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Consuming Appalachia: An Archaeology Of Company Coal Towns, Zada Komara
Consuming Appalachia: An Archaeology Of Company Coal Towns, Zada Komara
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
Material culture is an understudied aspect of social life in Appalachian Studies, the multi- disciplinary investigation of social life in the Appalachian region. Historically, material culture in the region has been largely studied for its semiotic properties, decoded as a tangible symbol of “a region apart,” lagging behind the rest of America in terms of moral, mental, economic, and social development. Critical material studies from archaeology and other disciplines paint a different picture, however, and construct a region as American as any other. This study utilizes discourse analysis of material rhetoric about Appalachia and archaeological and oral historical data from …
“To Nurture Something That Nurtures You”: Care, Creativity, Class, And The Production Of Urban Environments In Deindustrial Michigan, Megan L. Maurer
“To Nurture Something That Nurtures You”: Care, Creativity, Class, And The Production Of Urban Environments In Deindustrial Michigan, Megan L. Maurer
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
In this dissertation I investigate how gardeners and beekeepers in a small, deindustrial city in Michigan used their activities to produce their environments. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I consider what kind of labor gardening is. For residents of Elmwood, gardening was a way to care for households, communities, and ecosystems. Furthermore, this care was performed through a type of creative, material labor that served to address forms of alienation experienced by these individuals. While all sorts of Elmwoodites gardened, they did so in ways that were specific to their experiences of race and class. These experiences, in …