Digital Commons Network^™

Enough: Narratives Of Migration On A Small-Farm In Sidibouafif, Steven Ring

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Small-scale family farms in the Eastern Rif have undergone challenge after challenge throughout the 20^th century, including war, poverty, restrictions of natural resources, overpopulation, and extensive labor migration. This paper aims to examine the ways in which narratives of migration manifest in the daily lives of a family living in the plain of Al-Hoceima. I hold the belief that the ways in which large-scale processes manifest in our daily lives is indicative of how these processes affect our identity. This research comprises a case-study with the Khalid family of SidiBouafif, and aims to examine the ways in which media, …

Faunal Analysis Of Fauna In Feature 1, Byrd Hammock South Site, Wakulla County, Fl, Jacob Mendoza

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Embodying Tibet: Negotiating Tibetan-American Youth Identities At The Tibetan Children's Village Summer School Program, Lekey S. Leidecker , '16

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

My research illuminates the ways that the Tibetan Children’s Village Summer School program, despite its positive intentions, does in fact reinforce a fixed Tibetan identity by intertwining authenticity with a specific set of embodied experiences that do not match that of Tibetan youth living in the United States. Drawing on MacPherson’s (2011) “Fallacies About Language Sustainability” and recommendations for cultural preservation education, I evaluate the summer program’s curriculum as insufficient for promoting new articulations of Tibetan identity that reflects participants’ lived experiences in the United States, and argue that the current system in fact is exacerbating the difficulties that these …

Past Meets Future: Combining Gis, 3d Technologies, And Legacy Data To Reanalyze Ceramics At Copan, Honduras, Stephanie Sterling, Heather Richards-Rissetto, René Viel

UCARE: Research Products

The archaeological site of Copán—a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Honduras—was a primary center for cultural and economic exchange in the Maya world from the fifth to ninth centuries. Our research investigates the sociopolitical climate of the city immediately preceding this collapse. This poster presents the results of a pilot study intended to evaluate the potential of using a combination of digital technologies and legacy data to reanalyze a subset of diagnostic ceramics from select sites outside of Copan’s urban core. Our methods involved:

(1) Applying photogrammetry to generate 3D models for approximately 30 potentially temporally-diagnostic ceramic types

(2) Digitizing, …

Culture And Military Effectiveness: How Societal Traits Influence Battle Outcomes, Eric Stephen Fowler

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

What must states do to ensure victory on the field of battle? Conventional scholarship claims that a number of material and institutional factors significantly affect a nation’s ability to generate military power. Recent studies suggest that other factors, including levels of education, civil-military relations, and western culture also play an important role. This new line of logic is important because these factors tend to be glaringly absent from rigorous concepts of military power. The principle finding of this study is that culture matters and that it matters more than originally thought. Culture is admittedly complex, intangible, and difficult to count, …

The Annapurna Road: Development And Tourism On The Annapurna Circuit, Benjamin Skach

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The Annapurna Circuit has oft been called one of the best treks in the world. Its popularity has brought countless trekkers to the region, resulting in a strong local dependence on tourism. In recent years, plan to develop rural regions of Nepal have resulted in extensive road networks being built along the route of the circuit. These roads have helped some locals and hurt others. This study investigates the implementation of the roads in Annapurna Conservation Area and the effects on both trekkers and locals. Further, it examines the New Alternative Trekking Trails that have been implemented along sections of …

Kompa As A Lesson In Value Or A Semi-Voyeristic Appreciation Of The Bamboo Basket In Dolpa, Maxwell Shaw-Jones

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This “study” explores two central topics: 1.) The logistics and details of basket weaving as both a skill and a business in Dolpa and 2.) The cultural value of the woven bamboo basket, also in Dolpa. My fieldwork started in lower Dolpa, (Dunai and Bysagar), peregrinated north into the Tarap Valley, and then returned back down to Dunai. From my research I attempt to provide an insight into the way people, of all walks of life in Dolpa, think and relate to this tool (kompa), and then attempt to derive larger moral implications from what I have observed. …

Balancing The Local And The Global: Understanding Alternative Education In Modern Ladakh, Hannah Ryde

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

For nearly thirty years, the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) has addressed the shortcomings of the education system in Ladakh (la dwags), a mountainous region under the rain-shadow of the Himalayan Range in Jammu and Kashmir State of Northern India, through education reform in government schools and the creation of alternative education programs. These programs attempt to support students who have failed in, and been failed by, the Ladakhi government education system and are designed to fill in gaps in the curricula of mainstream schools through supplemental academics and skill-based learning, while simultaneously building confidence …

A Concomitant Of Conflict And Consensus: Case Of A Chieftaincy Succession In Ghana, Kaderi Noagah Bukari

Peace and Conflict Studies

Ghana is often seen as peaceful, but is faced with many chieftaincy conflicts that result mainly from succession to the throne (skin or stool) for traditional political power. Ghana has more than 230 chieftaincy disputes dotted across many parts of the country. However, the Bulsa Traditional Area (Buluk) of Ghana has had a stable and resilient chieftaincy succession despite conflicts arising out of the selection of chiefs. In the selection of chiefs, the adoption of a voting system is said to lead to consensus based decision-making which is largely responsible for the non-violent nature of the Buluk chieftaincy …

Pelvic Sexual Dimorphism Among Species Monomorphic In Body Size: Relationship To Relative Newborn Body Mass, Robert G. Tague

Faculty Publications

Females have larger pelves than males among eutherians to mitigate obstetrical difficulty. This study addresses 3 issues concerning pelvic sexual dimorphism using 8 species that are sexually monomorphic in nonpelvic size: Aotus azarae, Castor canadensis, Dasypus novemcinctus, Hylobates lar, Saguinus geoffroyi, Sciurus carolinensis, Sylvilagus floridanus, and Urocyon cinereoargenteus. Using published data to compute the index of relative newborn body mass (RNBM = [newborn body mass/adult female body mass]100%) for 266 eutherian species, A. azarae, H. lar, and S. geoffroyi are characterized as giving birth to relatively large newborns and the other 5 species as giving birth to relatively small newborns. …

Investigating Alternative Subsistence Strategies Among The Homeless Near Tampa, Florida, Matthew Peter Rooney

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modern homelessness is one of the most pressing social and political problems of our time. Several hundred thousand people experience homelessness in the United States each year, and the U.S. Department of Housing, which attempts to count those people, has admitted that their statistics are conservative estimates at best. A recent archaeological study (Zimmerman et al 2010) examining material culture associated with homeless communities in Indianapolis has suggested that those who are considered chronically homeless have generally abandoned wage labor and are instead pursuing urban foraging as a subsistence strategy. In order to better understand the structures of homeless communities, …

The Insecure City: Space, Power, And Mobility In Beirut, Kristin V. Monroe

Anthropology Faculty Book Gallery

Fifteen years after the end of a protracted civil and regional war, Beirut broke out in violence once again, forcing residents to contend with many forms of insecurity, amid an often violent political and economic landscape. Providing a picture of what ordinary life is like for urban dwellers surviving sectarian violence, The Insecure City captures the day-to-day experiences of citizens of Beirut moving through a war-torn landscape.

While living in Beirut, Kristin Monroe conducted interviews with a diverse group of residents of the city. She found that when people spoke about getting around in Beirut, they were also expressing larger …

Objecting (To) Infrastructure: Ecopolitics At The Ukrainian Ends Of The Danube, Tanya Richardson

Anthropology Faculty Publications

In southern Ukraine, two hydraulic infrastructures continue to exist despite environmentalist campaigns that have exposed them as fragile, broken or unprofitable. The Danube-Dnister Irrigation Project (DDIS), a Soviet mega-project that diverted water from the Danube and turned the Sasyk estuary into a reservoir, receives state funding despite a 1994 ban on its use for irrigation. The Bystre Shipping Canal, built in 2004 despite domestic and international opposition, is losing money but continues to operate. These cases exemplify the material politics of infrastructuring in which infrastructure is understood as an antagonistic process of assembling networks of humans and nonhumans rather than …

Editor's Introduction, Jr. Aguilar

Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints

No abstract provided.

Geochemical Investigation Of Late Pre-Contact Ceramic Production Patterns In Northwest Alaska, Shelby L. Anderson, Matthew T. Boulanger, Michael D. Glascock, R. Benjamin Perkins

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Study of northwest Alaskan ceramic production and distribution patterns has the potential to provide new evidence of coastal hunter-gatherer mobility and social interaction in the late pre-contact period. This research is directed at characterizing potential clay sources and linking ceramic groups to raw-material source areas through instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and modeling of possible clay and temper combinations. Results of INAA of 458 ceramic, 31 clay, and 28 possible temper specimens reinforces prior identification (Anderson et al., 2011) of three broad compositional groups. Though raw materials were collected over a large area, the clay specimens demonstrate remarkable geochemical homogeneity …

Indigenous Ecuadorian Mobility Strategies In The Clandestine Migration Journey, Victoria Stone-Cadena

Publications and Research

Based on testimonials of migration journeys of indigenous Cañaris from southern highland Ecuador, this paper examines strategies of mobility and social networking employed by migrants and facilitators in the human smuggling market. Following a series of economic crises in the late 1990s, Ecuadorian transnational migration increased significantly, with a 55.5 percent increase to the United States between 2000 and 2008, and staggering 12,150 percent increase to Spain between 1998 and 2005. This article focuses on the growth of a regional migration industry in the southern high-land region, and pays special attention to the roles of indigenous Cañari migrants and migration …

Using Photography As A Creative, Collaborative Research Tool, Ailsa Winton

The Qualitative Report

Drawing on debates in the complementary fields of participatory, youth and visual research methods, the paper discusses an experimental photography project carried out as part of a broader study with young people in Mexico City on spatial experience, belonging and exclusion. The paper describes the mechanics of the project, considers the kind of data it produced, and discusses the different outcomes for participants and researcher, including its difficulties and limitations. It finds that the creative, collaborative approach used has potential for opening the research process to embrace creative, reflexive, complicated “selves,” but warns that this outcome is not automatic: collaboration …

Music And The Migrant: A Transnational Account Of Cumbia, Irene L. Mekus

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper looks into the cultural synthesization and the transnational ties of cumbia between Latin America and the United States. Three case studies look at the story of migrants and their transnational ties through cumbia and are analyzed through an ethnomusicology framework.

Archiving Governance In Palestine, Caitlin M. Davis

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

During the 1980s, a historical turn within the discipline of anthropology fueled an ‘archival imaginary’, which encouraged scholars to enter archival spaces, study their documents, and collect the historical ‘context’ that had been missing from previous ethnographic texts. The archive, in other words, became a repository, a site for the extraction of information about a particular topic. In the historiography of Palestine, these activities have proved fruitful; new historians have mined military and state archives in ways that have illuminated the nefarious details regarding the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Fewer scholars, however, have positioned ‘the archive’ as a subject (not …

Modeling Food Security, Energy, And Climate And Cultural Impacts Of A Process: The Case Study Of Shea Butter In Sub-Saharan Africa, Colleen Claire Naughton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Millions of people in the world, particularly women and people in sub-Saharan Africa, suffer from hunger and poverty. Three of the major 2015-2030 United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to eliminate hunger through food security and sustainable agriculture, eradicate poverty, and achieve gender equality through women’s empowerment. Shea trees and their associated fruit and butter can play a major role in each of these three SDGs for women and their families throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Shea trees are located over a wide expanse stretching more than 5,000 kilometers across over eighteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These trees produce fruit that …

Airborne Lidar Acquisition, Post-Processing And Accuracy-Checking For A 3d Webgis Of Copan, Honduras, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Fabio Remondino, Maria Grazia Spera, Michael Auer, Nicolas Billen, Lukas Loos, Laura Stelson, Markus Reindel

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Archaeological projects increasingly collect airborne LiDAR data to use as a remote sensing tool for survey and analysis. Publication possibilities for LiDAR datasets, however, are limited due to the large size and often proprietary nature of the data. Fortunately, web-based, geographic information systems (WebGIS) that can securely manage temporal and spatial data hold great promise as virtual research environments for working with and publishing LiDAR data. To test this and to obtain new data for archaeological research, in 2013, the MayaArch3D Project (www.mayaarch3d.org) collected LiDAR data for the archaeological site of Copan, Honduras. Results include: 1) more accurate archaeological maps, …

Connectivity: An Ecological Paradigm For The Study Of Bronze Age, Slobodan Mitrović

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Connectivity: an ecological paradigm for the study of Bronze Age” addresses the relationship between historic and prehistoric people, and the landscapes they inhabited, moved about, and continue to inhabit. It suggests alternative methodological approaches that have broader ramifications for the discipline of (Bronze Age) archaeology. By engaging the code and innovations stemming from ecology and digital technology, the research questions concern the interface – referred to as connectivity – between the archaeological sites, resources, networks of communication, and the conditions of archaeological knowledge acquisition. Drawing on published and new data, the aim of the project is to put forward a …

Millets From The Margins: Value, Knowledge And The Subaltern Practice Of Biodiversity In Uttarakhand, India, Priya R. Chandrasekaran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Millets from the Margins: Value, Knowledge and the Subaltern Practice of Biodiversity in Uttarakhand, India analyzes what is at stake for small-scale, predominantly women, farmers as local varieties of rainfed food grains such as finger millet are being newly commodified and valued as a biodiversity resource. With support from a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, I conducted seventeen months of ethnographic research with farmers, activists, scientists, NGO leaders, government officials, transnational functionaries and agribusiness representatives in segregated yet interconnected realms ranging from a village in the Himalayan foothills to transnational institutions in Rome.

This work demonstrates …

Through The Gateway: Marijuana Production, Governance, And The Drug War Détente, Michael Polson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1996 voter approval of medical marijuana laws in California, marijuana policy has become increasingly liberalized. Producers, however, have remained in the greyest of grey market zones. Federal anti-drug laws and supply-side tactics have intensively targeted them even as marijuana has become more licit. In this legally unstable environment, marijuana patient-cultivators and underground producers have articulated and asserted themselves politically and economically, particularly as the likelihood of full legalization has increased. This dissertation explores how producers navigated the nebulous zone between underground and medical markets. I argue that even as producers supplied marijuana to a formalizing, regulated medical industry …

Islands Within An Almost Island: History, Myth, And Aislamiento In Baja California, Mexico, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

This paper examines the persistent histories and lasting effects of the Baja California peninsula's status as an "almost island." The peninsula is almost an island in so many ways. Its reputation as an island-like entity has also ben strengthened by a longstanding myth that it was, in fact, an actual island. In many senses it was an island - isolated, remote, difficult to envision, understand, and control. Geography and climate played a vital role in all of this, but so, too, did human imagination. The author uses the concept of shima, along with discussions about the dual meanings of the …

The Regulatory Life Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 1 in Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities, Irus Braverman, ed.

“The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists” explores a prominent technology for the legal regulation of nonhuman life: the threatened species list. I argue that threatened species lists are biopolitical technologies: they produce and reinforce underlying species ontologies by creating, calculating, and governing the boundaries between various nonhuman species. Such a differentiated treatment of the life and death of nonhuman species through their en-listing, down- and up-listing, multi-listing, and un-listing translates into the positive protection and active governance of such species. Listing threatened species thus becomes a …

Cultural Resources Monitoring For Brackenridge Park River Wall Replacement Project, San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas, Stephen Smith, Paul Shawn Marceaux

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

From January through May 2016, The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) conducted archaeological monitoring of removal and repair of 30.5 m (100 ft.) of the historic river wall along a section of the San Antonio River within Brackenridge Park. The wall is a contributing resource to Brackenridge Park’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) and its designation as a State Antiquities Landmark (SAL). The CAR’s archaeological monitoring was done under contract with Adams Environmental, Inc. Project Archaeologist Stephen Smith monitored contractor’s excavations at the site. Paul Shawn Marceaux served as …

An Archeological Survey Of The City Of Arlington's Proposed Bowman Branch Hike-And-Bike Trail, Tarrant County, Texas, Jesse Todd

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

The City of Arlington in Tarrant County, Texas proposes to construct the Bowman Branch Hike-and-Bike trail in southeastern Arlington. In addition, portions of the trail will be constructed within the floodplain of the Bowman Branch which falls under the purvey of the Fort Worth District of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Since the City of Arlington is a political entity of the State of Texas and land controlled by an entity of the State of Texas is involved, a Texas Antiquities Permit is required. In addition, the Archeology Division of the Texas Historical Commission acts as the Section …

Cultural Resources Monitoring: Archaeological Montioring Of Hand Excavated Trenches San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas, David M. Yelacic

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

To assist and support the installation of fiber-optic cable in the particularly sensitive and historic Downtown San Antonio, Texas, Terracon carried out archaeological monitoring of two small, hand-excavated trenches in City of San Antonio sidewalk easements. The undertaking is subject to compliance with the Antiquities Code of Texas and oversight from the Texas Historical Commission. Archaeological monitoring was carried out by David Yelacic, Principal Investigator, under Texas Antiquities Permit Number 7203.

Through the course of monitored excavation, very few cultural materials were encountered, and these materials (i.e., clear glass fragment, brown bottle glass fragment, wood, and rusted metal) were not …

Intensive Archeological Survey Of County Road 246 At Clear Fork Brazos River, Fisher County, Texas, Timothy B. Griffith

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

On January 30, 2013, Blanton & Associates, Inc. (B&A), at the request of the Texas Department of Transportation, Abilene District, conducted an intensive non-collection archeological survey of proposed bridge replacement on County Road (CR) 246 at Clear Fork of the Brazos River in Fisher County, Texas (CSJ: 0908-23-032). The 100 percent visual inspection, pedestrian survey, and backhoe trenching, was negative for cultural resources within the proposed project area. Based on these data, B&A recommends that the proposed bridge replacement on CR 246 at the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in Fisher County, Texas, be allowed to proceed as planned …