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Articles 61 - 90 of 99
Full-Text Articles in Social and Cultural Anthropology
A Librarian’S Genealogical Study To Outreach For Ethnic Populations, Sheau-Yueh J. Chao
A Librarian’S Genealogical Study To Outreach For Ethnic Populations, Sheau-Yueh J. Chao
Publications and Research
Chinese Americans searched for their identities and strove for achievement in the United States. Respect for the elders is considered as one of the outstanding virtues of Chinese culture. The importance of this trait is underscored via its record-keeping traditions and clan genealogies called Jiapu which was fostered by centuries of Confucian philosophy. Some of the history of Chinese in America can in fact be found not only in China but also internationally around the globe. In this paper, the author will share her experiences and ideas on building and enhancing family history research through understanding the major components in …
Imperatives In Informal Organizational Resource Exchange In Central Europe, David Jancsics
Imperatives In Informal Organizational Resource Exchange In Central Europe, David Jancsics
Publications and Research
This paper challenges the mainstream social scientific approach that emphasizes “moral inferiority” in corruption and bribery in Central and Eastern Europe. We argue that in many cases, people participate in informal organizational resource exchanges not because of immorality or greed but rather because of powerful external forces. By using the case of contemporary Hungary to support this argument, this paper provides a systematic analysis of such imperatives. The findings of 50 in-depth qualitative interviews suggest that two main imperatives can be distinguished; macro-level social and meso-level organizational forces. Macro-level forces may be linked to historical paths, Hungary's socialist and pre- …
From Antipolitics To Post-Neoliberalism: A Conversation With James Ferguson, Nils Gilman, Miriam Ticktin, James Ferguson
From Antipolitics To Post-Neoliberalism: A Conversation With James Ferguson, Nils Gilman, Miriam Ticktin, James Ferguson
Publications and Research
Humanity co-editors Nils Gilman and Miriam Ticktin spoke with James Ferguson on May 31, 2013, at Stanford University.
Self-Reliance Beyond Neoliberalism: Rethinking Autonomy At The Edges Of Empire, Karen Hébert, Diana Mincyte
Self-Reliance Beyond Neoliberalism: Rethinking Autonomy At The Edges Of Empire, Karen Hébert, Diana Mincyte
Publications and Research
Across scholarly and popular accounts, self-reliance is often interpreted as either the embodiment of individual entrepreneurialism, as celebrated by neoliberal designs, or the basis for communitarian localism, increasingly imagined as central to environmental and social sustainability. In both cases, self-reliance is framed as an antidote to the failures of larger state institutions or market economies. This paper offers a different framework for understanding self-reliance by linking insights drawn from agrarian studies to current debates on alternative economies. Through an examination of the social worlds of semisubsistence producers in peripheral zones in the Global North, we show how everyday forms of …
Global Futures And Government Towns: Phosphates And The Production Of Western Sahara As A Space Of Contention, Mark Drury
Publications and Research
The study of natural resources lends itself to theorizing the politics of nature and the politics of time. The space of Western Sahara, where both remain highly contested, provides an opportunity to consider the ramifications of resources in political conflict at different historical moments. Drawing from environmental histories of North Africa and the Sahara, as well as the anthropology of time, the author focuses on two historical moments. The first, from 1945 to 1972, concerns the discovery of phosphate deposits during the Spanish colonial period and the implications of this discovery for political authority in the Sahara more broadly. The …
Good Men Grow Corn: Embodied Ecological Heritage And Health In A Mopan Maya Community, Kristina Baines
Good Men Grow Corn: Embodied Ecological Heritage And Health In A Mopan Maya Community, Kristina Baines
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Sharing And Sustaining Maya Environmental Heritage In Southern Belize, Rebecca K. Zarger, Kristina Baines
Sharing And Sustaining Maya Environmental Heritage In Southern Belize, Rebecca K. Zarger, Kristina Baines
Publications and Research
This paper documents an approach to sharing and sustaining Maya environmental and cultural heritage through the development of a primary school curriculum and associated activities in order to bring cultural knowledge and practices to formal school settings. Methods include long-term ethnographic research on environmental knowledge and practices in two Maya communities in Toledo; participatory workshops with educators; iterative consultations with district educators, community leaders, and families; and community for a focus on discussions of how and whether such information could be integrated into formal schooling. Curricula and content for workbooks, radio shows, and field guides are comprised of both generalized …
Conjuring The Close From Afar A Border-Crossing Tale Of Vieques’ Activism And Obama-Empire, Víctor M. Torres-Vélez, Sarah Molinari, Katharine Lawrence
Conjuring The Close From Afar A Border-Crossing Tale Of Vieques’ Activism And Obama-Empire, Víctor M. Torres-Vélez, Sarah Molinari, Katharine Lawrence
Publications and Research
After more than 60 years of military occupation, 30 of these under violent military practices, a social movement forced the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. This victory would not have been possible without the highly effective organization of civil disobedience carried out on the island. But the sum total of the actions that eventually forced out the U.S. Navy, neither happened exclusively within the boundaries of Vieques, nor was carried out by Viequense residents alone. In this article we want to suggest that this amazing victory—a testament of people’s will in the face of globalization—is also a border- …
Out On The Land: Income, Subsistence Activities, And Food Sharing Networks In Nain, Labrador, Kirk Dombrowski, Emily Channell, Bilal Khan, Joshua Moses, Evan Misshula
Out On The Land: Income, Subsistence Activities, And Food Sharing Networks In Nain, Labrador, Kirk Dombrowski, Emily Channell, Bilal Khan, Joshua Moses, Evan Misshula
Publications and Research
In recent Inuit ethnography, a major concern has been how and to what extent contemporary Inuit participate in and depend on subsistence activities, particularly in the context of increasing wage employment and growing participation in the cash economy. This paper provides an analysis of these activities in the predominately Inuit community of Nain, Labrador. Using social network data and demographic information collected between January and June 2010, we examine the interconnections between subsistence activities—obtaining “country food” through activities such as hunting, fishing, and collecting—with access to the means of obtaining subsistence resources (such as snow mobiles, cabins, and boats), employment …
Soldiers Of Science--Agents Of Culture: American Archaeologists In The Office Of Strategic Services (Oss), Despina Lalaki
Soldiers Of Science--Agents Of Culture: American Archaeologists In The Office Of Strategic Services (Oss), Despina Lalaki
Publications and Research
"Scientificity" and appeals to political independence are invaluable tools when institutions such as the American School of Classical Studies at Athens attempt to maintain professional autonomy. Nonetheless, the cooperation of scientists and scholars with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), among them archaeologists affiliated with the American School, suggests a constitutive affinity between political and cultural leadership. This relationship is here mapped in historical terms, while, at the same time, sociological categorizations of knowledge and its employment are used in order to situate archaeologists in their broader social and political context and to evaluate their work not merely as agents …
Shamanic Knowledge: The Challenge To Information Science, Jay H. Bernstein
Shamanic Knowledge: The Challenge To Information Science, Jay H. Bernstein
Publications and Research
Shamanism, a form of healing involving soul travel and trance found in many traditional societies the world over, has been studied by anthropologists and scholars of religious studies. Shamanic traditions are characterized by specialized, restricted, and esoteric knowledge domains that are encoded and communicated through condensed and mystified symbols and reproduced in ceremonies. Shamanic knowledge is acquired through direct experience of the numinous, usually in the process of overcoming personal affliction. Information science so far has been silent on shamanic knowledge. This is understandable given the latter discipline's focus on formal documentary information systems and advanced information technologies. But in …
Extraction From Immersion, Kristina Baines
Extraction From Immersion, Kristina Baines
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Cultural Competence In Urban Affairs And Planning, Tom Angotti, Marly Pierre-Louis, Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Sigmund Shipp, Angela Tovar
Cultural Competence In Urban Affairs And Planning, Tom Angotti, Marly Pierre-Louis, Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Sigmund Shipp, Angela Tovar
Publications and Research
In the Fall of 2009, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) undertook the Centro Cultural Competence Initiative (CCI) with the support of a one-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). The goal of the CCI is to address the need for culturally appropriate work in a variety of professions by training students to be culturally competent practitioners. In the Fall of 2010, the Urban Affairs and Planning Department at Hunter College joined CENTRO as a partner in this initiative. Full time Professors Sigmund Shipp, Laxmi Ramasubramanian, and Tom Angotti worked …
Assessing (Multi)Culturalism Through Public Art Practices, Anru Lee, Perng-Juh Peter Shyong
Assessing (Multi)Culturalism Through Public Art Practices, Anru Lee, Perng-Juh Peter Shyong
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Policing: A Sociologist’S Response To An Anthropological Account, Peter Moskos
Policing: A Sociologist’S Response To An Anthropological Account, Peter Moskos
Publications and Research
Social science writing should not ape quantitative science in format, structure, or style. If we can’t explain ourselves to others in a style both illuminating and interesting, we won’t and don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Too many in the Ivory Tower cling to the belief that research and academic writing must conform to a “scientific” format. Quality writing is more art than science. To be relevant, writing need not be – indeed should not be – rooted in a limited model of “hypothesis, replicable experiment, findings, discussion.” The more jargon and sociobabble we anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers spew out, …
Folk Concepts, Jay H. Bernstein
Turkey Backbones And Chicken Gizzards: Women’S Roles And The Making Of A Soup King In Post Socialist Hungary, Lisa Pope Fischer
Turkey Backbones And Chicken Gizzards: Women’S Roles And The Making Of A Soup King In Post Socialist Hungary, Lisa Pope Fischer
Publications and Research
This article looks at soup making as a lens to view the impact of societal change for Hungarian pensioner women. Food as a practice illustrates agency: strategies and tactics used in time and space to communicate meaning for people in everyday life. During the Socialist period women endured frustrations of long lines and scarce resources. Post socialism, their heroic clout as food providers is diminished by the introduction of a market economy. However, the survival skills learned in the socialist era allow them to adapt to the new era of high inflation, and high unemployment. I use descriptions of one …
Down On The Farm: A Photo Essay Of The Indiana Farmer, Elizabeth Schaible
Down On The Farm: A Photo Essay Of The Indiana Farmer, Elizabeth Schaible
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Sexual Violence As The Language Of Border Control: Where French Feminist And Anti‐Immigrant Rhetoric Meet, Miriam Ticktin
Sexual Violence As The Language Of Border Control: Where French Feminist And Anti‐Immigrant Rhetoric Meet, Miriam Ticktin
Publications and Research
When I first arrived in the Paris region in 1999 to do research on the struggle by undocumented immigrants (les sans papiers) for basic human rights, discussions of violence against women were remarkably absent from the public arena. Nongovernmental organizations and researchers had begun to broach the topic, but with little public visibility. However, this changed in late 2000, with a media explosion on the issue of les tournantes, or the gang rapes committed in the banlieues of Paris. Such tournantes involve boys “taking turns” with their friends’ girlfriends, both parties usually being of Maghrebian or North …
Quisqueya On The Hudson: The Transnational Identity Of Dominicans In Washington Heights, Jorge Duany, Cuny Dominican Studies Institute
Quisqueya On The Hudson: The Transnational Identity Of Dominicans In Washington Heights, Jorge Duany, Cuny Dominican Studies Institute
Publications and Research
This field research study of ethnic identity, popular culture, and everyday life of the Dominican community of Washington Heights examines the social adaptation of Dominican immigrants to the host country.
Claiming Equality: Puerto Rican Farmworkers In Western New York, Ismael Garcia-Colon
Claiming Equality: Puerto Rican Farmworkers In Western New York, Ismael Garcia-Colon
Publications and Research
n July of 1966, a group of Puerto Rican migrant workers protested against police brutality and discrimination in North Collins, a small farm community of western NewYork. Puerto Rican farmworkers made up a substantial part of the population, and had transformed the ethnic, racial, and gender landscape of the town. Local officials and residents produced and reproduced images of Puerto Ricans as inferior subjects within US racial and ethnic hierarchies. Those negative images of Puerto Ricans shaped the way in which local authorities elaborated policies of social control against these farmworkers in North Collins. At the same time, Puerto Rican …
A Transnational Conversation On French Colonialism, Immigration, Violence And Sovereignty, Miriam Ticktin, Ruth Marshall, Paolo Bacchetta
A Transnational Conversation On French Colonialism, Immigration, Violence And Sovereignty, Miriam Ticktin, Ruth Marshall, Paolo Bacchetta
Publications and Research
This conversation was transcribed from a panel discussion that took place at The Scholar & Feminist Conference XXXII, “Fashioning Citizenship: Gender and Immigration,” held on March 24, 2007 at Barnard College.
Playing And Eating Democracy: The Case Of Puerto Rico's Land Distribution Program, 1940s-1960s, Ismael Garcia-Colon
Playing And Eating Democracy: The Case Of Puerto Rico's Land Distribution Program, 1940s-1960s, Ismael Garcia-Colon
Publications and Research
In the early 1940s, the colonial government of Puerto Rico with the consent of the U.S. federal government began to elaborate a land reform. Under Title V of the Land Law of 1941, the government established resettlement communities for landless families. One of their goals was to transform landless agricultural workers into an industrial and urban labor force by teaching them “democratic, industrial, and modern” habits. Government officials distributed land to landless families through lotteries, portraying the ceremonies as acts of democracy. Community education programs produced literature, films, and posters aimed at fostering development and political participation. The colonial state …
Buscando Ambiente: Hegemony And Subaltern Tactics Of Survival In Puerto Rico’S Land Distribution Program, Ismael Garcia-Colon
Buscando Ambiente: Hegemony And Subaltern Tactics Of Survival In Puerto Rico’S Land Distribution Program, Ismael Garcia-Colon
Publications and Research
A land distribution program in the community of Parcelas Gándaras in Cidra, Puerto Rico, transformed the lives of formerly landless workers. Examination of the working conditions and social relations of workers before the program (1890s–1945) and their economic strategies, migration, and networks after becoming small landholders (1945–1960s) shows how they used their land to accommodate their practices of everyday life and their tactics of survival. Local ruling groups became hegemonic through the establishment of land distribution communities. The habitus of the new landholders expressed the ways in which they engaged in economic, social, and political activities shaped by the new …
Taman Shamanism (Borneo), Jay H. Bernstein
Taman Shamanism (Borneo), Jay H. Bernstein
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
The State Goes Home: Local Hyper-Vigilance Of Children And The Global Retreat From Social Reproduction, Cindi Katz
The State Goes Home: Local Hyper-Vigilance Of Children And The Global Retreat From Social Reproduction, Cindi Katz
Publications and Research
In an early scene in The Terminator, the Cyborgian Arnold Schwarzenegger walks into an L.A. gun shop and asks to see the wares. The shopkeeper lays out Uzis, submachine guns, rocket launchers, and other sophisticated means of overkill, nervously understating, "Any one of these will suit you for home defense purposes." The situation is likewise in the growing child protection industry. In keeping with the shopkeeper's sly comment, these businesses feast on an all-pervasive culture of fear, while creating a mockery, alibi, and distraction out of what they are really about - to remake the home as a citadel through …
The Nature Of Nature: South Floridian Children And Their "Environmental Experience", Kristina Baines
The Nature Of Nature: South Floridian Children And Their "Environmental Experience", Kristina Baines
Publications and Research
To investigate how schoolchildren in south Florida think about their natural environment, children were observed participating in several school-organized environmental field trips. Their attitudes about, interactions with and knowledge concerning various aspects of their natural environment were observed. This study explores how these children interpret natural phenomena using their cultural tools and focuses on the interpretation of commonly-observed responses to nature. Responses discussed include: the blurring of lines between the natural and non-natural, separation and binary thinking, and fear and aggression. Reference is made throughout the study to various theoretical frameworks, including cultural-ecological perspectives, ideas from structural anthropology and other …
The Use Of Plot Surveys For The Study Of Ethnobotanical Knowledge: A Brunei Dusun Example, Jay H. Bernstein, Roy Ellen, Bantong Bin Antaran
The Use Of Plot Surveys For The Study Of Ethnobotanical Knowledge: A Brunei Dusun Example, Jay H. Bernstein, Roy Ellen, Bantong Bin Antaran
Publications and Research
This paper describes a technique for using plot surveys to measure individual informants' ethnobotanical knowledge of forests, as applied to the Dusun community of Merimbun in Brunei. Two knowledgeable but non-literate Dusun informants enumerated marked plots of both recent and old secondary growth mixed dipterocarp forest near the village. They were able to provide names (other than life-forms or the most general basic and intermediate categories) for 86-97% of species growing in the plots. Between 152 and 170 plant names were elicited by the surveys. In all cases, about 88% of the names were at the basic naming level and …
The Deculturation Of The Brunei Dusun, Jay H. Bernstein
The Deculturation Of The Brunei Dusun, Jay H. Bernstein
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Three Film Reviews, John A. Drobnicki
Three Film Reviews, John A. Drobnicki
Publications and Research
Reviews of Advertising Missionaries, directed by Chris Hilton and Gauthier Flauder; Chastie (Paradise), a film by Sergey Dvortsevoy; and Wilbert: Street Kid in Nicaragua, a video by Bent Erik Kroyer.