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Precolumbian Textiles In The Ethnological Museum In Berlin, Lena Bjerregaard, Torben Huss

Zea E-Books Collection

The Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Germany, houses Europe’s largest collection of PreColumbian textiles—around 9000 well-preserved examples. Lena Bjerregaard, editor and compiler of this volume, was the conservator for these materials from 2000 to 2014, and she worked with many international researchers to analyze and publicize the collection. This book includes seven of their essays about the museum’s holdings – by Bea Hoffmann, Ann Peters, Susan Bergh, Lena Bjerregaard, Jane Feltham, Katalin Nagy, and Gary Urton. The book’s second part is a 177-page catalogue, arranged by periods and styles, of 273 selected items that represent the collection as fully as possible, …

Negotiating Refugee Empowerment(S) In Resettlement Organizations, Sarah Steimel

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In-depth interviews with both organizational staff and refugee-clients in two American refugee resettlement organizations explore how empowerment is communicated to and understood by refugees being “empowered.” This study found that while organizational staff professed empowerment focused on self-sufficiency as self-determination, in practice their communication to clients defined self-sufficiency a priori in economic terms. Refugee-clients instead constructed empowerment(s) in economic, educational, personal, and family terms. These findings highlight the need for changes in US resettlement policy and for theoretical and practical understandings of refugee empowerment to recognize polysemic and conflicting empowerments in different life arenas and from different positionalities.

Identifying The Anthropological In A Mixed- Methods Study Of Transnational Students In Mexican Schools, Edmund T. Hamann, Victor Zuniga, Juan Sánchez García

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Identifying surveying as more commonly sociological and semistructured interviewing as more commonly anthropological, which describes disciplinary histories more than any fixed formulas, we juxtapose transnational students’ survey answers collected in Mexican schools with their answers to interviewers several months later. From this, we consider what can be learned about research methodology and transnational student cosmology when different methods yield discrepant answers. Without claiming superiority for either mechanism, we find their combination illuminating, and it substantiates the claim that anthropological inquiry can add crucial value to mixed-methods, interdisciplinary inquiry.

Is Male Androphilia A Context-Dependent Cross-Cultural Universal?, Raymond B. Hames, Zachary H. Garfield, Melissa J. Garfield

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The cross-cultural ethnographic literature has traditionally used the label male “homosexuality” to describe sexual relationships between biological males without considering whether or not the concept encompasses primary sexual attraction to adult males. Although male androphilia seems to be found in all national populations, its universal existence in tribal populations has been questioned. Our goal is to review previous cross-cultural classifications and surveys of male same sex behavior to present a system that does justice to its varied expressions, especially as it is informed by contemporary sexuality research. Previous comparative research does not effectively distinguish male same sex behavior from male …

Culturally Induced Range Infilling Of Eastern Redcedar: A Problem In Ecology, An Ecological Problem, Or Both?, Aubrey Streit Krug, Daniel R. Uden, Craig R. Allen, Dirac L. Twidwell Jr

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The philosopher John Passmore distinguished between (1) “problems in ecology,” or what we might call problems in scientific understanding of ecological change, and (2) “ecological problems,” or what we might call problems faced by societies due to ecological change. The spread of eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) and conversion of the central and southern Great Plains of North America to juniper woodland might be categorized as a problem in ecology, an ecological problem, or both. Here, we integrate and apply two interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving—social-ecological systems thinking and ecocriticism—to understand the role of human culture in recognizing, driving, and …

Provenance Investigations Of Raw Materials In Pre-Columbian Textiles From Pachacamac; Strontium Isotope Analyses, Karin Margarita Frei, Lena Bjerregaard

PreColumbian Textile Conference VII / Jornadas de Textiles PreColombinos VII (2016)

Pachacamac was considered a sanctuary or oracle by several of the pre-Columbian Andean cultures. As a pilgrimage destination, the site was rich in archaeological artifacts and yielded also many well preserved textiles. Some of the objects found at Pachacamac are considered offerings by the pilgrims to their Gods, and the majority are assumed to be of nonlocal origin. Others are from the Ychsma people, who lived in Pachacamac and the nearby Rimac Valley during the last centuries before the conquest. We have investigated 10 pre-Columbian textile samples, which were supposedly excavated at the archaeological site of Pachacamac, Peru. The textiles …

A Diachronic View On Fulling Technology In The Mediterranean And The Ancient Near East: Tools, Raw Materials And Natural Resources For The Finishing Of Textiles, Elena Soriga

Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD

Among the operations required in the overall cycle of the ancient production of textiles, Greek and Roman sources refer to the fulling of woollen fabrics as the most complex and expensive technical process performed both in the 1st millennium BC and the 1st millennium AD. Indeed, the finishing of woollen clothes needed a large amount of time, energy and labour, as well as involving the use of specialized skills and costly raw materials. Fulling fulfilled two functions that were necessary for the proper finishing of cloth, namely the scouring and consolidation of the fibres in the fabric. Woven cloth straight …

Democratic Dissent And The Politics Of Rescue During The Twenty-First Century’S “Inhospitable” Eu Migration “Crisis”, Marouf Hasian Jr., José Ángel Maldonado Olivas, Stephanie Marek Muller

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This article uses critical approaches to examine the ways in which dissenters have objected to the European Union’s current “politics of rescue.” The authors argue that the term “hospitality” has been a key term in liberal theorizing about mobility since the Enlightenment, but that various neo-liberal “pull” theories, worries about securitization and the militarization of rescue efforts in the Mediterranean have converged in ways that have turned Europe into an “inhospitable” place for foreigners. The authors use three short case studies—of maritime captains’ and sailors’ rescue efforts, academic critiques of FRONTEX, and vernacular reactions to the iconic Kurdi image—to put …

Sovereign Screens, Kristin L. Dowell

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

While Indigenous media have gained increasing prominence around the world, the vibrant Aboriginal media world on the Canadian West Coast has received little scholarly attention. As the first ethnography of the Aboriginal media community in Vancouver, Sovereign Screens reveals the various social forces shaping Aboriginal media production including community media organizations and avant-garde art centers, as well as the national spaces of cultural policy and media institutions.

Kristin L. Dowell uses the concept of visual sovereignty to examine the practices, forms, and meanings through which Aboriginal filmmakers tell their individual stories and those of their Aboriginal nations and the intertribal …

Street Democracy, Sandra C. Mendiola García

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

No visitor to Mexico can fail to recognize the omnipresence of street vendors, selling products ranging from fruits and vegetables to prepared food and clothes. The vendors compose a large part of the informal economy, which altogether represents at least 30 percent of Mexico’s economically active population. Neither taxed nor monitored by the government, the informal sector is the fastest growing economic sector in the world.

In Street Democracy Sandra C. Mendiola García explores the political lives and economic significance of this otherwise overlooked population, focusing on the radical street vendors during the 1970s and 1980s in Puebla, Mexico’s fourth-largest …

Yearning To Labor, John P. Murphy

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, France underwent a particularly turbulent period during which urban riots in 2005 and labor protests in 2006 galvanized people across the country and brought the question of youth unemployment among its poorer, multiethnic outer cities into the national spotlight.

Drawing on more than a year of ethnographic field research in the housing projects of the French city of Limoges, Yearning to Labor chronicles the everyday struggles of a group of young people as they confront unemployment at more than triple the national rate—and the crushing despair it engenders. Against the background of …

Governing Affect, Roberto E. Barrios

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Roberto E. Barrios presents an ethnographic study of the aftermaths of four natural disasters: southern Honduras after Hurricane Mitch; New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina; Chiapas, Mexico, after the Grijalva River landslide; and southern Illinois following the Mississippi River flood. Focusing on the role of affect, Barrios examines the ways in which people who live through disasters use emotions as a means of assessing the relevance of governmentally sanctioned recovery plans, judging the effectiveness of such programs, and reflecting on the risk of living in areas that have been deemed prone to disaster. Emotions such as terror, disgust, or sentimental attachment …

Disability Studies And The Environmental Humanities, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Jay Sibara

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between “wild” and “built” environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing “disability.”

Designed as a reader for undergraduate …

The Spirit And The Sky, Mark Hollabaugh

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

The interest of nineteenth-century Lakotas in the sun, moon, and stars was an essential part of their never-ending quest to understand their world. The Spirit and the Sky presents a survey of the ethnoastronomy of the nineteenth-century Lakota and relates Lakota astronomy to their cultural practices and beliefs. The center of Lakota belief is the incomprehensible, extraordinary, and sacred nature of the world in which they live. The earth beneath and the stars above constitute their holistic world.

Mark Hollabaugh offers a detailed analysis of all aspects of Lakota culture that have a bearing on their astronomy, including telling time, …

Indigenous Media And Political Imaginaries In Contemporary Bolivia, Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal examines the political dimension of indigenous media production and distribution as a means by which indigenous organizations articulate new claims on national politics in Bolivia, a country experiencing one of the most notable cases of social mobilization and indigenous-based constitutional transformation in contemporary Latin America. Based on fieldwork in Bolivia from 2005 to 2007, Zamorano Villarreal details how grassroots indigenous media production has been instrumental to indigenous political demands for a Constituent Assembly and for implementing the new constitution within Evo Morales controversial administration.


On a day-to-day basis, Zamorano Villarreal witnessed the myriad processes by which Bolivia’s …

Salish Blankets, Leslie H. Tepper, Janice George, Willard Joseph

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Salish Blankets presents a new perspective on Salish weaving through technical and anthropological lenses. Worn as ceremonial robes, the blankets are complex objects said to preexist in the supernatural realm and made manifest in the natural world through ancestral guidance. The blankets are protective garments that at times of great life changes—birth, marriage, death—offer emotional strength and mental focus. A blanket can help establish the owner’s standing in the community and demonstrate a weaver’s technical expertise and artistic vision. The object, the maker, the wearer, and the community are bound and transformed through the creation and use of the blanket. …

Research Methods For Architecture (Review), Rumiko Handa

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Review of Ray Lucas, Research Methods for Architecture (Laurence King, 2016).

Renewed interest in integrating research into design is apparent when we look at books published on the topic in recent years. The go-to textbook for more than a decade, Linda Groat and David Wang’s Architectural Research Methods was revised and expanded in a recent second edition (2013), reflecting such interest. The most important area of update is on the relationship between design and research. In particular, it explores research by design, that is, generating new knowledge using design as a method, as do a number of other publications. Among …

Critical Experiential Education In The Honors Classroom: Animals, Society, And Education, Nadine Dolby

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc, scholars of higher education, have described the purpose of higher education:

Our colleges and universities need to encourage, foster, and assist our students, faculty, and administrators in finding their own authentic way to an individual life where meaning and purpose are tightly interwoven with intellect and action, where compassion and care are infused with insight and knowledge. (56)

Interdisciplinary Teaching Of Theatre And Human Rights In Honors, Maria Szasz

Honors in Practice Online Archive

One of the centerpieces of honors education is careful research and thorough analysis of what we teach and why we teach our chosen subjects. In creating my honors class Theatre and Human Rights, I explored how I would teach the course and the various components best suited to teaching this topic. After first considering the topic of human rights and its relevance to theatre in an honors context, I then considered the value of interdisciplinary teaching in such a course and what its impact could be on helping students understand human rights, specifically through the study of Athol Fugard’s 1982 …

Honors Students’ Perceptions Of Language Requirement As Part Of A Global Literacy Competency, Katelynn Malecha, Anne Dahlman

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Competency-based approaches to education are becoming increasingly common in higher education. One of the key principles of competencybased education is flexibility, which “allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning” (U.S. Department of Education). This adaptability enables students to gain knowledge and know-how that they can demonstrate outside of traditional classroom boundaries, focusing on acquiring real-life skills that involve “learning through student actions and performances that embody and reflect competence in using information, content, ideas, and tools” (Malan; Spady qtd. in Nodine 6).

Authors & Endmatter (Jnchc 18-1)

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

About the Authors

About the NCHC Monograph Series

NCHC Monographs & Journals

NCHC Publications Order Form

In This Issue (Back cover)

On The Other Side Of The Wall: The Miscategorization Of Educational Developers In The United States?, David A. Green, Deandra Little

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Educational developers around the world are employed in a range of settings and under different working conditions, including academic (faculty) positions and administrative (professional staff) roles. Curiously, in a survey of 1,000 developers from 38 countries, the authors find that a full 51% of developers in the United States are on administrative contracts, while only 16% are on employed as faculty—figures that are markedly out of kilter with the overall international data. In this paper, the authors argue that the positioning of educational developers matters because of the “wall in the head”—the perceived division between faculty and staff in United …

Stepping Stones: A Leadership Development Program To Inspire And Promote Reflection Among Women Faculty And Staff, Krista Hoffmann-Longtin, Zachary S. Morgan, Lauren (Chism) Schmidt, Emily C. Valvoord, Megan M. Palmer, Mary E. Dankoski

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Women frequently benefit from focused faculty development opportunities not because they need to be “fixed,” but rather it is a means to demonstrate that success, even in chilly environments, is possible. The Stepping Stones program uses a unique design to provide participants with inspiration, time for reflection, and strategies for how to navigate one’s career, through hearing about the journeys of successful women. In this article, we describe the program and evaluation results. Post-event and longitudinal follow-up surveys indicate that the program and its unique narrative format help to debunk the superwoman myth and leave participants with a sense of …

Major Fallacies Surrounding Stone Artifacts And Assemblages, Harold Dibble, Simon J. Holdaway, Sam C. Lin, David R. Braun, Matthew J. Douglass, Radu Iovita, Shannon P. Mcpherron, Deborah I. Olszewski, Dennis Sandgathe

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

While lithic objects can potentially inform us about past adaptations and behaviors, it is important to develop a comprehensive understanding of all of the various processes that influence what we recover from the archaeological record. We argue here that many assumptions used by archaeologists to derive behavioral inferences through the definition, conceptualization, and interpretation of both individual stone artifact forms and groups of artifacts identified as assemblages do not fit squarely with what we have learned from both ethnographic sources and analyses of archaeological materials. We discuss this in terms of two fallacies. The first is the fallacy of the …

Capturing Change: The Duality Of Time-Lapse Imagery To Acquire Data And Depict Ecological Dynamics, Emma Brinley Buckley, Craig R. Allen, Michael L. Forsberg, Michael Farrell, Andrew J. Caven

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

We investigate the scientific and communicative value of time-lapse imagery by exploring applications for data collection and visualization. Time-lapse imagery has a myriad of possible applications to study and depict ecosystems and can operate at unique temporal and spatial scales to bridge the gap between large-scale satellite imagery projects and observational field research. Time-lapse data sequences, linking time-lapse imagery with data visualization, have the ability to make data come alive for a wider audience by connecting abstract numbers to images that root data in time and place. Utilizing imagery from the Platte Basin Timelapse Project, water inundation and vegetation phenology …

List Of Contributors

Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD

The 42 contributors include Salvatore Gaspa, Cécile Michel, Marie-Louise Nosch, Elena Soriga, Louise Quillien, Luigi Malatacca, Nahum Ben-Yehuda, Christina Katsikadeli, Orit Shamir, Agnes Korn, Georg Warning, Birgit Anette Olsen, Stella Spantidaki, Peder Flemestad, Peter Herz, Ines Bogensperger, Herbert Graßl, Mary Harlow, Berit Hildebrandt, Magdalena Öhrman, Roland Schuhmann, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, John Peter Wild, Maria Mossakowska-Gaubert, Julia Galliker, Anne Regourd, Fiona J. L. Handley, Götz König, Miguel Ángel Andrés-Toledo, Stefan Niederreiter, Oswald Panagl, Giovanni Fanfani, Le Wang, Feng Zhao, Mari Omura, Naoko Kizawa, Maciej Szymaszek, Francesco Meo, Felicitas Maeder, Kalliope Sarri, Susanne Lervad, and Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen.

Zur Bekleidung Der Krieger Im Avesta: Rüstung Und Magischer Schmuck, Götz König

Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD

Während die in Altavestisch komponierten Lieder des Avesta (die Gāϑās und das Yasna Haptaŋhāiti) einen rituellen Dichtungsstil pflegen, der sich in eigentümlicher Weise gegen die Dinge der Welt weitgehend verschließt, d.h. Wörter, die auf Materiales – auf in Raum und Zeit Identifizierbares – sich beziehen, vermeidet, stellen die in Jungavestisch abgefaßten metrischen wie prosaischen Texte des Avesta eine weitaus ergiebigere Quelle zur Rekonstruktion der materiellen avestischen Kultur dar. Richten dabei diejenigen Texte, welche die tägliche bzw. zu bestimmten Anlässen zu feiernde, um die altavestischen Texte herum komponierte Priesterzeremonie bilden (Yasna bzw. Yasna mit Vīsparad), ihre Aufmerksamkeit auf …

Reframing Islamic Art For The 21st Century, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

The celebrated Islamic galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reopened in 2011 as “Galleries for the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia.” Other major collections of Islamic art have been reorganized and reinstalled in Berlin, Cairo, Cleveland, Copenhagen, Detroit, Kuwait, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Singapore, and new museums of Islamic art have been established in Doha, Qatar; Honolulu, Hawaii; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Sharjah, U.A.E. In addition, the first museum in North America dedicated to Islamic art recently opened in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This article explores this global phenomenon, …

Contours Of Neoliberalism In Us Empirical Educational Research, Mardi Schmeichel, Ajay Sharma, Elizabeth Pittard

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Neoliberalism has an enormous influence on P–12 education in most industrial societies. In this integrative, theoretical literature review, we surveyed the journal articles on neoliberalism in US-based educational research to better understand how neoliberalism has been conceptualized in this body of work and to offer implications for future research on neoliberalism and education. We drew on Foucauldian discourse theories to conduct an analysis of peer-reviewed studies of American P–12 contexts to consider how researchers’ depictions of neoliberalism have shaped the discourse of neoliberalism in education and contributed to particular ways of thinking and responding to neoliberalism in the United States. …

What Can Gis + 3d Mean For Landscape Archaeology?, Heather Richards-Rissetto

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Until recently Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have held center stage in the archaeologist's geospatial toolkit, and there is no doubt that archaeologists have moved beyond the mapdbut into what? In the early years, criticisms voicing GIS as environmentally-deterministic were abundant. What methods and tool have archaeologists used to overcome these criticisms? New geospatial technologies such as airborne lidar and aerial photogrammetry are allowing us to acquire inordinate amounts of georeferenced 3D datad but do these 3D technologies help overcome criticisms of environmental determinism? TogetherdGIS þ 3Dd can link georeferenced 3D models to underlying data adding a ground-based humanistic perspective lacking …