Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Shifting Grounds: Movement And Continuity In Mustang, Nepal, Lauren Carter

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the socio-cultural and economic transformations in the Mustang region of Nepal. Drawing from fieldwork conducted over a month, this study examines how traditional economic activities, particularly yak herding, are being replaced by tourism and agriculture due to shifting socio-economic conditions and global influences. The concept of 'adaptive traditionality' is introduced to describe how the community in Mustang actively engages with both internal pressures and external changes to reshape their socio-cultural landscape. This adaptability is evident in the transition from nomadic pastoralism to more sedentary agricultural practices and tourism, which not only reflects a survival tactic but also …

Gender Roles In Natural Resource Use In Madagascar, Sarahana Shrestha, Cortni Borgerson, Be Jean Rodolph Rasolofoniaina

Department of Anthropology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Understanding gender roles in natural resource use is essential for culturally-tailored effective conservation. Despite its conservation priority, little is known about the gender roles of forest product use in Madagascar. This study used over seven years of data from 1,255 interviews on the extraction, use, and sale of forest, freshwater, and marine resources, to examine gender roles. We found that gender significantly affects natural resource use in Madagascar. While men were primarily responsible for natural resource collection, women collected nearly all resources in at least one household. Both genders collected resources, with subsistence use as the primary incentive for resource …

Foodways: An Ethnographic Analysis Of Cwu International Students’ Perception Of The Role Of Culturally Relevant Food In Their Sense Of Belonging, Joy Ihuka

All Master's Theses

International students face unique challenges adjusting to new academic environments, including developing a sense of homesickness and lack of belonging. Studies have shown that consuming culturally relevant food helps international students relieve homesickness, fostering a sense of belonging. Curiously, nonetheless, literature on student belonging rarely focuses on food. Within this gap, this thesis explores the significance of culturally relevant food in fostering a sense of belonging among international students at Central Washington University. Using ethnographic interviews, this research examines how culturally relevant food (including how food is prepared) or lack thereof may influence international students’ perceptions of belonging. This study …

Review Of Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form, First Edition, Patrick Barchett

Nebraska Anthropologist

Review of Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form, 1st edition, edited by Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman. 2022. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, USA. vii + 352 pp. Reviewed by Patrick Barchett, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Due widely to the inaccessible nature of “nonnormative” sexualities and genders in many ethnographic studies, queer kinship tends to be left out of many kinship classes and discussions. However, Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (edited by Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman) discusses not only queer kinship in the sense of LGBTQ+ kinship, but also other forms of nonnormative kinship structures, such …

The Unseen River And Infrastructural Silences: The Santa Ana River And The Ontology Of Floods, Cooper Lennon Crane

Pomona Senior Theses

This article discusses the history of land development and infrastructure along the Santa Ana River in Southern California. The river plays a significant role in the landscape of many of Southern California’s cities and urban geographies but has been relatively underdiscussed in literature. This article approaches the river using a combination of historic ethnography and sociocultural theory to unpack the meanings of the infrastructure of the river and its relation to Southern Californians. From these meanings, the article places the river in context with environmental politics, urban development, and water management issues in California today. The article argues that the …

Lingering Presence: (T)Racing Chinese Community In The Borderlands, Reia Li

Pomona Senior Theses

By the mid-1900s, although there were only around 700 Chinese people in Tucson, Arizona, there were over 100 Chinese-owned markets. These small grocery stores were located in Mexican American barrios and served mainly Mexican, Indigenous, and Black people. Starting from these stores and moving to other spaces important to the Chinese community, this work explores race as a spatial process and space as a racialized project. Drawing on anthropology, geography, and Asian/American studies, this thesis (t)races the transformations of Chinese homes, grocery stores, and suburban spaces throughout the 20th century, examining the racial meanings that these places both emerged from …

“Sounds Like” Redemption? On The Musicality Of Species And The Species Of Musicality, Tyler Yamin, Alice Rudge

Faculty Journal Articles

Popular and academic studies of music frequently claim that human musicality arose from the so-called ‘natural world’ of non-human species. And amid the anxieties produced by the Anthropocene, it is thought that the possibility of reconnecting with the natural world through a renewed appreciation of music’s links with nature may usher in a new era of posthuman environmental consciousness, offering repair and redemption. To critique these claims, we trace how notions of ‘musicality’ have been applied to or denied from non-human entities across diverse disciplines since the late nineteenth century. We conclude that such debates reinforce the separation that they …

Cooking In The Past And For The Future In Latin America, Clare A. Sammells

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Enduring Power Of Giving And Caring From Cavemen To Kind Hearts: A Neutrosophic Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach, Victor Christianto, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Giving and caring are not just warm and fuzzy feelings; they are the bedrock of a healthy society. By understanding the neuroscience and sociology behind these behaviors, we can cultivate a world that prioritizes cooperation, compassion, and the well-being of all its members. We used the single valued neutrosophic sets (SVNSs) with the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method for evaluating the giving and caring impacts. We used TreeSoft to divide the problems as a tree. The SVNSs were used to overcome uncertain information in the evaluation process. The SVNSs were integrated with the DEMATEL method to compute the relationships between …

The Fairness Model Of Legal Institutions, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Books and Chapters

If any group is to endure over time, individual frustrations, while inevitable, must be usually experienced as acceptable, or at least tolerable. Failing that, little would prevent the losers in these conflicts from leaving or revolting, which would be cumulatively debilitating to the group. As opposed to holding law’s job to impose order and police infringers, the second approach suggests that finding the balance between group and individual desires is the ‘major difficulty of all law—the problem of really getting a fresh start in relations between litigants after disposition of a trouble-case. This is the problem not only of keeping …

The Impact Of Museum Curation On Community And Identity: Japanese Culture At The Japanese American National Museum And The Huntington Library's Japanese Gardens, Cate Hasler

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores Japanese culture and its representation in two museum sites, the Japanese American National Museum, and the Huntington Library's Japanese Gardens. It examines the history of the sites and the curation of exhibits to determine the impact on Japanese identity and community within the Los Angeles area. Through ethnographic interviews and research, this thesis concludes that museums can be locally embedded cultural processes, where the ideas of identity and community are contested, challenging the authoritative and top-down operations of a museum as a public institution.

Defining The Historical Significance Of Eatonville Memorial Gardens, Caroline Amein

Honors Program Theses

Eatonville, Florida is the first all-Black incorporated town in the United States and the hometown of Zora Neale Hurston. This remarkable town is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Eatonville’s historic cemetery, however, is left out. This thesis examines why Eatonville Memorial Gardens was considered ineligible for the National Register and collects data to submit a new nomination. Through ethnographic interviews and archaeological and archival data, this work explores what historic Black cemeteries mean to their communities as well as our shared history. This work also hopes to answer the question of what is lost when a cemetery …

A Growing Dome In The Clouds Of Everest: An Applied Anthropology Project In The High Himalaya, Gary Mark Lesley

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Presented is a novel approach to addressing food insecurity within a remote indigenous community situated in the high Himalaya of Nepal. The village faces challenges in accessing fresh, affordable produce, particularly during harsh winter seasons. This threatens the community's food sovereignty and adversely affects the stability of the Sir Edmund Hillary School, a site of historical and cultural importance. Through the integration of indigenous knowledge and technological advancements, this APP details a strategy to augment local agriculture, drawing on applied anthropological methodologies. The genesis of this project stems from the creative leadership of the school principal and his vision for …

Simply Butter (One Pat At A Time), Maddie Mcsweeney

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Simply Butter (one pat at a time) is an investigation of food and intimacy through sculpture, installation, performance, printmaking, and recordkeeping. In this series of Happenings, I explore themes of love, loss, and empathy while dealing with emotions related to grief and mental health issues. I look to cultural phenomena and art history figures who are concerned with similar sentiments to make conceptual connections and inform my choices when creating this project. Drawn to silliness and the absurd, I use the rudimentary yet familiar form of a stick of butter to act as a monolithic stand-in for the emotionally, mentally, …

Mediating Authenticity: An Ethnographic Portrait Of Experience At U.S. Popular Music Festivals, Elizabeth Navarra Varnado

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This ethnographic study of U.S. popular music festivals subverts the impression of festivals as strictly ‘presentational’ live music events by utilizing a nuanced approach that is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, historical analysis, and participant interviews.

Interlocutors, drawn from the author’s personal network of festival attendees, musicians, and promoters, reflect on “particularly positive festival moments,” the social and emotional benefits of festivals, and the corporeality of festival aesthetics. Discourse and published media play a vital role in festival participants’ perception of the festival field and their place within it; therefore, this study draws inspiration from the tripartite focus of iconic festival …

Peoples Of India: The Use Of Craniometric Data To Distinguish A Separate Ancestral Group, Stephanie A. Craig

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Peoples of India come from an area with a long history of migrations into and out of the area. This area is considered the second most diverse genetically outside of Africa. Many would group these people as Asian due to the country’s location. However, when studies are done on the skeletal remains from this area, the remains tend to give results of mixed or indeterminate ancestry unless the analyst is familiar with identifying Peoples of India. This study aims to determine the Peoples of India as a separate ancestral group separated from Asians, Europeans, and Africans. To do this, …

Recovering The Nium Trail: A Journey Through Collaboration And Multidisciplinary Mapping, Crystal West

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study explores and maps an ancient, historic, and contemporary travel corridor that follows the San Joaquin River in the Central Sierra Nevada of California. It is called the Nium or People’s Trail by the North Fork Mono Tribe, the French Trail in historic archives, and the Mammoth Trail on contemporary US Forest Service maps. When I agreed to the request by Chairman Ron Goode of the North Fork Mono Tribe to map the Nium Trail, I was saying yes to a different, more broad and inclusive approach than I had previously taken as an archaeologist documenting archaeological sites and …

Following The Footprints Of Iron, Marve William Nelson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

With the advent of lead isotope analysis in the 1960’s, metallurgic studies within archaeology have grown from their infancy of organizing artifacts into typological categorizations into their own sub-discipline of archaeology: archaeometallurgy. Archaeometallurgic researchers conducts muti-phase, chemistry-based, studies to determine provenance of source metal ores as well as microchemical and metallographic analyses to identify smelting and forging techniques, culminating in multidisciplinary studies which detect shifting commerce pathways and correlate them to periods of significant cultural change. The results of these studies have offered evidence for both verification and refutation of various previous hypotheses of cultural evolution through cultural transmission. Archaeometallurgy …

Climate Change And Critical Agrarian Studies, Ian Scoones, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Amita Baviskar, Marc Edelman, Nancy Peluso, Wendy Wolford

Publications and Research

Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the …

Cultivating Legalism From Paper Proofs: Analysing Everyday Forms Of Claim Making By Van Gujjar Pastoralists In Uttarakhand, Mohammad Meer Hamja, Pranav Menon

Socio-Legal Review

Scholarship from South Asia has often highlighted how subaltern peoples partake in social movements as figures of resistance but rarely analyse their techniques of working the law in their favour to negotiate citizenship with the state. Such modes of articulating claims through affective gestures and vernacular legalese foster plural meanings to otherwise rigid legal categories and dogmatic bureaucratic interpretation. This paper draws upon socio-historical and ethnographic accounts of Van Gujjars to highlight how these pastoralists utilise myriad forms of paper proofs and documentary evidence to engage in claim making across the forests of Uttarakhand. Through an articulation of everyday tactics …

Social Determinants Of Health: Evaluation Using Rates Of Vision Screening And Follow-Up Examinations, Madeline Dyer

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Vision care is essential to the quality of life of young children, impacting them over the course of their lives. Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) affect the likelihood of a child having access to appropriate care specified by the Bright Futures. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of SDOH on the completion of vision screening and the rate of follow-up with an eye care provider when applicable. In addition, rates of instrument-based vision screening and recommended ophthalmology follow-up were compared with COI, a metric assessing the quality of resources available and the conditions that matter for …

“Muchakang Pangkalawakan”: Queering Engagements With Bakla Of The Philippine Tropics, Artemio P. Millo

Sociology & Anthropology Department Faculty Publications

The performance of participants in the Miss Gay Muchakang Pangkalawan [Miss Ugly Gay Universe] in Quiapo, Manila, reflects characteristics of the flamboyant and effeminate bakla. However, these stereotypical depictions may not always be consistent with how participants view themselves. This study argues that an introspective understanding of how participants make sense of their identity work engendered by ever-turning tropes reveals slippages that can liberate them from existing oppressive stereotypes. By utilizing personal narrative and ethnographic reflexivity, this study deconstructs the participants’ performances, revealing identity-making that may reinforce or resist dominant discourses on the bakla under which these narratives are …

Pharmaceutical Messianism And The Politics Of Covid-19 In The United States, Gideon Lasco, Vincen Gregory Yu, Nishtha Bharti

Development Studies Faculty Publications

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, public officials in the United States–from the President to governors, mayors, lawmakers, and even school district commissioners–touted unproven treatments for COVID-19 alongside, and sometimes as opposed to, mask and vaccine mandates. Utilising the framework of ‘pharmaceutical messianism’, our article focuses on three such cures–hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and monoclonal antibodies–to explore how pharmaceuticals were mobilised within politicised pandemic discourses. Using the states of Utah, Texas, and Florida as illustrative examples, we make the case for paying attention to pharmaceutical messianism at the subnational and local levels, which can very well determine pandemic responses and outcomes in contexts such …

Deciphering A Non-Meal: Pantawid-Gutom And The Everyday Negotiation Of Hunger In The Philippines, Gideon Lasco, Jhaki Mendoza

Development Studies Faculty Publications

Pantawid-gutom literally means “to bridge hunger” and refers to a range of food and non-food products and practices in the Philippines that allow people to survive in between “serious meals.” What does its existence as a liminal category between food/non-food or serious/non-serious meal signify, particularly for millions of Filipino families who regularly experience hunger? Drawing on fieldwork in low-income urban communities on Luzon Island, and from a review of the scholarly and popular literature, we use local conceptions of pantawid-gutom—hitherto overlooked in the scholarship—as a starting point for exploring the lived reality of food insecurity in the country. The efficacy …

‘Saving The Youth’: Children And Young People As Moral Subjects In The Philippines’ Punitive Drug Regime, Gideon Lasco, Luis Emmanuel A. Abesamis

Development Studies Faculty Publications

Background

The Philippines has one of the must punitive drug regimes in the world, as evidenced not just by Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war but previous anti-drug campaigns. This article examines the place of ‘the youth’ in the longstanding moral panic around drugs and drug policy in the Philippines.

Methods

This article uses critical discourse analysis to analyze figurations of young people across three distinct periods in the Philippines’ contemporary history: Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s early dictatorship (1972–1975), Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s presidency (2001–2010), and Rodrigo Duterte’s administration (2016–2022).

Results

In all three periods, young people were simultaneously invoked as a group that needs …

The Implications Of Waste Streams At Camp Au Train, Timothy J. Maze

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Archaeological remains from Camp Au Train provide an opportunity to understand sanitation methods during its use as a Civilian Conservation Corps camp and later used to house German Prisoners of War during World War II. Seven refuse features from this camp were excavated and their contents linked to functional locations within the camp in order to reconstruct waste streams across the site and to observe how military aspects of sanitation were implemented by an organization infamous for its emphasis on cleanliness, order, and hygiene. While the importance of sanitation is often mentioned by historians and archaeologists in research of these …

“Not Much Of A Job”: Everyday Life And Labor At Camp Au Train, Josef T. Iwanicki

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this thesis, I use data from Camp Au Train, a Civilian Conservation Corp camp in Michigan’s Hiawatha National Forest, as a case study to connect the everyday life of enrollees with dominant government narratives while including a focus on labor and the capitalist crisis of the Great Depression. Using the vantage point of work, play, study, and health, I integrate archaeological, historic, and photographic evidence to show contradictions between the enrollees’ real lived experience and the dominant perspectives of the CCC ‘authorities’ who organized their lives. I argue that to interpret these contradictions, the CCC needs to be connected …

Concepts And Measures Of Human Intelligence And Anthropology: A Systematic Review Of Academic Literature From 1930s To 2010s, Leilani Maldonado

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis explores the evolution of intelligence research and its contextualization within historical biases. Using a meta-analysis approach, the study examines word frequencies in academic literature spanning from the 1930s to the 2010s to identify shifting trends in intelligence discourse. Eleven search terms related to intelligence were analyzed to interpret changes in academic focus over time. The findings reveal significant shifts influenced by historical events, societal movements, and advancements in technology and methodology. From the prominence of IQ measures during World War II to the rise of cognitive science in the 1960s and the emergence of emotional intelligence in the …

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: An Anthropological Exploration Of Overdose Prevention Experiences And Perceptions Among People Who Use Drugs In Orlando, Florida, Maria De Los Angeles Ocando Monaco

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The ongoing overdose problem in the United States, particularly exacerbated by the widespread use of fentanyl, and polydrug use, represents a critical public health challenge. This thesis explores how people who use drugs (PWUD) in Orlando, Florida, are responding to the overdose problem in their community. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at a syringe services program in Summer 2023, I argue that PWUD in Orlando actively take measures to prevent overdose and overdose deaths but are faced with many obstacles that challenge their overdose prevention efforts. I examine overdose narratives of PWUD to show how factors preventing effective overdose prevention …

Curanderismo And Healing: Insights From Hispanic Young Adults, Allisa Castro

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Curanderismo is a holistic form of traditional medicine primarily used by Latin American populations and Hispanic communities in the United States. This type of care focuses on several aspects of health including physical, emotional and spiritual (supernatural). Hispanics are the largest ethnic minority population in the United States and yet healthcare access to this population remains limited by various barriers including lack of insurance, legal status, language, poverty, and other structural factors. Within this context, exploring the perceptions and role of traditional medicine, like curanderismo, as a form of healthcare becomes crucial in understanding and addressing the unique healthcare needs …