Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

African Land Mammal Ages, John Van Couvering, Eric Delson

Publications and Research

We define 17 African land mammal ages, or AFLMAs, covering the Cenozoic record of the Afro-arabian continent, the planet’s second largest land mass. While fossiliferous deposits are absent on the eroded plateau of the continent’s interior, almost 800 fossil genera from over 350 locations have now been identified in coastal deposits, karst caves, and in the Neogene rift valleys. Given a well-developed geochronologic framework, together with continuing revision to the fossil record—both stimulated by the story of human evolution in Africa—and also to compensate for the variation in fossil ecosystems across such great distances, the AFLMAs are biochronological units defined …

The Gay Men Who Play With Their Hiv Status., Matthew I. Euzarraga

Capstones

• Since the 90’s a group of individuals known as Bug Chasers, predominately gay men have been playing a game of cat and mouse actively wanting to be caught and infected with HIV. This is a dive into the world of bug chasing.

A Multi‑Disciplinary Comparison Of Great Ape Gut Microbiota In A Central African Forest And European Zoo, Victor Narat, Katherine R. Amato, Noémie Ranger, Maud Salmona, Séverine Mercier‑Delarue, Stephanie Rupp, Philippe Ambata, Richard Njouom, François Simon, Tamara Giles‑Vernick, Jérôme Legoff

Publications and Research

Comparisons of mammalian gut microbiota across different environmental conditions shed light on the diversity and composition of gut bacteriome and suggest consequences for human and animal health. Gut bacteriome comparisons across different environments diverge in their results, showing no generalizable patterns linking habitat and dietary degradation with bacterial diversity. The challenge in drawing general conclusions from such studies lies in the broad terms describing diverse habitats (“wild”, “captive”, “pristine”). We conducted 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing to characterize intestinal microbiota of free-ranging sympatric chimpanzees and gorillas in southeastern Cameroon and sympatric chimpanzees and gorillas in a European zoo. We conducted …

The Video Camera Spoiled My Ethnography: A Critical Approach, Katherine Gregory

Publications and Research

As videography and other media technologies are normalized in the field of qualitative methods for the purpose of data collection, there is a growing need to discuss the benefits and limitations of these data collection tools. This article chronicles an ethnographic video study focused on the experiences of Muslim adults living in the Netherlands, and why the author opted to end the project. Issues focus on reckoning with the imperial gaze of the camera, performative behavior of participants before the camera and interdisciplinary tensions the researcher faced from conflicting trainings as a qualitative methodologist and media practitioner.

A New Twist On The “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay And Lesbian African Weddings In Democratic South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This essay examines the media coverage surrounding two African weddings of lesbian and gay couples in South Africa, as a lens onto the evolving cultural politics of black queerness in that country. Two decades after South Africa launched a world-leading legal framework for LGBTI protections, I argue that these media representations depict the growing inclusion of black LGBTIQ people as a process of bridging the supposed “gap” between homosexuality and African culture. This new “bridging the gap” script seemingly rejects the older, dominant script portraying homosexuality as intrinsically “un-African.” But I argue that it instead reproduces the “un-African” script in …

¿Cómo Traducimos "Ni Una Más" Al Inglés?: Latin American Manifestation Of The Phenomenology Of Femicide, And The United States’ Subsequent Internal Neglect, Suemi Mendez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to tackle two components in analyzing the phenomenological concept of femicide, most simply known as the killing of women because they are women through structural violence and oppression. First, it will develop its deployment within the Latin American framework as it has been adapted to function within the regional lexicon, both socially and legislatively. This assessment will serve to address the successes and failures thus far in tackling femicide as the location with the highest statistics globally. Through this foregrounding, it will lead into how this revised deployment of femicide fits into the context of Global North …

Dietary Development And Nutritional Ontogeny In Gorilla Beringei : A Multi-Layered, -Omics Approach, Emma C. Cancelliere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In species who consume folivorous diets, immature individuals must contend with the challenges of extracting nutrients from fibrous foods before dietary adaptations and strategies are fully developed. Additionally, immatures have distinct nutritional needs to support their stage-specific metabolic and biophysiological requirements. To meet these stage-specific needs, while constrained by underdeveloped feeding strategies and digestive capacities, immatures may adopt distinct diets better suited to their specific developmental context. However, where dietary modification is constrained by low dietary diversity or landscape homogeneity, it is unclear how immature individuals compensate through alternative strategies. In turn, little is known about the nutritional and life …

“The Gifts Of Enemies”: The Acteal Massacre, Sociedad Civil Las Abejas And Mexico’S Ejército Zapatista De Liberación Nacional And Humanitarian And Development Aid During The Low-Intensity War, 1997–1999, Maria R. Hart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about a faction of the Sociedad Civil Las Abejas who, as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), were housed at the INI IDP camp in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, in 1997-99 after the Acteal massacre on December 22, 1997. This faction is of interest because they protested the remaining members of Sociedad Civil Las Abejas (Civil Society The Bees) social movement at Acteal and the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, often better-known as the Zapatistas), because the movement required them to reject governmental humanitarian aid and development programs or lose their membership in the social …

Many Forms Of Black Death: Coal Extraction, Transnational Activism And The Value Of Life In Colombia, Oscar H. Pedraza Vargas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After the murder of the president and vice president of the coal union by paramilitaries in the department of Cesár, Colombia, the union is left adrift. Its fragility is only heightened when the person who decides to take over, is killed six months later. The union has been vocal on their critique of environmental destruction produced by coal and argues that their criticism is part of the reasons why they were targeted. Not far from there, in the department of Guajira, the conglomerate in charge of Cerrejón, the largest open-pit coal mine of South America, wants to divert a creek …

Relationship Of Posterior Intracranial Venous Structures In Homo Sapiens And Handedness, Brianne Finley

Theses and Dissertations

The transverse sinus spans the endocranial surface of the occipital bone and ultimately transmits deoxygenated blood to the sigmoid sinus and jugular vein en route to the heart. This paired sinus tends to be more defined on either the left or right side in human crania. Left and right dominance, or the use of one side of the body more than the other, leaves traces on the human skeleton. Methods to determine handedness upon examination of various elements of the human skeleton mostly focus on the use of the extremities, while little research exists examining the skull for evidence of …

Archaeology Or Crime Scene? Teeth Micro And Macro Structure Analysis As Dating Variable, Jessica A. Vincenty

Student Theses

Simple methods to aid in the determination of forensic or archaeologic relevancy of skeletonized remains have been researched since the 1950s. With advances in microscopic imaging techniques and machine learning computer data analysis methods the relevancy of decontextualized, comingled remains has room for improvement. This thesis is a study done to pioneer a new approach to analyzing dental skeletal remains to determine forensic relevancy.

Archaeological dental samples collected from the ancient city of Ur in modern day southern Iraq in addition to modern dental extractions were processed for scanning electron microscopy imaging. Archaeological and modern samples displayed different surface and …

Market Integration And Soil-Transmitted Helminth Infection Among The Shuar Of Amazonian Ecuador, Theresa E. Gildner, Tara J. Cepon-Robins, Melissa A. Liebert, Samuel S. Urlacher, Joshua M. Schrock, Christopher J. Harrington, Felicia C. Madimenos, J. Josh Snodgrass, Lawrence S. Sugiyama

Publications and Research

Background

Soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections have many negative health outcomes (e.g., diarrhea, nutritional deficiencies) that can also exacerbate poverty. These infections are generally highest among low-income populations, many of which are also undergoing market integration (MI; increased participation in a market-based economy). Yet the direct impact of MI-related social and environmental changes on STH infection patterns is poorly understood, making it unclear which lifestyle factors should be targeted to better control disease spread. This cross-sectional study examines if household infrastructure associated with greater MI is associated with lower STH burdens among Indigenous Ecuadorian Shuar.

Methods

Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, And La Futura Cuir, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

This essay discusses how Puerto Ricans are imagining and building new futures out of a political context of material and affective ruin that is not guided by the promise of a modernist future or the palliative anticipation of a sovereignty to come. It examines how the politics of ruination might lead to a “hopeful pessimism” that could break with the nostalgic immobility of the arrested present. It concludes by exploring the possibilities of an emerging cuir (queer) futurity that breaks with raced and gendered scripts of postcolonial sovereignty to envision a new postdisaster future.

Bones, Burials, And The Riddle Of Truth: Reconstructing The Past Through What Has Been Left Behind, Jelena M. Begonja

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mortuary archaeology is known to be the study of human remains and burials. The primary focus of this work has been to study all of the elements associated in burials to learn more about the burial practices and rituals in a group’s culture, however, there is much more potential in studying burial sites than just learning about a group’s burial rituals and practices. This thesis will demonstrate that it is indeed possible to make different inferences about the rest of people’s daily lives, and the truth, based from materials found in studying burials alone. For some groups without much existing …

From The Unspoken To The Verbalized: Different Ways Of Communication And Their Relationship To Culture In A Traditional Lakota Narrative "Ikto Na Wičhá Ha Kiŋ”, Or “Ikto And The Racoon Skin”, Liliana R. Boladz-Nekipelov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master’s thesis is a discourse analysis of a traditional Lakota story, " Iktó na wičhá ha kiŋ”, or “Ikto and the Racoon Skin”, one of the 64 stories included in the “Dakota Texts”, which were collected by Ella Deloria at three Lakota reservations in 1930s as a part of Franz Boas’ language documentation project. The thesis is also an attempt to examine different communicative strategies employed within the narrative and their relationship to culture, as well as the relationship between form and the transfer of meaning and culture and meaning. The analysis is conducted using Dell Hymes’ ethnographic approach …

Revisiting Juchitán: Witnessing An Indigenous Mexico Within The Latin American Archive, Michelle G. De La Cruz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout archives of photographic collections, as one discovers the focused, artistic selective process of images that become part of a photographer’s collection, one must venture further and ask: will these choices be decisively remembered by an individual or collective audience or actively be dismissed, misunderstood, and denied presence? For my master’s thesis, I will be analyzing Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s photobook, Juchitán de las Mujeres, a photo-collection of the women-empowered indigenous society in Oaxaca, Mexico which erupted during Latin American photography’s prime in the 20th century, turning away from a deeply exoticized past and towards a celebration of Hispanism as …

Climbing Performance And Ecology In Humans, Chimpanzees, And Gorillas, Elaine E. Kozma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to establish the effects of limb proportions and body size on the climbing performance of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas by assessing three aspects of climbing performance: 1) energetic cost, 2) fatigue, and 3) canopy access. Whether hominins were arboreal, and to what extent, is a matter of hot debate. Specifically, the relative prominence of vertical climbing in the locomotor repertoires of various hominin taxa remains a contested issue. Over the course of human evolution, both the body size and relative hindlimb length of hominins has increased. These traits are often linked to bipedality. Long forelimbs, in contrast, …

Shadow Standards And The Logic Of Costs: Care, Stewardship, And Data In U.S. Community Health, Margarite J. Whitten

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the delegation of responsibility for providing health care to particular categories of marginalized populations in the United States in the absence of a uniform and universal health care system. It explores how the U.S. federal government governs patient populations at a distance by mandating that healthcare providers collect, produce, and report on patient data. Drawing from eighteen months of ethnographic research in Massachusetts clinics for the homeless and the frail elderly between 2014-2015, I argue that when marginalized patients are unable to satisfy the neoliberal ideal of self-governance to maintain their health in cost-effective ways, providers are …

Reclaiming Indiana: The Politics Of Crisis Amid The Failures Of Liberal Capitalist Modernity, Chris Grove

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnography examines grassroots political responses to the economic crisis that began in 2008, foremost in the US Midwest, which arguably laid the groundwork both for the election of President Donald Trump and presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders. President Obama launched his $787 billion stimulus plan in Elkhart, Indiana, in early 2009. At the height of the crisis, unemployment skyrocketed from four to 20 percent in Elkhart, and it became central to struggles over the political direction of the US. With few safety nets, Elkhart residents struggled to meet their basic needs, creating conditions for political organizing on both …

Paper House: The Revolution, The Disappeared, And The Historicity Of Lebanon, Elsa Saade

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will be an attempt to reenact events in relation to the disappeared and the Lebanese civil war, with the help of newspaper cuts, oral history, theories on historical writing, memories, and books on Lebanon. As a prospective historian, the writer will be tapping into the internal event of thought processes and meaning of the past, as advised by R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of History. (Collingwood, 1946 ) That critical inquiry will only be at the service of understanding the present from the lens of a self-reflecting inquisitor that has faced many silences in a past …

Snapshots Of Human Anatomy, Locomotion, And Behavior From Late Pleistocene Footprints At Engare Sero, Tanzania, Kevin Hatala, William E. H. Harcourt-Smith, Adam D. Gordon, Brian W. Zimmer, Brian G. Richmond, Briana L. Pobiner, David J. Green, Adam Metallo, Vince Rossi, Cynthia M. Liutkus-Pierce

Publications and Research

Fossil hominin footprints preserve data on a remarkably short time scale compared to most other fossil evidence, offering snapshots of organisms in their immediate ecological and behavioral contexts. Here, we report on our excavations and analyses of more than 400 Late Pleistocene human footprints from Engare Sero, Tanzania. The site represents the largest assemblage of footprints currently known from the human fossil record in Africa. Speed estimates show that the trackways reflect both walking and running behaviors. Estimates of group composition suggest that these footprints were made by a mixed-sex and mixed-age group, but one that consisted of mostly adult …

Redefining Gender & Gender Expression Through Self-Perceptions & Self-Reflections, Deborah O. Ade

Publications and Research

As societies evolve policies are developed to recognize and formalize these changes. One current context for change is New York City and the concept that has undergone significant change is gender. Many individuals no longer identify with the traditional binary distinction of male or female. Subsequently, new gender categories have emerged (e.g., bi-gender, pan gender, androgynous). Indeed, a total of 31 gender categories have been recognized by the NYC Commission of Human Rights. The goal behind this acknowledgement is to encourage equitable treatment and respect of all individuals within the workplace. NYC businesses that do not accommodate individuals identifying with …

Latinxs/Hispanics In The Us, Daniel Nieves

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Media Exposure And Language Attitudes On Grammaticality Judgments, Chun-Yi Peng

Publications and Research

While traditional 1st wave variationist sociolinguists resist citing media exposure as a source of language variation, this experimental study demonstrates that Mainland Mandarin speakers with reported exposure to Taiwanese TV were more likely to rate syntactic constructions found in Taiwanese Mandarin as grammatically acceptable. Data were collected through an online survey consisting of acceptability judgments, written-guise attitude tasks, reported viewing habits, and demographic questions. Principle Component Analysis was deployed to reduce data dimension, which allows for the identification of the key personality traits linked to Taiwanese Mandarin that contribute to the media effects. The results suggest an intertwined relationship in …

Anthropology 240 Essentials Of Archaeology, Timothy Pugh

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Food Frights: Covid-19 And The Specter Of Hunger, Maggie Dickinson

Publications and Research

Worries over widespread food shortages in the first few weeks of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States eclipsed the real hunger crisis on the horizon—one intimately tied to already existing inequalities. In the midst of the pandemic, the specter of hunger is haunting the same people it always has—the poor, the undocumented, low wage workers, the un- and under employed. It is not our supply systems that are breaking down and causing hunger, but our systems for ensuring people can access the food that exists which have been broken for a long time.

Paleopathological Research In Continental China: Introduction To The Special Section, Elizabeth Berger, Kate Pechenkina

Publications and Research

We set out to assemble this special issue of IJPP with three goals in mind: (1) to familiarize Anglophone readers with research on paleopathology conducted by Chinese scholars; (2) to enhance interest in paleopathological research among Chinese scholars, and to foster the use of differential diagnosis as the key mode of paleopathological analysis; and (3) to initiate integration of pathological analysis of human skeletal collections with historical records documenting early medical practices, epidemics, development and age-related diseases, and demographic records.

The collection of papers that follows present new data, from a range of time periods and geographic and social contexts, …

The Public Reckoning: Anti-Debt Futures After #Rickyrenuncia, Sarah Molinari

Publications and Research

This essay argues that the summer 2019 mobilizations in Puerto Rico and the renewed demand for a debt audit help to imagine anti-debt futures that disrupt the terms and temporalities of public debt and indebted lives. The essay discusses one form of debt resistance-a comprehensive citizen debt audit-as central to deepen the process of public reckoning marked by #RickyRenuncia and to build upon the landscapes of protest and solidarity emerging in its wake.

Exploring Sexual Dimorphism Of The Modern Human Talus Through Geometric Morphometric Methods, Rita Sorrentino, Maria Giovanna Belcastro, Carla Figus, Nicholas B. Stephens, Kevin Turley, William Harcourt-Smith, Timothy M. Ryan, Stefano Benazzi

Publications and Research

Sex determination is a pivotal step in forensic and bioarchaeological fields.Generally,scholars focus on metric or qualitative morphological features,but in the last few years several contributions have applied geometric-morphometric (GM) techniques to overcome limitations of traditional approaches. In this study,we explore sexual dimorphism in modern human tali from three early 20th century populations (Sassari and Bologna, Italy; NewYork, USA) at intra- and interspecific population levels using geometric morphometric (GM) methods.Statistical analyses were performed using shape,form,and size variables.Our results do not show significant differences in shape between males and females, either considering the pooled sample or the individual populations. Differences in talar …

The Phylogenetic Relationships Of Middle-Late Miocene Apes: Implications For Early Human Evolution, Kelsey D. Pugh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The living great apes, humans, and their fossil relatives (family Hominidae) are among the most intensively studied mammalian groups, yet many aspects of their shared evolutionary history are not well understood. Phylogenetic relationships of fossil great apes are poorly resolved and the positions of many fossil taxa relative to crown ape clades are debated. Moreover, the relationships of Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, and Ardipithecus to hominins are disputed, with some authors suggesting that alternative positions within Hominidae are more likely. Analyzing the position of these taxa within the broader context of the Miocene ape fossil record is thus necessary to …