Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

Prehistoric Myths In Modern Political Philosophy, Karl Widerquist, Grant Mccall

Karl Widerquist

Appendix To Prehistoric Myths In Modern Political Philosophy, Karl Widerquist, Grant Mccall

Karl Widerquist

Performing El Rap El ʿArabi 2005-2015: Feeling Politics Amid Neoliberal Incursions In Ramallah, Amman, And Beirut, Rayya S. El Zein

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is about politics in Arabic rap. Specifically, it is about affective dynamics and material negotiations during rap concerts in three cities in the Levant. I analyze Arab hip hop culture in the context of three different but related histories of cosmopolitan, middle class growth, and gentrification. Using an ethnomusicological framework rooted in participant observation and performance theory, I compare concert conditions, audience behavior, and accessibility of music production in Ramallah, Amman, and Beirut.

In Chapter One, I elaborate the discursive and theoretical frameworks that have pinned the political valences of Arab youth, Arab artists, and Arab rappers in ...

War Of The Worlds: Music And Cosmological Battles In The Balinese Cremation Procession, Michael B. Bakan

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Abstract

This article explores processional action as a form of cosmological intervention in Hindu-Balinese cremation processions, focusing on the multiple and intersecting functions of a particular type of Balinese instrumental music ensemble: the gamelan beleganjur. It explores the alternately “enlivening and protective aspects” (DeVale 1990, 62) that underlie the use of beleganjur music in the ngaben, or cremation ritual, showing how beleganjur’s sonic power and rhythmic drive serve to combat malevolent spirit beings, strengthen and inspire processional participants in their efforts to meet challenging ritual obligations, and grant courage to the souls of deceased individuals embarking on their perilous ...

Contributors To Indian Catholicism: Interventions And Imaginings, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Contributors to Indian Catholicism: Interventions and Imaginings, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism.

Authority, Representation, And Offense: Dalit Catholics, Foot Washing, And The Study Of Global Catholicism, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

In reflecting on a sharp scholarly exchange at a conference, this article explores issues of authority, representation, and offense in global Catholic and South Asian Studies. Focusing on the act of foot washing by Dalit Catholics, the article examines how scholarly offense is linked to particular claims of representational authority. The article also puts this discussion within the context of contemporary debates about Western portrayals of Indian culture and society.

The Tying Of The Ceremonial Wedding Thread: A Feminist Analysis Of “Ritual” And “Tradition” Among Syro-Malabar Catholics In India, Sonja Thomas

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article presents a feminist analysis of patriarchy persisting in Catholicism of the Syro-Malabar rite in Kerala. The article specifically considers the impact of charismatic Catholicism on women of the Syro-Malabar rite and argues that it is important to interrogate this new face of religiosity in order to fully understand how certain rituals are allowed to change and be fluid, while others, especially concerning female sexuality, are enshrined as “tradition” which often restricts the parameters for women’s empowerment and may reinforce caste and patriarchal hegemonies preventing feminist solidarity across different religious- and caste-based groups.

Dalit Catholic Home Shrines In A North Indian Village, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines three Catholic home shrines in a Dalit community in North Indian and argues that it is misleading to think that home shrines and other collections of material objects are somehow static conveyors of meaning. “Meaning” can mean many things or nothing at all, depending upon the terms we are using and the scholarly methods we deploy. The crucial aspect of Dalit Catholic home shrines is that they are literally open to interpretation and reinterpretation, to touching and being touched. Their significance—their meaning—depends not on decoding their structure or symbolic logic, but interacting with them as ...

The Grace Of God And The Travails Of Contemporary Indian Catholicism, Kerry P. C. San Chirico

Journal of Global Catholicism

This essay discusses the challenges faced by Indian Catholicism, particularly as it seeks to adapt to and in contemporary, post-colonial India through the process or program of what is called inculturation, a self-conscious program of adaptation to Indian religion and culture. Since Indian Catholicism is constituted by so many irreducible persons-in-relation, the article focuses on the life of the Catholic priest, Swami Ishwar Prasad in whose life we may chart something of the inculturation movement and the Catholic tradition as it is found in North India region, in one rather long and rich lifetime connecting two centuries. The article seeks ...

In Continuity With The Past: Indigenous Environmentalism And Indian Christian Visions Of Flora, James Ponniah

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article considers whether Indian Christianity can be said to have a distinctive ecological vision. The first two parts of the article examine Christian environmentalism in two native forms of Indian Christianity: Tamil Christianity and Tribal Christianity. Continuing with the theme of conformity to the local culture—though of the elite—the third part of the article investigates how Christian Ashrams function as dynamic centers for ecological praxis. The last part of the article considers how contemporary Indian Christian communities can respond to the ecological challenges confronting them.

Antoniyar Kōvil: Hindu-Catholic Identity At The St. Anthony Shrine In St. Mary’S Co-Cathedral, Chennai, Pj Johnston

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article combines ethnographic description of the practices of Hindu and Christian visitors of the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai with the observation that this material cannot be understood using the standard world religions paradigm that essentializes Christianity as exclusivistic. Drawing upon the visual and material culture of the shrine in light of premodern and Vatican II templates for inculturation and the negotiation of religious difference, the article highlights overlap between Tamil Hinduism and the Tamil Popular Catholicism of the site to argue that the beliefs and practices documented should inform descriptive and normative accounts of Catholic Christianity. Because Tamil ...

Culture And Conservation: Beyond Anthropocentrism, Nathan Poirier

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

No abstract provided.

A Feeling In Their Bones: Issues Of Deciphering Animal Ritual In The Archaeological Record Among The Naskapi Innu And Eastern Cree, Arwen M. Johns

Totem: The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology

Whether religion and ritual are elements of past cultures that can be studied effectively by archaeologists has divided experts for some time within the discipline. This paper examines specific animal rituals from two mobile hunter gatherer groups from Canada’s North, the Naskapi Innu and Eastern Cree, in relation to Colin Renfrew’s 1985 book The Archaeology of Cult. In this paper I seek to demonstrate that the archaeological concepts and methods put forth in Renfrew’s (1985) work, related to analyzing religious and ritual contexts in large scale sedentary societies, cannot be neatly applied to Northern mobile hunter gatherer ...

Indigenous Knowledge Within Academia: Exploring The Tensions That Exist Between Indigenous, Decolonizing, And Nêhiyawak Methodologies, Paulina R. Johnson Ms

Totem: The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology

Over the last few decades the rewriting of Indigenous knowledge and history has been discussed, debated, and rewritten through the fields of Anthropology, History, and First Nation Studies, to name a few. One of the main tensions that exists in this reclamation process is the differences between Indigenous and Western methodological approaches. However, it has yet to be put forward as to what are the tensions that exist within Indigenous methodologies and their practice. This paper will bring forward three methodological approaches utilized within research for and by Indigenous peoples, as we examine how Indigenous, Decolonizing, and Nêhiyawak methodologies challenge ...

Out Of Sight, In Mind: Cell-Phones And The Reconnection Of The Iraqi Diaspora With A (Home)Land, Abdulla Majeed

Totem: The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology

It was only after the invasion of 2003 and the gradual collapse of the Iraqi state that cellphones began to surface on Iraq's public market, for they have been previously banned by the regime of Saddam Hussein. This fairly recent breakage of the digital barrier rendered Iraq at the time as one of the most promising ICTs markets in the Middle East, with critical consequences on the larger Iraqi society, particularly since it also saw the introduction of the previously banned Internet. Using personal experience, as well as interviews with Iraqis from Baghdad, this paper argues that Iraqis creatively ...

Ceramic Consumption In A Boston Immigrant Tenement, Andrew J. Webster

Graduate Masters Theses

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boston’s North End became home to thousands of European immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Italy. The majority of these immigrant families lived in crowded tenement apartments and earned their wages from low-paying jobs such as manual laborers or store clerks. The Ebenezer Clough House at 21 Unity Street was originally built as a single-family colonial home in the early eighteenth century but was later repurposed as a tenement in the nineteenth century. In 2013, the City of Boston Archaeology Program excavated the rear lot of the Clough House, recovering 36,465 ...

Improvement The Order Of The Age': Historic Advertising, Consumer Choice, And Identity In 19th Century Roxbury, Massachusetts, Janice A. Nosal

Graduate Masters Theses

During the mid-to-late 19th century, Roxbury, Massachusetts experienced a dramatic change from a rural farming area to a vibrant, working-class, and predominantly-immigrant urban community. This new demographic bloomed during America’s industrial age, a time in which hundreds of new mass-produced goods flooded consumer markets. This thesis explores the relationship between working-class consumption patterns and historic advertising in 19th-century Roxbury, Massachusetts. It assesses the significance of advertising within households and the community by comparing advertisements from the Roxbury Gazette and South End Advertiser with archaeological material from the Tremont Street and Elmwood Court Housing sites, excavated in the late 1970s ...

Chase Home For Children: Childhood In Progressive New England, Katherine M. Evans

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis aims to further the study of childhood in archaeology through the examination of a children’s aid institution in Progressive New England. Specifically, this research explores how the Progressive and Victorian aims of Chase Home for Children, as expressed in primary sources, are manifested in the material culture. Chase Home participated in the larger Progressive movement in its mission to train children “in the practical duties, to encourage habits of honesty, truthfulness, purity and industry, to prepare them to take their position in life as useful members of society” (Children’s Home Pamphlet 1878). An analysis of small ...

Blurred Boundaries: Interpreters As Researchers In Cross-Cultural Settings, Jennifer S. Hensley

Journal of Interpretation

This is a study of ambiguities and tensions that occur within the role of the bilingual/bicultural researcher in an ethnographic study. This manuscript presents an analysis of three instances from two interviews in a study on the acculturation of deaf students in deaf kindergarten classrooms in Japan and the US. This is an auto-ethnographic analysis of conflicts found in fluctuating between multiple roles: research assistant, interpreter, cultural mediator, and sociolinguistic consultant. In these examples my bicultural knowledge allowed me to identify “hidden” meanings overlooked by other members of the research team. However, my interpreter role at times made it ...

The Life And Times Of Landfills, Joshua O. Reno

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

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.