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Conducting Cross-Cultural Research In Teams And The Search For The “Culture-Proof” Variable, Patricia Draper

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Objective: Cross-cultural research must always deal with the problem that meaning systems and behaviors cannot be readily compared from one culture to the next because the sociocultural context can vary so widely.
Design: The organizers of Project AGE: Age, Generation, and Experience, a multicultural study of aging, recognized this problem and devised instruments for studying age that allowed for cultural variation as well as comparability at higher levels of abstraction. The principal investigators of Project AGE and the individual researchers made every effort to gain an emic understanding (understanding based on categories recognized by the local respondents) of people’s attitudes …

Photojournalistic Manipulations Of Reality: The Power Over Knowledge, Valerie Friedman

Honors Theses

This project is an anthropological study on how students at Colby College interpret photojournalistic images and news media. Using extensive literature, I strove to find a better understanding of how news agencies and the media control the flow and availability of information. Through fieldwork and numerous research methods, I wanted to understand how students formed relationships with images and news stories they encountered. This paper shows how the media and images people see in the news controls the minds and ideas of the public. Newspapers, magazines, the radio, internet sites, television broadcasts, and other forms of news media are primary …

This Sporting Life: Sports And Body Culture In Modern Japan, William W. Kelly, Atsuo Sugimoto

CEAS Occasional Publication Series

Yale CEAS Occasional Publication Series - Volume 1

Sports in Japan have long been embedded in community life, the educational system, the mass media, the corporate structures, and the nationalist sentiments of modern Japan. For over a century, they have been a crucial intersection of school pedagogy, corporate aims, media constructions, gender relations, and patriotic feelings. The chapters in this book highlight a wide range of sports, and together, they offer a significant window on to the ways that the sporting life animates the institutions of modern Japan.

Book Review - Hart, W. (2002) Never Fade Away, James Kent Knaack

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

No abstract provided.

Four Poems: Snakehead Fish; Departures; Capitol; And Preparations For Southeast Asia, Bryan Thao Worra

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

No abstract provided.

From One To Metaphor: Toward An Understanding Of Pa’Ikwené (Palikur) Mathematics, Alan Passes

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This article addresses an aspect of Pa’ikwené knowledge called púkúha, which means both “to understand” and “to count.” It explores the indigenous numerology and the close relationship,no less imaginative than empirical,between mathematics and linguistics that is not always apparent in non-oral societies such as ours. The Pa’ikwené mathematical system is conceptually inventive and lexically profuse, some numerals having over two hundred different forms in current usage thanks to an intensive, affix-based process of morphemic transformations. Thereby, a number word can belong to twenty-one numerical classes relating to five distinct semantic categories incorporating diverse discrete states or qualities (male/female, concrete/abstract, …

Matsigenka Corporeality, A Nonbiological Reality: On Notions Of Consciousness And The Constitution Of Identity, Dan Rosengren

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Departing from the specific case of Matsigenka people in the Montaña of southeastern Peru, this article challenges some of the assumptions associated with predominant conceptions of Amazonian perspectivism. Examining different cultural registers such as birth rituals and mythology, Matsigenka peoples’ notions about being, soul, and self are discussed in relation to the importance that often is ascribed to physical shape for conceptualizing the world. In contrast to this stress on the corporeal, it is argued that Matsigenka people consider the noncorporeal cognizant self to determine outlook and identity. In accordance, corporeal transformation is seen as a result of “the self …

Imagined Cities, Real Futures: Simcity And The Co-Production Of Urban Dystopias, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

While the author of this chapter agrees with anthropologists who reject an urban studies predicated on postmodern surfaces and insist that we analyze cities in regional, national and global contexts of political economy, he nevertheless suggests that the urban imaginary has never been so important: Movies, television and music have proven all too useful in the continued vilification of an urban underclass. In 2001, in order to explore the role media might play in the structuring and delimitating of the ways we think about cities, Collins assigned SimCity, a computer simulation game combining models of urban development with cellular automata, …

Children’S Social Behaviors And Peer Interactions In Diverse Cultures, Carolyn P. Edwards, Maria Deguzman, Jill Brown, Asiye Kumru

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

This chapter lays out five principles to guide research on peer relationships in cultural context that reflect both current and earlier bodies of research literature: (1) Cultural scripts for socialization in peer relationships are evident in early childhood. (2) Both across and within cultural communities, children’s own active role in the socialization process becomes increasingly evident as they grow older. (3) Because children are active agents in their own socialization, they can not only make choices, they can also negotiate, deflect, and resist socializing attempts by others. (4) Children’s choices and preferences (self-socialization) during middle childhood have measurable and lasting …

The Trials And Tribulations Of Eliciting American Indian Voice, Amber Madoll

Masters Theses

In this thesis I explored the application of oral history in the collection, preservation and interpretation of American Indian cultural history. Through the analysis of written ethnographies, published works, oral histories and case studies, this research addresses some of the major debates hindering oral history's admittance as a viable ethnographic and historical resource. The overall intention of this research was to elicit the major methodological issues anthropologists face when employing oral history techniques in American Indian studies so that solid, comprehensive strategies can be created and implemented to strengthen the acceptance and practice of oral history in modem cultural studies. …

A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article urges humanistic legal studies to take the technical dimensions of law as a central focus of inquiry. Using archival and ethnographic investigations into developments in American Conflict of Laws doctrines as an example, and building on insights in the anthropology of knowledge and in science and technology studies that focus on technical practices in scientific and engineering domains, it aims to show that the technologies of law - an ideology that law is a tool and an accompanying technical aesthetic of legal knowledge - are far more central and far more interesting dimensions of legal practice than humanists …

What Heritage Does And Does Not Do To Identity: Some Answers From An Ethnographic Perspective, Eric Gable

Cultural and Philosophical Inquiry Articles

This paper explores how caretakers of slave-era heritage sites objectify and enact what Robert Bellah and his co-authors call "communities of memory" in a racially polarized United States and how the public interpret their efforts at creating what amounts to official history. It highlights the often-vexed encounter between those who are in charge of conveying public representations of slavery and race in the antebellum era in the United States and vernacular responses to such representations. It looks at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, which recently has made great efforts to make slaves prominent figures in the landscapes it reconstructs …

Crafting Culture At Fort St. Joseph: An Archaeological Investigation Of Labor Organization On The Colonial Frontier, Brock A. Giordano

Masters Theses

The study of labor organization through the examination of craft production in complex societies has been a topic of intense scholarly interest (Blackman et al. 1993; Costin and Hagstrom 1995; Shafer and Hester 1991). A number of scholars have hypothesized that goods produced in mass quantities by particular specialists can be recognized by their high degree of standardization or homogeneity (Blackman et al. 1993:61; Schiffer and Skibo 1997). As such, this study employs the theoretical framework that in an archaeological context it is possible to differentiate centralized production from noncentralized production by identifying any standardization or variation within the manufacturing …

Borrowed Meanings: Case Studies Of Katsina And Dreamcatcher Traditions, Angela Glasker '05

Honors Projects

Every summer, thousands of climbers and nearly half a million other tourists flock to Devils Tower in Wyoming due to its spectacular views and challenging climbing conditions. And every summer, members of several different Native American tribes travel to the religious site known as Bear Lodge, their name for Devils Tower, to perform religious rituals such as the Sun Dance. The Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Kiowa, and Lakota all recognize Devils Tower as a sacred religious site, "grant it a prominent place in their mythology and oral histories, and in the past probably used it for individual religious observances" (Brown 2003: …

An Analysis Of Service-Learning And Applied Anthropology, Danielle Nordbrock

Honors Theses

People think of others in comparison to themselves, and what they know. Anthropologists study a wide variety of things, this includes all different societies: simple and complex, ancient and modern, and in different locales. The perspective of an anthropologist tends to take on a unique cross-cultural nature, with comparisons oftentimes being central to the research. When anthropologists become engaged in a project and begin their fieldwork they experience a unique sense of understanding from living in such close proximity to another culture.

Romantic Love And Marriage: An Analysis Of The Concept And Functionality Of Romantic Love As A Marital Stabilizing Agent, Emily Sorrell

Nebraska Anthropologist

When identifying the central components that constitute general social structures, one cannot overlook the integral role that marriage, in its many manifestations, plays in the make-up of human societies. Marriage, or the ultimate extension of pair bonding, developed largely as a cultural adaptation to the reproduction of slowly developing human offspring and hence can be viewed as a method of maximizing reproductive fitness. If this assumption is correct, then one may presume that it would be beneficial to humans and their reproductive success to engage in marriages of relative stability. Hence, it would be reasonable to assume that there must …

Postpartum Depression: An Evolutionary Perspective, Mark Tracy

Nebraska Anthropologist

There is no common consensus among theorists regarding the nature and purpose of postpartum depression. Evolutionary theorists have proposed that the onset of postpartum depression is an adaptive function that signals a potential fitness cost to the mother i. e. the investment in the child will be cost more than the evolutionary benefits to be gained from rearing this child Many studies have shown that there is a strong correlation between postpartum depression and lack of paternal or social support indicating that when these two variables are absent the mother is more likely to experience postpartum depression. In this paper …

Co-Wife Conflict And Cooperation, William R. Jankowiak, Monika Sudakov, Benjamin C. Wilreker

Anthropology Faculty Research

Conventional wisdom holds that the polygynous family system is as sexually and emotionally satisfying as a monogamous one. Ethnographic accounts of 69 polygynous systems, however, provide compelling evidence that the majority of co-wives in a polygynous family prefer pragmatic co-operation with one another while maintaining a respectful distance. Moreover, there often is a deep-seated feeling of angst that arises over competing for access to their mutual husband. Co-wife conflict in the early years of marriage is pervasive, and often marked by outbursts of verbal or physical violence. Co-wife conflict may be mitigated by social institutions, such as sororal polygyny and …

Images Of God: The Effect Of Personal Theologies On Moral Attitudes, Political Affiliation, And Religious Behavior, Christoper Bader, Paul Froese

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Social scientists often explain religious effects in terms of religious group affiliations. Typically, researchers identify religious groups by denomination or some broader popular categorization, such as “fundamentalist” or “evangelical.” To capture religious differences more effectively, Steensland et al. (2000) propose an intricate classification of American denominations that takes into account the theology and historical development of various American religious traditions to predict individual attitudes and behaviors. We believe that equal care and attention should be devoted to the development of key measures of belief that may cross denominational lines. In this article, we propose one such measure: personal conceptions or …

Is Empathy Gendered And If So, Why? An Approach From Feminist Psychological Anthropology, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Difference feminists have argued that women have special virtues. One such virtue would seem to be empathy, which has three main components: imaginative projection, awareness of the other's emotions, and concern. Empathy is closely related to identification. Psychological research and the author's own study of women's and men's talk about poverty and welfare use in the United States demonstrate women's greater empathic concern. However, some cross-cultural research shows greater sex differences in empathy in the United States than elsewhere. This combination of findings (women tend to demonstrate greater empathic concern, but this typical difference varies cross-culturally) requires a complex biocultural …

Property As Legal Knowledge: Means And Ends, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article takes anthropologists’ renewed interest in property theory as an opportunity to consider legal theory-making as an ethnographic subject in its own right. My focus is on one particular construct – the instrument, or relation of means to ends, that animates both legal and anthropological theories about property. An analysis of the workings of this construct leads to the conclusion that rather than critique the ends of legal knowledge, the anthropology of property should devote itself to articulating its own means.

Framing The Bride: Globalizing Beauty And Romance In Taiwan’S Bridal Industry, By Bonnie Adrian, Marc L. Moskowitz

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic And Anthropological Knowledge, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

“The Bank of Japan is our mother,” bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan's central bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource, and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw attention to special methodological problems—involving the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception—in the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge practices.

Athletic Amenorrhea: Prevalence And Awareness Among Female Athletes At Western Michigan University, Michele R. Chupurdia

Masters Theses

Women who participate in competitive sports are under enormous pressure to maintain an extremely low body weight through diet and exercise. While exercise is viewed as widely beneficial to women of all ages, the pressure to succeed in sports by achieving or maintaining an unrealistically low body weight through food restriction and high intensity training may lead some women to develop eating disorders, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis.

The research conducted for this thesis and presented here investigates female college athletes (18-24 years) from Western Michigan University, a Division I school, who are undergoing strenuous training. The goal of this study is …

Power, Positionality, And Conceptions Of Stewardship And Ownership In The Cleanup Of Nomans Land Island, Massachusetts, Michael Greenberg

Honors Theses

One of the most pressing issues facing Indigenous groups today, especially in the intimate New Engl'and communilties of the northeastern United States, is their ongoing struggle to reclaim and preserve sovereignty on land they once cultivated as stewards but now live on under the encroachment of larger States. In recent years, the United States government has sought to deal with issues of Native American sovereignty through granting federal recognition to tribes, thus creating a relationship of "nation-to-nation status" between a tribal government and the national government. This relationship generates a complex power structure on global, national, regional, and tribal levels, …

Roadside Memorial Practices: An Examination Of Landscapes Of Commemoration In Warren County, Kentucky, Michael Briggs

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Roadside memorials commemorating the death of automobile crash victims are scattered throughout the Kentucky landscape. This persistent cultural practice contains symbolic elements oftentimes indicative of religious connotations. Because there is a constitutional separation of church and government in the United States, these memorials can prelude controversy if located on state-maintained rights-of-way. This study examines Warren County, Kentucky, and analyzes the spatial distribution of these memorials on the landscape and the cultural implications to society because of their ties to death and dying. Scientific research in various fields of psychology, sociology, folk studies, geoscience, and religious studies was analyzed, including religious …

Understanding Ethno-Nationalism: Sikh Diasporic Imaginings In Southwest Michigan, Rory G. Mccarthy

Masters Theses

Diaspora as a category is both useful and troublesome for researchers in the discipline of anthropology. It is useful, for it allows anthropologists to approach cultural studies from a position that recognizes flaws in the conception of culture as geographically bounded. Studying diasporic populations, therefore, enables anthropologists to apply new theoretical approaches to culture, without reifying and essentializing social practices. Conversely, using diaspora as a category can homogenize groups by glossing over differences in ethnicity, religion, and migratory expenence.

This study aims at bettering the understanding of diversity within a diasporic population by examining the role that religion plays in …

Gender And Cosmos Emplaced: Women's Houses And Men's Houses In Bariai, West New Britain, Papua New Guinea, Naomi Mcpherson

Pacific Studies

In Papua New Guinea, the men's cult houses are dramatic examples of vernacular architecture that have overshadowed the importance and symbolic meanings of the domestic dwelling, or women's houses. This essay is an ethnography of house forms, specifically women's houses and men's cult houses in Bariai, West New Britain. The focus is on relationships of articulation between the built environment and gender concepts within the framework of Bariai cosmology, which show how gender concepts and relations are emplaced and the built environment is gendered.

The Lineage Model And Archaeological Data In Late Classic Northwestern Belize, Jon B. Hageman

Anthropology Faculty Publications

As central topics of anthropological study from the 1940s through the 1970s, kinship and lineage became largely discredited during the 1980s. Recent scholarship, however, has indicated that kinship and lineage, when considered as the products of social activity, can make important contributions to studies of living and past populations. This paper explores the lineage as a model of social organization distinguished by specific activities practiced by members of Late Classic Maya social groups. This model is derived from cross-cultural literature on lineages, but practices associated with lineage organization are historically and culturally specific. A suite of archaeological correlates, based on …

Reviews And End Matter (V. 16, 2004)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Gem and Ornamental Materials of Organic Origin, by Maggie Campbell Pedersen (2004), reviewed by Stefany Tomalin

World on a String: Parts One, Two, and Three, by Diana Friedberg and Lionel Friedberg (2004-2005), reviewed by Lois Rose Rose

Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Beadwork from Canadian Collections, by Marie-Louise Labelle (2005), reviewed by Margret Carey.