Digital Commons Network^™

Moldova: To Be Or Not To Be Establishing A National Identity Before And After Independence: 1989-1993, Brittney Grandy

Sigma: Journal of Political and International Studies

This difference is all too clear in the former Soviet satellite of Moldova. In 1989, Moldova had a population of 4,335,360 (,21,eMOCKon Weekly 2013), with a variety of nationalities living within its borders that threatened to divide the state. Moldovans were the largest ethnic group, accounting for roughly 65 percent of the population. Ukrainians (13.8 percent), Russians (13 percent), Gaguaz (3.5 percent), and Romanians (0.06 percent) were just a few of the other ethnic minorities (,21,eMocxon Weekly 2013). While other former Soviet states dealt relatively effectively with a variety of ethnic minorities within their borders, this issue tore at the …

Kinship And The Self-Organization Of Exchange In Small-Scale Societies, James R. Allison

Faculty Publications

Circulation of material goods is common in small-scale societies. Even where exchange is not coordinated above the level of the household, goods produced in one area are consistently conveyed to distant settlements. Numerous ethnographic studies demonstrate that exchange transactions are common among kin, and that the circulation of goods in small-scale societies is structured by kinship ties. From an individual’s point of view, the number of kinfolk available to exchange with and where they live strongly affect access to nonlocal goods. This paper explores the interrelationships among kin networks, settlement organization, and exchange using agent-based modeling, ethnographic studies, and archaeological …

The Meaning Of Giving Birth: Voices Of Hmong Women Living In Vietnam, Cheryl A. Corbett, Lynn Clark Callister, Jamie Peterson Gettys, Jacob R. Hickman

Faculty Publications

Increasing knowledge about the sociocultural context of birth is essential to promote culturally sensitive nursing care. This qualitative study provides an ethnographic view of the perspectives of birthing of Hmong mothers living in the highlands of Vietnam. Unique cultural beliefs exist in Hmong culture about the spiritual and physical wold as well as ritual practices associated with childbearing. This includes variations of ancestor worship, reincarnation, and healing practices by shamans. Traditionally, Hmong families take an active role in childbirth with birth frequently occurring in the home. Situated within a large collaborative anthropology project, a convenience sample of 8 Hmong women, …

Chiapa De Corzo Mound 3 Revisited: Burials, Caches, And Architecture, Michaela Ann Ostler

Theses and Dissertations

Chiapa de Corzo Mound 3 was excavated by Tim Tucker under the direction of the New World Archaeological Foundation in July 1965. Mound 3 is located in the ritual center of Chiapa de Corzo, the southwest quadrant. Significant Preclassic and Protoclassic architecture, burials, and caches were discovered there but were never fully analyzed or published. A complete analysis of this mound is necessary to better understand the role of Chiapa de Corzo as a whole and as a regional power. This thesis completes the analysis and accomplishes the following goals: (1) completes the ceramic analysis and classification started by Tucker, …

Full Issue

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

Barbara Sjoholm. Black Fox: A Life Of Emilie Demant Hatt , Artist And Ethnographer, Sandra Laursen

The Bridge

Two young women on vacation, an art student and a teacher, meet a mysterious local man dressed in animal skins who persuades them to climb into his boat. He rows them across a beautiful mountain lake where they begin a wilderness adventure in the land of the midnight sun. It sounds like the start of a fairy tale, but it is a true story from the opening chapters of Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt , Artist and Ethnographer.

Veiling In Fear Or In Faith? Meanings Of The Hijab To Practicing Muslim Wives And Husbands In The United States, Zahra Alghafli, Loren Marks, Trevan Hatch, Andrew Rose

Faculty Publications

This article examines the Muslim practice of wearing the hijab—the veiling and covering of a woman’s head and body. More specifically, this study aims to present insiders’ perspectives regarding the personal understandings of the hijab among 20 wives and 20 husbands (n = 40) in religious Shia and Sunni Muslim families living in the United States. Qualitative analysis yielded three emergent themes: (1) The hijab as a symbol of religious commitment; (2) The hijab as a tool of protection, rather than oppression, for women and families; and (3) Two different views of Muslims’ reasoning behind the hijab. These …

Using Wearable Devices For Non-Invasive, Inexpensive Physiological Data Collection, James Gaskin, Jeffrey Jenkins, Thomas Meservy, Jacob Steffen, Katherine Payne

Faculty Publications

Using sensors to gather physiological data about users can provide valuable insights for Information Systems (IS) research that are not availed through traditional measures. While useful in many laboratory settings, many of these physiological sensors (e.g., fMRI, EEG, EKG, etc.) are impractical and severely limited in other scenarios due to (1) prohibitive cost, (2) small sample size, (3) invasiveness, and (4) the difficulty to match psychological traits to physiological measures. In this study, we demonstrate how inexpensive consumer-grade wearable technologies overcome these first three limitations while we extend existing research on exploring the fourth limitation.

What Makes Russian Advertisements Russian? Contemporary Russian Advertising As A Sociocultural Phenomenon, Valentina Iepuri

Russian Language Journal

It is common knowledge that advertisements reflect society. They play an important role in the formation of stereotypes and impose a certain way of life and a certain system of values. By analyzing both the foreground and the background of advertisements as texts, it is possible to reveal not only their primary sales messages but also the embedded social and cultural ones (Frith 1997, 3).

Sociocultural, anthropological, and psychological aspects of Russian advertising and various forms of its impact on public consciousness, morality, and public taste require special attention and research, especially now that advertising has become an integral part …

"A Very Fine Azteck Manuscript": Latter-Day Saint Readings Of Codex Boturini, Christopher James Blythe

Journal of Book of Mormon Studies

THE BooK OF MORMON presented itself as a history of previously unidentified New World civilizations with origins in the ancient Near East. To defend its claims of historicity, believers pointed to the work's correspondence with the Bible and their own spiritual witnesses. They also insisted that, independent of their supernatural access to this ancient world, archaeological discoveries had authenticated and would continue to authenticate the book's historical claims. This article documents the all-but-forgotten Latter-day Saint use of Codex Boturini-a sixteenth-century Mesoamerican codex depicting the Mexica (i.e., Aztec) migration from their mythical homeland Atzlan to Tenochtitlan, the seat of the empire's …

The Church Library Coordinating Committee And The Correlation Of Meetinghouse Libraries, Cory Nimer

BYU Studies

Beginning in the late 1950s, many religious groups in the United States saw a growing interest in the development and improvement of libraries. Within some denominations, organizations were created to advocate library programs and promulgate standards and guidelines. This effort included the establishment of the Parish Library Section of the Catholic Library Association in 1957 and the formation of the Lutheran Church Library Association the following year. A drive toward greater cooperation and professionalization culminated in 1967 with the creation of the Church and Synagogue Library Association, a nonprofit, nondenominational organization that provided conferences and publications for training church librarians.

Book Reviews, Matthew Bowman, Reviewer

Journal of Book of Mormon Studies

In his foreward to this book, Richard Bushman praises it for its meticulous attention to the historian's craft. Michael MacKay and Gerrit Dirkmaat have served as editors on the Documents series of the Joseph Smith Papers Project-spending months documenting, annotating, and organizing the surviving historical material from the early years of Joseph Smith's religious career-and their experience with those primary sources shines in this volume. They have tracked down scraps of information in archives from New York to Utah, from obscure nineteenth-century publications as far-flung as the Ohio Observer and the Milwaukee Sentinel, and even from much better-known sources like …

Lexicography In-Your-Face: The Active Semantics Of Pastaza Quichua Ideophones, Janis B. Nuckolls, Tod D. Swanson, Diana Shelton, Alexander Rice, Sarah Hatton

Faculty Publications

English:

We argue that a multimodal approach to defining a depictive class of words called ‘ideophones’ by linguists is essential for grasping their meanings. Our argument for this approach is based on the formal properties of Pastaza Quichua ideophones, which set them apart from the non-ideophonic lexicon, and on the cultural assumptions brought by speakers to their use. We analyze deficiencies in past attempts to define this language’s ideophones, which have used only audio data. We offer, instead, an audiovisual corpus which we call an ‘antidictionary’, because it defines words not with other words, but with clips featuring actual contexts …

Agent-Based Modelling Of The Relationships Among Kinship, Residence, And Exchange, James R. Allison

Faculty Publications

In the North American Southwest, archaeological research has documented ceramic exchange networks in which spatially proximate households in consumer communities have greatly varying amounts of imported pottery. This paper uses agent-based modelling to gain insight into the processes responsible for these distributions. The agent-based model used here tracks kinship ties among agents representing individuals who give birth, marry, co-reside with spouses, and exchange things in a virtual landscape filled with small settlements of up to a few hundred individuals. Exchange of goods in the model flows through the kinship networks. The results suggest that the differential distribution of goods among …

Sourcing Basalt From The Santiago Quarry In Chihuahua, Mexico Using Xrf, Michael T. Searcy, Todd Pitezel, Eric Christiansen

Faculty Publications

During survey in 2013, we identified the only known vesicular basalt quarry in the Casas Grandes region in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. Using XRF, we analyzed basalt from the Santiago Quarry and compared the results to the chemical characterization of formal tools (mostly mano and metate fragments) recovered at the site of Paquimé in order to determine if this quarry was one of the sources exploited by prehistoric stoneworkers during the Medio period (AD 1200–1450).

The Latter-Day Saint Reimaging Of “The Breath Of Life” (Genesis 2:7), Dana M. Pike

Faculty Publications

The creation and flood accounts in Genesis in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) contain variations on a phrase commonly translated “the breath of life.” This phrase additionally occurs in some uniquely Latter-day Saint materials relating to creation. After overviewing and analyzing this phrase and its meaning in the Bible, this paper then examines the occurrences of the phrase “the breath of life” in important early Latter-day Saint texts.1 The purpose of this study is to illustrate and explain how and why many Latter-day Saints have come to often employ the phrase “the breath of life,” transforming its traditional …

An Investigation Of The Manufacture And Use Of Bone Awls At Wolf Village (42ut273), Joseph A. Bryce

Theses and Dissertations

Wolf Village is a Fremont farming village located at the southern end of Utah Valley where Brigham Young University has conducted six field schools there and recovered 135 awl and awl fragments. The Wolf Village awls, like the awls from many Fremont sites, represent a large range of morphological variability. Because of the ubiquity and diversity of Fremont bone awls, many different approaches have been taken to organize and understand them; focusing more on morphological characteristics than interpretation. In order to better understand the life use of bone awls, experiments were conducted to replicate the manufacture and use of these …

Assessing Diversity Among Corporations In Brazil: An Exploratory Study, Helga Sheyla Pereira

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore what corporations in Brazil, whether with Brazilian headquarters or not, are doing in regards to communicating their diversity practices and initiatives to the public. Understanding these companies' positions on diversity can paint a better picture of how much Brazil has advanced on diversity in the workplace matters, since the topic started coming about in discussions in the 1990s (Fleury, 2000). A sample of 15 companies was selected from Exame magazine "Melhores e Maiores Ranking 2014" (2015), and a content analysis of each company's website was performed during the summer of 2016, based …

Book Reviews

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Quigley's Model As A Model Model, Matthew Melko

Comparative Civilizations Review

Joseph Drew, editor-in-chief of the Comparative Civilizations Review, has updated and edited a paper from the early nineteen seventies composed by noted scholar and past president of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilization, Dr. Matthew Melko. In it, Dr. Melko advances the proposition that the best model for the study of civilizations -- exemplified by the model proposed by Dr. Carroll Quigley which advances a holistic method -- is the comparative study of civilizations. According to the paper, this model along with similar ones is the best avenue to study inter-civilizational connections. Another way noted by the …

Full Issue

Journal of East Asian Libraries

No abstract provided.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone: Data-Driven Storage Selection And Collection Analysis, Yao Chen

Journal of East Asian Libraries

This article investigated how to use holding data, circulation and interlibrary loan (ILL) statistics to analyze the East Asian collection at the University of Minnesota. Data from multiple sources was divided along Library of Congress call number classification to help explore what was collected, utilized, and what should be grown or de-emphasized. These three sets of data are readily available in most libraries, and they can serve as a powerful tool to help subject librarians to assess the collection in their subject fields. With these data, a librarian can also make informed decisions about collection management, including remote storage selection …

Full Issue, Children's Book Review

Children's Book and Media Review

No abstract provided.

With A Little Luck: Surprising Stories Of Amazing Discoveries, Kate Reynolds

Children's Book and Media Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue, Children's Book Review

Children's Book and Media Review

No abstract provided.

Reading Media Literature With Young People, Amy Petersen Jensen

Children's Book and Media Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue, Children's Book Review

Children's Book and Media Review

No abstract provided.

Scholastic Book Of Outstanding Americans, Annmarie Hamar

Children's Book and Media Review

No abstract provided.

Integrators Of Design: Parsi Patronage Of Bombay's Architectural Ornament, Nicole Ashley Vance

Theses and Dissertations

The seaport of Bombay is often referred to as India's "Gothic City." Reminders of British colonial rule are seen throughout South Bombay in its Victorian architecture and sculpture. In the heart of Bombay lies the Victoria Terminus, a towering, hybrid railway station blending gothic and vernacular architectures. Built at the height of the British Empire, the terminus is evidence of the rapid modernization of Bombay through the philanthropy of the Parsis. This religious and ethnic minority became quick allies to the British Raj; their generous donations funded the construction of the "Gothic City." The British viewed the Parsis as their …

Interconnectedness, Complicity And Ambiguity: Reading With Dark Ecology, Rachel Dene Whipple

Theses and Dissertations

There are many aspects of ecological thinking. When reading texts through a lens of dark ecology, certain conflicts that arise from the imposition of human expectations on natural systems are revealed. These include interconnectedness, complicity, and ambiguities. Within a system, boundaries are contingent and transitory. Beginnings and ends are gradual, not definite. Ecological systems change over time, but it is a category error to imagine that change represents progress or to assume a teleological purpose. While there are hierarchies of power, and different roles, no species is, ecologically speaking, more advanced than another. Ecological criticism focuses on interconnectedness, complicity, and …