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Fishing Camps And Topiary Trees: Place, Affect, And Moral Agency In A Papua New Guinea Modernity, David Lipset

Pacific Studies

Despite being regarded as a founding father in sociology and as no less canonical in anthropology (Merton 1934; Horowitz 1982), the overall theoretical framework of Durkheim’s arguments with respect to place, affect, and agency in The Division of Labor in Society (1933) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995) are too often ignored or unwittingly reinvented (Stewart 2007; Berlant 2008). I therefore want to begin this essay with a brief outline of how I understand his main points in order to lay a theoretical groundwork for my analysis of the shifting relationship of place, affect, and agency among the …

Vol. 45 No. 1 (2022): Pacific Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 45, No 1-Aug 2022 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Vol. 45 No. 1 (2022): Pacific Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US$40.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, and …

Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu, And The Quest For Justice And Reconciliation, Hak Joon Lee

The Journal of Social Encounters

This paper studies Marin Luther King, Jr.’s and Desmond Tutu’s strivings for justice and reconciliation as the leaders of movements against white racist systems in the US and South Africa. Despite their differences in terms of nationality, age, religious denomination, and geography, the paper demonstrates how King’s and Tutu’s quests were grounded in the distinctive communal ethics informed by their Christian faith and their shared spiritual heritage as African peoples, which emphasize community, the ubiquity of religion, the moral order of the universe, and hopefulness. Contrasting their communal approach to a secular rational ethical approach to justice and peace, the …

Wak'as, Mallkis, And The Inca Afterlife: The Hydrological Connection Between The Incan Empirical And Nonempirical Worlds, Marius C. Vold

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

The ruling elite amongst the indigenous groups of the Andes region, often referred to as the Incas, were, before European contact, a non-literal society. Therefore, our understanding of their religious beliefs pertaining to the relationship between life and death, and the intricate relationship between this belief system and the environment surrounding the Inca is heavily influenced by post-European contact, often clouded by European propaganda and a lack of cultural relativism. This project aims at exploring the relationship between the hydrological cycle and the Incan empirical and nonempirical worlds by comparing and synthesizing post-European contact written records, ethnohistorical records, archeological evidence, …

Summary Report Of Discussions At The Forum “Nepali Diaspora Organizations In North America: Achievements, Opportunities, And Challenges”, Coppell, Texas, Usa July 2022, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

The forum “Nepali Diaspora Organizations in North America: Achievements, Opportunities and Challenges” was held at the annual convention of the Association of Nepalis in the Americas (ANA) in Coppell, TX, USA on July 2, 2022. Nepalese Society of Texas (NST) hosted the convention and forum. As studies related to diaspora have become important topics in the fields of development, community culture, sociology and anthropology, ANA decided to include this topic in the forums organized at the national convention.

The global Nepali diaspora population in 2022 is estimated at 800,000. Although no authoritative statistics is available, the Nepali diaspora in North …

Climate Disasters, Mass Violence, And Human Mobility In South Sudan: Through A Gender Lens, Marisa O. Ensor

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article examines the links between gender, mass violence, climate change, and displacement in South Sudan. I argue for risk-informed gender-sensitive strategies that incorporate local capacities and sources of resilience. When civil war engulfed South Sudan again in 2013, egregious human rights violations, including sexual and gender-based violence, were perpetrated with near complete impunity. As the national army was divided along Dinka-Nuer ethnic lines, soldiers from each faction turned against each other in a deadly pattern of revenge and counter-revenge attacks that soon spread across the national territory. Inter-communal conflicts also intensified, often centering on competition over land for pasture, …

Community Self-Reliance Of Rural Tourism In Indonesia: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Husen Hutagalung, Dedi Purwana, Usep Suhud, Amirul Mukminin, Hamidah Hamidah, Nurti Rahayu

The Qualitative Report

Community-based tourism villages have now become a worldwide concern because of their tremendous impact on strengthening the empowerment of local communities as well as on enhancing social responsibility in a sustainable manner. This study aims to explore the meaning of self-reliance in tourism village communities since it is a key indicator of the progress of community-based tourism villages. This study adopted a qualitative approach with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to investigate the meaning of people's experiences from inter-subjective activities in a double-hermeneutic process between researchers and people who experience them. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight (8) research subjects from …

Planetary-Scale Change To The Biosphere Signalled By Global Species Translocations Can Be Used To Identify The Anthropocene, Mark Williams, Reinhold Leinfelder, Anthony D. Barnosky, Martin J. Head, Francine M.G. Mccarthy, Alejandro Cearreta, Stephen Himson, Rachael Holmes, Colin N. Waters, Jan Zalasiewicz, Simon Turner, Mary Mcgann, Elizabeth A. Hadly, M. Allison Stegner, Paul Michael Pilkington, Jérôme Kaiser, Juan Carlos Berrio, Ian P. Wilkinson, Jens Zinke, Kristine L. Delong

Faculty Publications

We examine three distinctive biostratigraphic signatures of humans associated with hunting and gathering, landscape domestication and globalization. All three signatures have significant fossil records of regional importance that can be correlated inter-regionally and help describe the developing pattern of human expansion and appropriation of resources. While none have individual first or last appearances that provide a globally isochronous marker, all three signatures overlap stratigraphically, in that they are part of a continuum of change, with complex regional patterns. Here we show that during the later stages of globalization, late nineteenth to twentieth century records of species translocations can be used …

Dying Of Pestilence: Gender, Stature, And Mortality From The Black Death In 14th Century Kyrgyzstan, David Wayne Hansen Ii

Theses and Dissertations

Bioarchaeological studies have provided important information about mortality patterns during the Second Pandemic of Plague, including the Black Death, but to date have focused exclusively on European contexts. This study represents a temporal and spatial expansion of plague bioarchaeology, focusing on Central Asia, the origin of the Second Pandemic. I examine the relationship between stature, gender, and plague mortality during an outbreak of plague at two fortified settlements in northern Kyrgyzstan in 1338-39, the earliest archaeological sites known to contain victims of the Black Death in Eurasia.

Stature is frequently used in bioarchaeology as a proxy for exposures to developmental …

Southwest Pacific Tropical Cyclone Development Classification Utilizing Machine Learning And Synoptic Composites, Rupsa Bhowmick, Jill C. Trepanier, Alex M. Haberlie

Faculty Publications

This study evaluates the ability of machine learning algorithms to classify tropical depressions (TDs) and tropical storms (TSs) in the western region of the southwest Pacific Ocean (SWPO). Decision rules are generated to predict the environment required for a depression to fully develop into a mature storm, and the most influential predictors in the classification decision are ranked. TD and TS are discriminated based on a maximum sustained wind speed threshold (≥17 ms−1). Various aerosol, thermodynamic, and dynamic parameters are extracted closest to the initiation point of each non-developing and developing sample. The covariates associated with each labelled sample are …

The Apostrophic Impasse: Diacritical Remarks On The Stories Of International Law, Legal Decolonial Genealogy And Antony Anghie’S Historiography, Britt L.A.Q. (Haadiya) Hendrix

Theses and Dissertations

The (hi)stories of international law have strengthened the tentacles of coloniality in the legal regime as they continue to taunt the precarious lifeworlds of people, our planet and social imaginaries of an otherwise. The flow of coloniality has similarly rematerialized in decolonial legal theories and the postcolonial historiographical accounts of international law. I intend to demonstrate this colonial revival in the groundbreaking text of Antony Anghie Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Creation of International Law (2005) which challenged the (hi)stories of traditional jurisprudence. The latter was not necessarily a rejection nor negation of Western thought, because I argue that postcolonial historiography …

Devotee/Ethnographer: My Struggle At The Boundary Walls Of Participant Observation, Atreyee Majumder

Articles

This article demonstrates the difficulty of incorporating within the methodological ambit of ‘participant observation’, a possibility of the ethnographer herself staking claim in the religious truth claims of the community that constitute the subject of research. In so doing, this article provides a critique of the concept of participant observation to point out that participant observation anticipates the work of the ethnographer in participating in the physical, performative lives of the community that she purports to study, but never the internal life, especially the life of accessing a register of truth. I found myself in a curious situation as a …

Intersecting Mobilities: Beyond The Autonomy Of Movement And Power Of Place, Miriam Ticktin, Rafi Youatt

Publications and Research

It is widely understood that we live in a world where people, goods, species, and things of all sorts are on the move, and that the politics around mobility and its regulation and meaning are critical to contemporary political and social life. Human migration has been globally intensive for well over a century; industrial economic production, consumption, and trade move goods around the world; transportation infrastructure moves all sorts of cargo around, human and nonhuman; regular and irregular ecological processes and changes are creating new patterns of nonhuman movement; variants of viruses race around the world; even geological elements are …

Borders: A Story Of Political Imagination, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

This article traces three different political imaginaries about borders, suggesting that the dominant imaginary—the one of border walls, driven by a fear of invasion—is only one way to live in the world. The goal is to make space in our political imaginations to rethink how we live together, including thinking beyond nation-states as containers that keep people in or out. By first showing how the vision of invasion is built and maintained with intersecting transnational technologies and ideologies, I open the way to thinking otherwise. Second, I trace the counterpolitics of borders developed by artists and activists, resisting borders and …

An Inventory And Assessment Of Sample Sources For Survey Research With Agricultural Producers In The U.S., Jessica D. Ulrich-Schad, Shuang Li, J. G. Arbuckle, Edem Avemegah, Kathryn J. Brasier, Morey Burnham, Anil Kumar Chaudhary, Weston M. Eaton, Wei Gu, Tonya Haigh, Douglas Jackson-Smith, Alexander L. Metcalf, Amit Pradhananga, Linda S. Prokopy, Matthew Sanderson, Emma Wade, Adam Wilke

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Researchers need probability samples to collect representative survey data about the behaviors and attitudes of agricultural producers they study in relation to the natural resources that they manage, yet obtaining accurate and complete sampling frames is challenging. We extract data from a publication database to identify the most commonly used sampling frame sources in survey research of agricultural producers in the U.S., finding that government program participant lists are used most often, while private vendor samples are increasingly being purchased. Based on our research experience, we find that for many projects, private vendors can provide the most rigorous samples. Given …

What Happened To The “New Middle Class”? The 2016 Borp (Brazil’S Once-Rising Poor) Survey, Benjamin Junge, Sean T. Mitchell, Charles H. Klein, David De Micheli

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This research note provides a detailed account of the development and implementation of a household survey conducted in 2016 as part of a larger investigation into the lifeways and political subjectivities of Brazil’s “once-rising poor,” the demographic sector comprising poor and working-class people who experienced various forms of socioeconomic mobility in the early twenty-first century. After reflecting on the challenges of maintaining a critical perspective on class labels and relations that were intensely contested at the time, the article introduces the survey sample (n = 1,204), highlighting variables captured. It then establishes the demographic profile, mobility experiences, political values, attitudes, …

The Effects Of Burial Practices On The Preservation Of Bioarchaeological Remains From Caddo Sites In Northwestern Louisiana, Riley Kloostra

LSU Master's Theses

There are many variables which can impact the preservation of skeletal remains. This study attempts to understand how six specific variables present at two Native American sites may have impacted the skeletal preservation of burials at those sites. Four of the six variables are extrinsic factors, which vary on the level of the burial pit; these are presence of shell artifacts in the burial, presence of ash in the pit fill, presence of a clay cap over the burial, and depth of the burial pit. The other two variables discussed are intrinsic factors, varying on the level of the individual; …

An Assessment Of The Extremes And Impacts Of The February 2021 South-Central U.S. Arctic Outbreak, And How Climate Services Can Help, Rebecca A. Bolinger, Vincent M. Brown, Christopher M. Fuhrmann, Karin L. Gleason, T. Andrew Joyner, Barry D. Keim, Amanda Lewis, John W. Nielsen-Gammon, Crystal J. Stiles, William Tollefson, Hannah E. Attard, Alicia M. Bentley

Faculty Publications

In February 2021, a widespread cold-air outbreak, with two associated winter storm systems, impacted the South-Central United States. After a comprehensive summary of the synoptic setup and a day-by-day analysis of the event, we assess the significance of the storm from a climatological perspective. Concerning winter precipitation, there were isolated instances of record snowfall accumulations. While freezing rain and freezing drizzle both occurred, total freezing precipitation accumulations did not exceed a one-in-50 year event. The duration of the cold was notable — many stations across the region broke records for the highest number of consecutive days below freezing. When analyzing …

The Role Of Native Hawaiian Spiritual Practices In Social Systems And Environmental Stewardship, Christina A. Hornbaker

Social Sciences

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Native Hawaiian spiritual practices played a role in social systems and stewardship practices. Lightfoot and colleagues (2013) suggest that more archaeological research is needed on traditional resources and environmental management practices. The authors point out that “landscape management practices… are subtle and not prone to leaving smoking guns in the archaeological record” (Lightfoot et al. 2013), which makes such sites difficult to document without ethnographic accounts. Due to this subtlety, I will mainly be pulling information from interviews or oral histories from Hawaiian descendants, early explorers and missionary accounts, ethnographers, and …

Why, New York City? Gauging The Quality Of Life Through The Thoughts Of Tweeters, Sheryl Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a resource for social data, Twitter’s platform has been used to measure the quality of life through sentiment analysis. This capstone project explores another methodological technique—querying Twitter data around specific keyword terms to determine dominant topics, word patterns, and sentiment leanings in a geographical area. Focusing on New York City and Los Angeles for comparative analysis, the keyword term “why” will be used to build a Python analysis around topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Using this approach, the analysis reveals social and cultural differences, the overall sentiment of tweets, and subjects of interest to tweeters.

GitHub Repository for all …

Sunbelt Schooling: Publics And Politics Of Education Advocacy In Phoenix, Arizona, Matthew Chrisler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For the past forty years, public education in the United States has been the target of both neoliberal and conservative education reforms that have imposed austerity and privatization, set limits on racial, gendered, and sexual citizenship, increased school responsibility for social reproduction, and winnowed visions of public education as both a universal social entitlement and site of participatory democracy. These reforms emerged from, and remain powerfully anchored in, the United States Sunbelt, a crescent of metropolitan suburbs spanning southern California to Florida. This region propelled the conservative revolution in American politics but is also the site of progressive organizing that, …

Everything To Lose: Extraction, Racism, And Survival On Wet'suwet'en Land, Anne Spice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work critically analyzes the role of extractive industry in the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples and occupation of Indigenous lands, and examines how Indigenous resistance to oil and gas projects augments the damaging effects of fossil fuel extraction and create alternative possibilities for life in the face of catastrophic environmental crises. In Wet’suwet’en territory, in Northern British Columbia, Canada, construction has begun on the fracked gas Coastal GasLink pipeline, despite the opposition of local Indigenous leaders and chiefs. Several Indigenous land reoccupation camps have been set up by Wet’suwet’en people to resist the pipeline’s construction, and the resulting conflict …

Landscape, Settlement, And Community: The Natural, Human, And Sacred Geography Of Classic Maya Civilization In West-Central Guatemala, Marc A. Wolf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the fluid and commonly multi-compositional aspects of Maya settlement patterns, which reflect concepts of space within Maya worldviews. Research will be focused on the predominantly Classic (ca. AD 650-810) era archaeological site of Cancuen and its neighbors in the Verapaz department of Guatemala. These settlements provide a complex arena where questions of identity, spirituality, and ethnic affiliations can be addressed within a spatial context. The continuing detailed settlement and environmental survey mapping within the Cancuen region is the primary source of evidence from which a more thorough appreciation of emic Maya spatial considerations will be investigated.

The …

Building The Revolution: Ideology, Affect And Gender In Bolivarian Caracas, Andreina I. Torres A.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Building the Revolution: Ideology, Affect and Gender in Bolivarian Caracas,” examines the Bolivarian Revolution (1998-present) as a heterogenous shifting political process, and terrain of struggle in which a multiplicity of actors disputed the meanings and direction of socialism in Venezuela. During three years of ethnographic and archival research in Caracas (between 2014 and 2017) I researched one of the many Campamentos de Pioneros (Pioneer Camps) that was part of the Movimiento de Pobladores y Pobladoras de Venezuela (Venezuela’s Settlers’ Movement). The pioneers sought to “rescue” and occupy centrally located land in the national capital in order to build housing for …

The Resilience Of Agro-Pastoral Communities In High Altitude Central Tibet: Zooarchaeological And Stable Isotope Investigations At Bangga, 3000–2200 Bp, Zhengwei Zhang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Our understanding of the development of high-altitude adaptations worldwide has been enriched by recent anthropological research. Study of life on the Tibetan Plateau—dubbed “the Roof of the World”—has highlighted specific challenges of seasonal availability of food and extreme weather systems. Recent archaeological studies have revealed that pastoralism has a long history of resilience on the extreme high altitude Tibetan Plateau. However, specific risks to early flocks on the Tibetan Plateau and ways that herders managed their animals to mitigate these have not been well explored. Dated to 3000–2200 Cal BP, the archaeological settlement of Bangga represents one of the earliest …

The Myriad Of Things: Paleoethnobotany Of The Chenopodium Album Aggregate In Northern China, Mana Hayashi Tang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Carbonized macrobotanical remains of the Chenopodium album aggregate (Amaranthaceae) are highly ubiquitous at archaeological sites. These chenopods are early successional plants and ruderals, which grow well in disturbed ecosystems, including those that they co-habit and co-create with humans. Often distinguished from known agricultural crops (e.g., rice, millet) as a weed, chenopods have received less attention in early food culture studies, despite their ethnohistory as a grain crop, vegetable, and famine food. Their seed remains in northern China exhibit regionally variable morphological attributes, different from those seen in chenopod cultivars of the Americas. Their morphological variability may be a result of …

Large-Herbivore Nemabiomes: Patterns Of Parasite Diversity And Sharing, Georgia C. Titcomb, Johan Pansu, Matthew C. Hutchinson, Kaia J. Tombak, Christina B. Hansen, Christopher C. M. Baker, Tyler R. Kartzinel, Robert M. Pringle

Publications and Research

Amidst global shifts in the distribution and abundance of wildlife and livestock, we have only a rudimentary understanding of ungulate parasite communities and parasite-sharing patterns. We used qPCR and DNA metabarcoding of fecal samples to characterize gastrointestinal nematode (Strongylida) community composition and sharing among 17 sympatric species of wild and domestic large mammalian herbivore in central Kenya. We tested a suite of hypothesis-driven predictions about the role of host traits and phylogenetic relatedness in describing parasite infections. Host species identity explained 27 – 53% of individual variation in parasite prevalence, richness, community composition and phylogenetic diversity. Host and parasite phylogenies …

The World’S Languages In Crisis (Redux): Toward A Radical Reimagining For Global Linguistic Justice, Gerald J. Roche

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

The world’s languages are in crisis: intergenerational transmission of around half the world’s languages is collapsing. I argue that to understand and intervene in this situation, we need to radically reimagine what it means to call it a crisis. We need to think about this crisis not simply as an acute emergency (which it is), but also in Antonio Gramsci's sense of a period in which ‘the old is dying but the new cannot be born’. In this sense, our present moment of crisis is one in which language oppression and language revitalization co-exist in dynamic tension. To analyze this …

Reduce, Reuse And Deny: How Sustainability Is Judged By Consumers, Madison E. Hill

Student Research Symposium

This research was an analysis of a series of interviews regarding what factors are considered when deciding if a given product is environmentally friendly or not. Participants were asked to select between products or practices as the generally more sustainable option, and were asked to explain their reasoning for that decision. Participants were encouraged to describe their reasoning behind each choice, but it was noted when certain choices were more challenging than others. Products that green-wash effectively generate trust between consumers trying to ‘do their part’ and industries attempting to capitalize on each side of environmental crises. Most sustainable practices …