary approach to indigenous health research provides a more collaborative and integrated opportunity to address the multidimensional aspects of health. This paper has the goals to contribute to the limited research on interdisciplinary indigenous health research.

Interdisciplinary Lens On Indigenous Health Iniquities: Planning, Nursing, Anthropology, Geography, Education, Chantal Francouer, Alana Kehoe, Ivy Tran, Steven Vanloffeld, Lillian Woroniuk, Jacob Renaud

Learning with your Head & Heart

Indigenous peoples experience poorer health outcomes on almost every measure of health and wellbeing, when compared to the rest of Canada. For decades researchers have been working independently on addressing health inequalities, yet little progress has been made on closing the gap. This Discipline-specific way of thinking is too narrow and neglects indigenous ideologies of holistic approaches to health. An interdisciplinary approach to indigenous health research provides a more collaborative and integrated opportunity to address the multidimensional aspects of health. This paper has the goals to contribute to the limited research on interdisciplinary indigenous health research.

Postcolonial Trauma In The Mediterranean: The Italian-Libyan Transnational Community, Rosario Pollicino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study aims to recuperate the Italian collective remembering originating from the colonial offense in Libya. Focusing on works of testimony in different genres of contemporary literature written by the Italian former settlers in Libya, I analyze how these former settlers who moved to Libya have been subjected to different kinds of traumas by the Fascist government. I focus on how these traumas, individual and collective, are documented through these works and discuss how they continue to be relevant today. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, history, literary and trauma studies I argue that these cultural representations prove the existence of a …

A Data-Driven Analysis Of Video Game Culture And The Role Of Let's Plays In Youtube, Ana Ruiz Segarra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Video games have become an important part of the global popular cultures that are connecting broader audiences of all ages around the world. A recent phenomenon that has lasted almost ten years is the creation and upload of gaming-related videos on YouTube, where Let’s Plays have a considerable presence. Let’s Plays are videos of people playing video games, usually including the game footage and narrated by the players themselves. In this work I use the metadata, of popular channels and their videos to analyze the current state of video game culture in YouTube and what is the role of Let's …

Reflection/Commentary On A Past Article: “A Practical Iterative Framework For Qualitative Data Analysis”, Prachi Srivastava, Nick Hopwood

Education Publications

This submission is a reflection by Srivastava and Hopwood on their earlier article, A Practical Iterative Framework for Qualitative Data Analysis, originally published in International Journal of Qualitative Methods in 2009, and selected for the journal’s special anniversary issue, “Top 20 in 20.” They discuss how they have applied the framework in their various studies since then, Srivastava, primarily in field-based international research in education and global development, and Hopwood, in education and health. Based on a brief analysis of the paper’s citations, they identify its impact to have been: in a wide variety of fields crossing disciplinary boundaries, studies …

Virtual Archaeology, Virtual Longhouses And "Envisioning The Unseen" Within The Archaeological Record, William M. Carter

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We are of an era in which digital technology now enhances the method and practice of archaeology. In our rush to embrace these technological advances however, Virtual Archaeology has become a practice to visualize the archaeological record, yet it is still searching for its methodological and theoretical base. I submit that Virtual Archaeology is the digital making and interrogating of the archaeological unknown. By wayfaring means, through the synergy of the maker, digital tools and material, archaeologists make meaning of the archaeological record by engaging the known archaeological data with the crafting of new knowledge by multimodal reflection and the …

Imagining The Unimagined Metropolis: Privilege, Liminality, And Peripheral Communities In The Contemporary Urban Situation, Colton R. Sherman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Various works of psychogeographic literature explore privileged and non-privileged communities and spaces through narrative and character development. Novels of this sort—specifically those by China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, and J.G. Ballard—feature narratives where their respective protagonists undergo a liminal metamorphosis and transform from a monotonous, albeit privileged urbanite into a free-associating inhabitant of the urban periphery: the unimagined, non-privileged space of urban detritus. By engaging with these authors’ novels alongside the works of the Situationists, Walter Benjamin, Rob Nixon and others, the goal of this thesis is to explore how the dominant urban epistemologies are subverted—whether or not they should be …

No Justice Without Narratives:Transition, Justice And The Khmer Rouge Trials, Tallyn Gray Dr

Transitional Justice Review

The article addresses the relationship between the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the supposed constituents of that transitional justice institution. The article sets out to offer a sociological methodology that TJ mechanism could contemplate in the process of enabling victims/witnesses to narrate justice and transition in their own terms and using Cambodia as a case study. It offers a theoretical and methodological approach to be reflected upon by transitional justice scholars and practitioners, which may enable a more victim-centered attitude in practical interactions with atrocity survivors ( not a cure-all policy solution ). My own research …

Creating And Sustaining Community: An Analysis Of Lgbtq Community In London, Ontario, Geoff S. Bardwell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

There has been an increase in literature over the last decade on lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer (LGBTQ) communities. However, aside from health-related studies, little has been published pertaining to LGBTQ communities in London, Ontario. This dissertation seeks to answer the following research questions: what are the constitutive elements that make up London’s LGBTQ communities? What forms of community-making prove to be viable and effective in a smaller urban setting? Does the practice of aesthetics/artistic performance lead to socio-political change among members of London’s LGBTQ communities? This is a multidisciplinary research project that utilizes archival, theoretical, and ethnographic-informed qualitative research …

Speech Equality: A Gendered Analysis Of Children’S Television Shows, Rikki N. Bergen

Anthropology Presentations

Childhood is an exciting time and kids are just learning who they are and who they are expected to be. The role television plays in their understanding of gender, racial, cultural, economic and social identity cannot be denied and it is therefore important for scholars to examine the types of ideas that are being presented. The gendered attitudes portrayed both explicitly and implicitly in children’s television shows can have a negative effect on childhood development and a child’s perceptions of self and the world around them.

Cultural Diversity In Artificial Societies: Case Studies Of The Maya Peoples, Roberto Ulloa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The existence of cultural diversity in a connected world is paradoxical given that all individuals constantly interact and share information, and that individuals are all part of one giant network of connections. In the long term, it seems logical to assume that everybody should hold the same cultural information and, therefore, the same culture. Yet cultural diversity is still manifest around the globe. Cultural diversity as a phenomenon becomes even more puzzling when we take into account how it survives catastrophic events which regularly befall societies, such as invasions, natural disasters, and civil wars. In this thesis, agent-based computer simulations …

The Model Minority Myth: (Benevolent) Racism Against (Asian) Americans, Angel Leung

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Asians and Asian Americans are considered the most well-to-do racialized groups in twenty-first century U.S. Their identity and ontology are incontrovertibly influenced by the model minority myth, a stereotype that envelops them as successful and as overcoming racial discrimination. This paper argues that the model minority myth exemplifies how putatively benevolent racial tropes are nonetheless racist against all communities of colour. Thus, Asian Americans are positioned as the ‘model minority’, as opposed to certain ‘problem minorities’, in order to further subjugate Black and Brown bodies. The myth is also problematic for Asian Americans themselves, demonstrating that to exist as an …

A Revised Feminist Analysis Of Disordered Eating And Weight Preoccupation, Angel Leung

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Eating disorders (EDs) are often emblematized by the upper-class young white woman anorexic or bulimic, an archetype that constructs disordered eating as pathological and depicts it in a singular and comprehensible manner. Personal narratives of body dissatisfaction (rooted in both literature and qualitative research), as well as my own subjectivity as a poor East Asian-Canadian woman, will equip me with the theoretical frameworks and insights by which I problematize the homogenization of problematic eating. Subscribing to the tradition of interjecting first-person perspectives into research that is so characteristic to feminist theory, I demonstrate how a subject as visceral and commanding …

Conduits Of Communion: Monstrous Affections In Algonquin Traditional Territory, Ian S.G. Puppe

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project investigates the legacies of shifting land tenure and stewardship practices on what is now known as the Ottawa Valley watershed (referred to as the Kitchissippi by the Omamawinini or Algonquin people), and the effects that this central colonization project has had on issues of identity and Nationalism on Canadians, diversely identified as settler-colonists of European or at least “Old World” descent and First Nations, Métis and Inuit (Lawrence 2012).

Focusing on historical and contemporary political and social issues related to Algonquin Provincial Park and its establishment, this project explores; 1) Competing claims levied by First Nations Peoples, local …