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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh
The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh
Michael D Sharbaugh
Water sources in the United States' New England region are laden with arsenic. Particularly during North America's colonial period--prior to modern filtration processes--arsenic would make it into the colonists' drinking water. In this article, which evokes the biocultural evolution paradigm, it is argued that colonists offset health risks from the contaminant (arsenic poisoning) by ingesting copious amounts of seven spices--cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, vanilla, and ginger. The inclusion of these spices in fall and winter recipes that hail from New England would therefore explain why many Americans associate them not only with the region, but with Thanksgiving and Christmas, …
The Shanti Sena “Peace Center” And The Non-Policing Of An Anarchist Temporary Autonomous Zone: Rainbow Family Peacekeeping Strategies, Michael I. Niman Ph.D.
The Shanti Sena “Peace Center” And The Non-Policing Of An Anarchist Temporary Autonomous Zone: Rainbow Family Peacekeeping Strategies, Michael I. Niman Ph.D.
Michael I Niman Ph.D.
This article utilizes ethnographic methods and government documents to examine the self-policing and peacekeeping strategies of the Rainbow Family, a nonviolent acephalous intentional community that holds massive weeklong gatherings around the globe. It is a case study that examines the efficacy of these methods, comparing them to those traditional police agencies employ under similar conditions. It contextualizes these strategies by examining other utopian and anarchist communities and movements such as Critical Mass bike rides. This study demonstrates how smiling, chanting, listening, social pressure, and social capital all play into forming a more effective and less violent approach toward peacekeeping.
The Epistemology Of Ethnography: Method In Queer Anthropology, Margot D. Weiss
The Epistemology Of Ethnography: Method In Queer Anthropology, Margot D. Weiss
Margot Weiss
This essay explores methodological dilemmas in queer anthropology by reviewing three recent queer ethnographies: Mary Gray's Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America; Mark Padilla's Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic; and Gloria Wekker's The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. The essay aims to illuminate the epistemology of queer studies more broadly by focusing on a key paradox of ethnographic method: the binary of theory and data that is simultaneously made and unmade in ethnographic research and writing. In a newly transnational queer studies, ethnography …