Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Native American Organic Garden: Using Service Learning As A Site Of Resistance To The Boarding School Tradition, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

As educators, we owe it to our students to enable them to transgress structural impediments and to create sustainable alternatives from the margins of the industrial agro-food system. Policies of assimilation, allotment, and enclosure of the Native American commons and ecosystems brought devastation to Native cultures. Dependence on government commodities replaced Native food sovereignty and contributed to malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes as diets responded to corporately produced and processed foods. Young people often feel disempowered and ask how they might confront such formidable forces as corporate control of our agro-food system, destruction of natural resources, and threats to human health. …

Renegotiating Gender And Class In The Berry Fields Of Michoacán, Mexico, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

This article examines the renegotiation of gender and class in a rural Mexican community where economic crisis in the sugar industry led foreign agribusinesses to promote blackberry and raspberry production for export and hire primarily women as berry pickers. Analysis focuses on the transition from a sugar economy where mostly men worked in the cane fields to non-traditional agricultural exports when women entered agricultural waged labor in unprecedented numbers. This restructuring of the regional economy raises important questions regarding the marginalization of differentiated subaltern groups and the nature of new sets of power relations between transnational agribusinesses, berry growers, and …

Reflections On Reflections: Dialectical Commentaries On Gender And Class In Ntae Production, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

No abstract provided.

"Like An Ox Yoke": Challenging The Intrinsic Virtuosity Of A Grassroots Social Movement, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalization fostered an upsurge of grassroots social movements in Latin America that sought alternatives to increasing poverty and social exclusion. Social movement scholars often interpret these movements as morally noble models of democracy given their claims to social justice and equity. My research examines the forced seizure of a closed Mexican sugar mill and establishment of a cooperative, worker-run factory by a grassroots movement whose cultural politics aimed at creating more democratic processes. Yet in 2009, after 11 years of success, movement leaders declared the mill bankrupt and shut it down. The façade of unity presented …

From Sugar To Blackberries: Restructuring Agro-Export Production In Michoacán, Mexico, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

In recent years, economic crisis in the sugar industry and the closure of an important sugar mill in Michoacán, Mexico, have fostered the entry of transnational agribusinesses that contract with local growers for blackberry production. Land concentration is under way as wealthy growers rent ejido (agrarian-reform) land to grow berries and small-scale growers shift to less capitalized berry production or migrate out of the region. An analysis of the impact of this transition, part of the globalization of the agro-food system, on campesinos, workers, and their communities reveals that a general improvement in the economy has been accompanied by increased …

Ritual And Ceremony In A Contemporary Anishinabe Tribe, Julie Pelletier

Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of Social Justice: From Global Transformation To Local Resistance, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

The global transformations that enveloped Latin America over the past decade resulted in uneven consequences for diverse social groups. Scholars witness an increasing tension between a macroeconomic agenda concerned with profitability and local community access to employment and sustenance. As neoliberal reforms intensify Latin America's integration into the world economy, they may adversely impact local communities. Should local people lose their ability to obtain basic rights, will they be able to effectively challenge the neoliberal model? In the absence of more adequate attention to social justice, it is probable that occurrences of local resistance in defense of these rights will …

Global Competition And Community: The Struggle For Social Justice, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

The above two quotations embody disparate worldviews with regard to the neoliberal project that has enveloped much of Latin America in the past decade. Globalization intensifies the region's integration into the world economy through neoliberal reforms such as market opening, privatizations, and rationalization of production. These reforms are transforming rural societies, raising important questions concerning policies that selectively favor new strategies for capital investment and production oriented toward market expansion, as they marginalize surplus workers and "inefficient" forms of production. This paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the contradictions brought about by globalization and local people's struggles to …

Culture, Ideology, And Community: The Dynamics Of Accommodation And Resistance To Restructuring Of The Mexican Sugar Sector, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

Neoliberalism has provoked profound and diverse consequences for rural Mexico, escalating the agricultural crisis for producers and workers in various sectors. Against this context, recent improvements in the sugar sector raise interesting questions about its relative economic success under the neoliberal paradigm. This article contrasts two cane zones--one that experienced economic recovery and another affected by abandonment of the sugar mill--to argue that in the interstices of modernizing neoliberalism, cane growers and mill workers who were subjected to politics of exclusion struggle to ensure the survival of their culture, community, and economic livelihood.

Restructuring The Mexican Sugar Industry: Campesinos, The State, And Private Capital, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

Under the new agrarian policies and economic rules of Article 27, implemented in January 1992, the customary patters of political patronage and loyalty in the countryside no longer operate as before. Campesions now are challenged to think and act like entrepreneurs who assume investment risks in order to successfully participate in competitive markets. But most possess neither the economic resources nor worldviews to be the “campesino entrepreneurs” sought by the government or by the leaders of the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC) and the Confederación Nacional de Productores Rurales (CNPR), the two campesino confederations affiliated to the ruling PRI. This contradiction …

A Method For Investigating Tv Effect On Passivity-Activity Of Crees, Gary Granzberg

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

With the recent rise to prominence of materialistic emphasis in anthropology, there has been a corresponding development of new methodology. An example is presented here of how new methodology can be applied to the study of a Cree Indian community in Canada. This study examined the effect of television on the passivity-activity dimension in development of children.

Naming Practices In South America, John Bregenzer

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

On the basis of previous investigation of modes of address and social structure, this study attempts to show that certain naming practices in South America are related to indicators of a postulated individualism-communalism continuum of the societies. The results suggest a relationship between some naming practices and a continuum based on mean size of the local community.

The German Paradox (A Problem In National Character), Robert F. Spencer

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

ABSTRACT - There has been considerable argument since World War II over whether the concept of a national character, such as might distinguish the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians, or any other contemporary national group, has any reality in fact. The present paper, operating on the assumption that there is a distinctive German character, one essentially different from that of the English, the Italians, the French, or the Russians, seeks to show, in terms of the processes of culture defined by anthropology, where German uniqueness lies. This, it is contended, rests not so much in factors of native psychology and …

Modern Pottery-Making In San Anton, Mexico, Gordon J. Hadden

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

The principal contemporary pottery-making techniques which are recognized for the Mexican area are; handmodeling, building, molding with convex molds, molding with concave molds, molding with concave "vertical halves" molds, modeling with revolving "moldes," and wheel-throwing (Foster 1955: 3) . We can attribute this diversity of pottery-making techniques to the blending of pre-Conquest native practices with those of the postConquest Spanish.

Pueblo Indian Religion, Medicine, And The Good Life, Mary Elizabeth Hamlin

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

While a public health education trainee with the Division of Indian Health, United States Public Health Service, I became interested in the socio-religious structure of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. During the nine month field training period spent in the Albuquerque area I investigated the existing ethnological literature concerning the Pueblo Indians. Research investigation in the area of the relationship between religion and medicine was accomplished by study of literature and field observation and inquiry. My concern was not so much the epidemiological determinants of disease and its prevalence. Rather it was with the "behavior of the people in …

Preference For Male Children In Japanese And American Society, Joyce Aschenbrenner

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

Is a preference for children of a given sex in a society primarily a result of cultural values, of social requirements or of individual needs? Although it is impossible completely to separate these types of influence, since social change may modify cultural traditions, and social interaction and cultural values influence individual needs. perhaps some assessment of the relative importance of various social and cultural phenomena involved in sex preference in a society can be attempted.

The present study is an exploratory treatment of the nature and degree of sex preference in two societies - Japanese and American - and a …

The Ethnological Use Of A Health Questionnaire, Nancy Way Lienke

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

In the summer of 1962 the population of Grand Portage Chippewa Indian Reservation was brought under review to determine the possible utility of the Cornell Medical Index Health Questionnaire (CMI) in the examination of psychosocial patterns. The use of the questionnaire was part of an investigation of the cultural concepts of health and disease in Grand Portage community. The CMI, therefore, was administered in the context of an ethnological study, and it should be considered in this inquiry as an instrument for studying the socio-cultural dimensions of disease rather than as a method of gathering traditional epidemiological data.

This paper …

A Cross-Cultural Evaluation Of Festinger's Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance, Harold E. Nelson

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

The purpose of this paper is to attempt an evaluation, in cross-cultural terms, of Leon Festinger's Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, as a research tool. The specific problem to be treated is a consideration of the extent to which dissonance theory can be made applicable in varying situations in diverse cultural settings. Prior to an exposition of methodology, a short abstract of the hypothesis and some of its ramifications is appropriate.

Some Problems In Minnesota Chippewa Acculturation, Jerome S. Stromberg

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

The "Indian Problem" is a term frequently used without precise definition. It serves, perhaps, to bring to the mind of the general public conditions of poverty, backwardness, drunkenness, disrespect for the law, and lack of education and community organization among the Indians. An objection to this approach is that it does not provide adequate or systematic understanding of the basic nature of this "problem," but refers rather to the easily observable external manifestations. The "Indian Problem" approach also seems to attribute to all Indians an inherent tendency toward socially unacceptable behavior. A more profitable approach is to identify some of …

Economy And Protein Malnutrition Among The Digo, Luther P. Gerlach

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

In short, even where protein malnutrition is primarily a result of poor environment, economy, and technology, other, often less obvious, traditional cultural patterns must be taken into account in any development and improvement program. If kwashiorkor is to be eliminated satisfactorily, and if contingent problems are to be kept to a minimum, these other patterns must often also be modified.

The importance of traditional cultural patterns is perhaps best illustrated by an example of a people who suffer from protein malnutrition primarily because of them. The Digo tribe of coastal Kenya and Tanganyika, among whom this writer conducted anthropological field …

Carl Bodmer's Paintings As Ethnographic Documents, Joan Rupp

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

No abstract provided.