Anthropology Commons^™

Insiden Penurunan Banner People’S Justice Di Documenta Fifteen Dan Perintang Komunikasi Antarbudaya, Heronimus Heron, Min Seong Kim

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

On June 20 2022, artists and art observers in Indonesia were shocked by the circulation of information that the People's Justice banner by Taring Padi exhibited at Documenta Fifteen interpreted as containing elements of antisemitism. Taring Padi explained that the People's Justice banner was based on the political history of Indonesia under New Order regime and had nothing to do with antisemitism, however, the banner was eventually dismantled on June 21, 2022. Based on this background, there are several research questions to explore: How is the chronology of dismantling the People's Justice banner at Documenta Fifteen? Why did this incident …

Principal Agency 50 Years After The Lau Decision: Building And Sustaining Bilingual Education Programs For Asian Languages, Kevin M. Wong, Zhongfeng Tian

Education Division Scholarship

This study examined how three champion principals of Asian language dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs—Cantonese, Korean, and Mandarin—in California have navigated the oscillating language-in-education policies after the Lau decision. We explored principals' various roles through a lens of agency in a social justice leadership framework, specifically considering the opportunities and challenges for agentive leadership from three different phases: foregrounding and engaging, planning and implementing, and evaluating and sustaining. Findings demonstrate that the success of DLBE programs goes beyond the overarching language policies that supposedly enable bilingual education; rather it hinges on the bottom-up commitment, collaboration and resilience of principals, …

Violinmaking Apprenticeship: A Qualitative Investigation Of Learning As Embodied Familiarization, Isaac Calvert, Melissa Noel Hawkley, Samantha Swift

The Qualitative Report

This case study examines Yanchar, Spackman, and Faulconer’s “Learning as Embodied Familiarization” (hereafter LAEF) framework in the case of a violinmaking apprenticeship. Its purpose is to critically examine each facet of the LAEF framework as manifest in the lived experience of both master and apprentice. While previous studies investigating this framework have used various qualitative and hermeneutic methodologies, none have done so from a prolonged, ethnographic perspective. This perspective comes from an immersive autoethnography in which I apprenticed under a master violinmaker in an informal, one-on-one workshop environment for six months working four to five days a week for three …

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

The Social Life Of Violins: A Creative Exploration Of Entanglements And Actor-Network Theory, Benedetta Lombardo

Culture, Society, and Praxis

This paper uses fiction to explore anthropological concepts concerning material culture, entanglements, new materialism, agency and actor-network theory. In this article a fictive ethnographer encounters a violin who narrates its life- from its conception in the forest where it was part of an ecosystem, to taking form as a violin in a luthier’s shop and the skill negotiation that it entails as well as the effect on the human body, similar to Ingold’s theory of skilled practice, later following the violin until contemporary days as it gets exchanged as a precious good or sold as a commodity. The piece in …

“And They Wrote It All Down As The Progress Of Man”: Relationships Between Environment, Extractive Industries, And Appalachian Agency, Emma V. Kelly

Masters Theses

The landscape of Central Appalachia has shaped and been shaped by its residents for thousands of years. The advent of industrialized extractive industries greatly shifted the nature and the extent of these processes, with capitalistic domination being asserted over the environment. While this shift towards industrialization was a widespread phenomenon, it undertook a unique trajectory within Appalachia, a region which occupies a distinct position within the national perspective. Although geographically established by the Appalachian Regional Commission, Appalachia is more than a politically defined set of counties: It is an incredibly diverse sociocultural region that exists on varying planes of marginalization …

Editor's Introduction, Mathew N. Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Jalan Gender, Jalan Spiritual: Menggali Pembentukan Gender Project Dalam Konteks Pengalaman Keberagamaan Perempuan, Katrin Bandel, Anne Shakka, Gusnita Linda, Yustina Devi Ardhiani

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Using the method of collaborative autoethnography, this study critically reflects on the life stories of three women from different backgrounds by focusing on gender and religion. One of the main aspects that we examined is gender projects, i.e. the projections people make when imagining their future gender roles and identities. As a result of our (self-) observations, we found that, while at first the gender project of those women was formed by the patriarchal gender order of their society, as time progresses, after living through and evaluating a variety of often traumatic experiences, they developed their own gender projects more …

Dance And Know You Are A Part: The Instrumentality Of Performative Politics And Dance In The Configuration Of Local Social Memory And Afro-Brazilian Identity And Agency In Pelotas, Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil, Triston R. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The arts have been a refuge from perpetual repression and omission, and, a platform for social activism for Afro-descendants in the Americas. In Brazil this is very much the case. With performance serving as a social barometer or a looking glass, dance becomes a source of cultural knowledge, acts as preservative, and negotiates individual mobility within a given context. The Afro-Brazilian dance company, Cia de Dança Daniel Amaro in Pelotas, Brazil grants its members a means of activism and agency to challenge entrenched national narratives and reinterpret local social memory.

Most academic writings about dance or performance in Brazil, focus …

Vulnerable Agents: Ugandan Children's Experiences With Hiv Rehabilitation And Reintegration, Colleen Walsh Lang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Changing The Subject Of Sati, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Charan Shah's 1999 death was widely considered to be the first sati, or widow immolation, to have occurred in India in over twenty years. Media coverage of the event focused on procedural minutiae-her sari, her demeanor-and ultimately, several progressive commentators came to the counterintuitive conclusion that the ritually anomalous nature of Charan's death confirmed its voluntary, secular, and noncriminal nature. This article argues that the "unlabeling" of Charan's death, like those of other women between 1999 and 2006, reflects a tension between the nonindividuated, impervious model of personhood exemplified by sati and the particularized citizen-subject of liberal-democratic politics in India.

Mothering On Maple Avenue: An Exploration Of African American Women’S Agency In Nineteenth Century Germantown, New York, Cheyenne R. Cutter

Senior Projects Spring 2020

National discourse on womanhood and mothering in nineteenth century America positioned these fields of women’s practices as sites of privilege for middle-class Anglo-American women, and as inaccessible to their African American contemporaries. After gaining their nominal freedom through New York’s manumission of enslaved individual around 1830, African American families had to confront their new reality to find ways to articulate their position within American society. How then, did the African American women of the Persons family, who occupied the Maple Avenue Parsonage in Germantown, New York during the nineteenth century, confront this new reality? What position within society did they …

Exploring Ecodynamics Of Coastal Foragers Using Integrated Faunal Records From Čḯxwicən Village (Strait Of Juan De Fuca, Washington, U.S.A.), Virginia L. Butler, Sarah K. Campbell, Kristine M. Bovy, Michael A. Etnier

Anthropology Faculty and Staff Publications

Extensive 2004 excavation of Čḯxwicən (pronounced ch-WHEET-son), traditional home of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe in northwest Washington State, U.S.A., documented human occupation spanning the last 2700 years with fine geo-stratigraphic control and 102 radiocarbon samples. Remains of multiple plankhouses were documented. Occupation spans large-magnitude earthquakes, periods of climate change, and change in nearshore habitat. Our project began in 2012 as a case study to explore the value of human ecodynamics in explaining change and stability in human-animal relationships on the Northwest Coast through analysis of faunal and geo-archaeological records. Field sampling was explicitly designed to allow for integration …

Differential Responses To Constraints On Naming Agency Among Indigenous Peoples And Immigrants In Canada, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

This article illuminates the social structures and relations that shape agency for members of two marginalized groups in Canada and examines how individuals respond differently to constraints on their power to name themselves and their children. Constraints on spelling, structure and choice of name are framed according to the particular positions of indigenous peoples and immigrants in relation to European settler society as either ‘original inhabitants’ or ‘recent arrivals’. These historically unequal power relations are manifest in intertwined ideologies of language, identity and nation, evident in ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary. Differential responses include resistance, endurance and assimilation.

Dekalb, Illinois, Muslim Women’S Agency Negotiating And Re-Affirming Their Muslim Identity, Sinta Febrina

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Post 9/11 American Muslim women are stereotyped as victims of their patriarchal religion and as perpetrators of terror. These conditions led to the discrimination of American Muslim women which requires them to continuously strategize and negotiate their identity. This thesis examined DeKalb, Illinois Muslim women’s agency to strategize and negotiate their identity in lager American society. In this study, fifteen Muslim women from three different categories were interviewed: American-born citizens, naturalized citizens, and immigrants. This study found that Muslim women’s various backgrounds (country of origin, education, socio-economic status, and immigration status) affected their strategy and agency to negotiate and re-affirm …

Schisms And Conflict Management In New African Immigrants’ Religious Organizations In The Greater Atlanta Area, Christina Edwards

Doctor of International Conflict Management Dissertations

New African immigrant religious organizations (NAIRO) are transnational religious organizations established and led by new African immigrants (NAI). These organizations are experiencing planned growth as outlined in their manuals, but little is known about the internal conflicts that lead to unplanned schisms or break away congregations. Foundational studies in the field of Sociology of Religion failed to include NAI-led churches in their studies and Atlanta was not selected as an immigrant hub city in their follow-up studies. This dissertation explores the social phenomenon of NAIRO internal conflicts that lead to unplanned schisms and therefore contribute to the overall growth of …

Returning The Radiant Gaze: Visual Art And Embodiment In A World Of Subjects, Beth Carruthers

The Goose

Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century anti-ocularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other—an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises no …

'We Are The Big Six:’ Maasai Perceptions And Organization Of Cultural Tourism In Kenya, Kara D. Kelliher

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Kenya’s wildlife has long been considered an international treasure. Travelling to the renowned Masai Mara National Reserve (MMNR) to capture the ‘big five,’ those five large wild animals considered to be Africa’s greatest, with their camera lenses, visitors will also see or even meet local Maasai living and/or working in the area. Employing ethnographic methods this research examines three sites: the Enkang Oloirien Village Homestay, Olapa village and the main entrance to the MMNR where Maasai women sell souvenirs to explore Maasai perceptions and organization of cultural tourism. Responding to literature which considers benefits from tourism to accrue when hosts …

Relational Identities And Other-Than-Human Agency In Archaeology, Eleanor Harrison-Buck, Julia A. Hendon

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology explores the benefits and consequences of archaeological theorizing on and interpretation of the social agency of nonhumans as relational beings capable of producing change in the world. The volume cross-examines traditional understanding of agency and personhood, presenting a globally diverse set of case studies that cover a range of cultural, geographical, and historical contexts.

Agency (the ability to act) and personhood (the reciprocal qualities of relational beings) have traditionally been strictly assigned to humans. In case studies from Ghana to Australia to the British Isles and Mesoamerica, contributors to this volume demonstrate that …

All In - And More! Gambling In The James Bond Films, Pauliina Raento

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Scholarly analysis of gambling in the James Bond films is rare, despite the multitude of topics in Bondology and the fictional agent’s global fame. The odd commentary in gambling scholarship criticizes the franchise from the perspective of harm prevention. This article counters both groups of scholars with a qualitative interpretation of Bond’s gambling habits and the role of gambling and risk taking in the film series. A basic toolkit of visual methodologies is applied to the 24 EON-produced Bond films released in 1962–2015. The examination shows the critical importance of gambling to character identity, power hierarchies and communication, atmosphere, and …

We Are One: Singing, Sisterhood, And Solidarity In Appleton-Area Women's Choirs, Lauren Vanderlinden

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Despite its relatively small population, the city of Appleton has a large and thriving women’s choir community. Between the Lawrence Academy of Music Girl Choir, which serves hundreds of girls every year, and Cantala, the women’s choir at Lawrence University, opportunities for involvement in nationally-recognized female-voice ensembles range from second grade all the way through to college graduation. Using the theories of Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler, Green, and Bentham, this project explores the women’s choir culture of Appleton in an attempt to discover the core values of these two influential programs. I accomplished this by conducting ethnographic research in the form …

Cognitive Sociology, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

Cognitive sociology is the study of the conditions under which meaning is constituted through processes of reification. Cognitive sociology traces its origins to writings in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, cognitive and cultural anthropology, and more recently, work done in cultural sociology and cognitive science. Its central questions revolve around locating these processes of reification since the locus of cognition is highly contentious. Researchers consider how individuality is related to notions of society (structures, institutions, systems, etc.) and notions of culture (cultural forms, cultural structures, sub-cultures, etc.). These questions further explore how these answers depend on learning processes …

An Integrated Archaeological Investigation Of Colonial Interactions At A Seventeenth-Century New England Site, Maeve E. Herrick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this research is the ways in which interactions between Indigenous peoples and English settler-colonists were manifested in the landscape at a seventeenth-century site in South Glastonbury, Connecticut. Magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar allowed for the location of anthropogenic and geological features on the landscape, and for the seventeenth-century landscape to be recreated. This reconstruction indicated that Europeans and Indigenous peoples may have been cohabitating the site. Archival research helped to uncover what types of interactions may have been occurring at the site. Excavations uncovered "Indigenous" artifacts in a "European" context, leading to the reconsideration of the prevailing perspectives …

A Journey To New Narratives: How Sri Lankan Migrant Women Challenge Perceptions Through Resistance, Kimaya De Silva

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis draws on ethnographic research carried out with a group of returned Sri Lankan migrant women who migrated for employment to the Middle East. This retrospective ethnography, based on their time working abroad, brings forth ideas of silent resistance and hidden weapons of women from developing countries, and intends to work against dominant discourses like the human trafficking framework which deems migrant women ‘victims’ of the system of migration, largely ignoring the agency that they exercise throughout the process. The ethnography argues that resistance and resilience are better frameworks with which to characterise the experiences of migrant women. The …

Violence, Catastrophe, And Agency In Nepal: A Deeper Understanding Of The 2015 Earthquakes And Border Blockade, Kassandra D. Viers

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In 2015, Nepal was struck by two catastrophes. First, on April 25, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, followed by hundreds of aftershocks, struck in Gorkha. Then, in September, a blockade was formed that prevented goods from passing through trade checkpoints between India and Nepal. Both of these events highlight social suffering, a form of suffering that refers to the systems of oppression, unequal distribution of resources, and broad social structures that serve to keep certain people impoverished and subjugate. The earthquake caused the most damage to vulnerable people, people already suffering the effects of structural violence. The blockade was created by …

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.

Willing To Work: Agency And Vulnerability In An Undocumented Immigrant Network, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

Restriction-oriented immigration policies and polarizing political debates have intensified the vulnera- bility of undocumented people in the United States, promoting their “willingness” to do low-wage, low-status work. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research with undocumented immigrants in Chicago to examine the everyday strategies that undocumented workers develop to mediate constraints and enhance their well-being. In particular, I explore how a cohort of undocumented Mexican immigrants cultivates a social identity as “hard workers” to promote their labor and bolster dignity and self-esteem. Much of the existing literature on unauthorized labor migration has focused on the structural conditions that encumber …

Healing The Social Body After Assisted Reproduction, Cvetana Cindy Golusin

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with the lived experiences of ten women after having children with In Vitro Fertilization. I examine the reshaped subjectivities that emerge within the women’s everyday life experiences to deepen understandings of human agency by exploring the intersection of assisted reproductive technologies, cultural ideologies, and social interactions as components in the transformation of the women’s identity. The experience of in vitro fertilization offered a fertile place in which to examine the roles that social and interpretive practices play in constituting the subjective experience in recasting a women’s identity. The study design consisted of informant interviews and case …

Grassroots Activists And Movements Against Female Genital Mutilation And Cutting Bridged With Political Alliances : Agency Power And The Potential To Bring About Change, Aisha Kearney

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In this thesis I highlight grassroots activists and social movements/mobilization against FGM/C throughout some of the regions where it's concentrated, and consider the political alliances that have aided these activists and their movements towards declines in the prevalence of the practice. I consider the recent outlawing of the practice in the Gambia (last year) which was strongly motivated by grassroots activists originally from the Gambia and the transnational political alliances they were able to form. I examine activists and movements in Senegal, paying particular attention to the approach of NGO TOSTAN. I also highlight long standing histories of grassroots activism …

Women's Activism And Social Networks In Post-Genocide Rwanda., Michelle Cecelia Marie Fox

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

Following the 1994 genocide the social networks of many Rwandan women changed. The loss of kin, particularly men, left many women needing new sources of social and material support. Beginning in the early 1990s the international development and aid community recognized the need to integrate gender analysis in their work and began to focus on women’s activism and efforts to improve the position of women in the supposed developing world. Using social network data and structured interview data gathered in Rwanda in June and July 2013 from 30 women, this study attempts to answer the question: Do women who were …