Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 Huli Response To Illness / Book Review, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

What diseases afRict the Huli people of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea? How are these conceptualized by them as illness experiences? How do their behavioral responses, including the utilization of both traditional and Western health services, flow from and affect these conceptualizations? And how are these processes grounded in the broader ecological, historical, social, and cultural contexts within which individual Huli make their decisions regarding illness?

Sorcery And Social Change In Melanesia / Book Review, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

In some ways, this collection of papers is a typical symposium volume. Organizationally, it consists of a core ethnographic case studies (originally presented at the 1979 and 1980 annual meetings for the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania) bracketed with an introductory essay and concluding discussion by the editors, Marty Zelenietz and Shirley Lindenbaum, respectively. It is atypical, however, in that it largely succeeds in avoiding the most common shortcomings of such collections.

"The New Guinea Highlands" Region, Culture Area, Or Fuzzy Set?, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

The criteria for delineating "the New Guinea Highlands," a fundamental category in Melanesian anthropology, are variable, vague, and inconsistently applied, with the result that there is little clarity or agreement with regard to its characteristics and its membership. So far as the literature is concerned, "the New Guinea Highlands" is a fuzzy set. The common resort to notions of "cores," "margins," or "fringes" is an attempt to preserve an essentialist approach but inevitably leads to the same confusion. The continued use of "the Highlands" as an analytic or theoretical construct carries the costs of misleadingly implied homogeneity, with marginalization of …

Language And Cultural Description, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

Beginning in the late 1950s, Charles Frake was among those (including Harold Conklin and Ward Goodenough) who founded the blend of cognitive psychology, descriptive linguistics, and cultural anthropology which came to be known as “the New Ethnography” or “cognitive anthropology.”

Exchanging The Past, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

In 1980-1982, Bruce Knauft and Eileen Cantrell conducted fieldwork among the Gebusi people of the remote Nomad region of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Then, "indigenous customs seemed robust as well as profound" (p.13), including one of the highest homocide rates in the world, rooted sorcery accusations derived from spirit medium seances.

Auyana, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

Sterling Robbins was one of four ethnographers who conducted fieldwork in the early 1960s as part of James B. Watson’s New Guinea Micro-evolution Project. As such he was unavoidably caught in the turmoil over how to deal with the “loose structure” of New Guinea highland societies.

Classifications In Their Social Context / Book Review, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

Since Durkheim and Mauss, the study of folk classification has developed along two main lines: the predominantly British and French "soocial constructionist" tradition, and the largely American "ethnoscience" approach, to use Roy Ellen's designations (p. 4). Ellen is referring to the continuing contrast in the anthropological literature between analyses of folk classification systems which view them as primarily reflecting structural, sociological, cosmological, or symbolic concerns, and those which concentrate on the more mundane orderings of nature which employ perceptual (usually morphological) criteria.

Growth And Structure Of The Lexicon Of New Guinea Pidgin / Book Review, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

New Guinea Pidgin (NGP) is the language of politics and the most widely used lingua franca in Papua New Guinea. It may also provide a crucial test case for theories of pidgin and creole languages and, more broadly, "for statements about the relationship between the internal and external history of language and that between linguistic variation and social stratification."

Grand Valley Dani, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

The Dani must by now be the most familiar of all New Guinea Highlands peoples to anthropologists and students alike. Through Robert Gardner_s evocative film, Dead Birds, Peter Matthiessen_s novelistic, Under the Mountain Wall, and Karl Heider_s numerous scholarly papers, books, and films, they have been portrayed in various ways, always fascinating and ever eluding our complete understanding.

A Question Of Comfort: Race, Whiteness, And The Creation Of Diverse, Inclusive, And Engaged Learning Environments, H. Elizabeth Braun

Open Access Dissertations

Most colleges and universities in the United States today claim that “diversity” is an important institutional value, but it is not always clear what this term means or how “diversity” is actually experienced and understood by students at predominantly white institutions. This ethnographic study examines a predominantly white liberal arts woman’s college in New England, applying data from participant observation, semistructured interviews, autoethnography, and textual data. My research addresses three intersecting areas of inquiry: the experience of students attending a predominantly white institution in relation to issues of race and racial identity, institutional practices related to race, “diversity,” and “culture,” …

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.

What Makes The Anthropology Of Educational Policy Implementation “Anthropological” ?, Edmund T. Hamann, Lisa Rosen

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Many of the roots of interdisciplinary educational policy implementation studies are anthropological. It follows that what constitutes an anthropology of educational policy implementation should be articulated. This chapter draws on the works of Bronislaw Malinowski, Frederick Erickson, and Joseph Maxwell, among many others to identity the anthropological contributions and prospective contributions to inquiry into the study of the interface between educational policy and practice.

As sociocultural theorists (e.g., Gutiérrez and Rogoff, 2003; Orellana, 2009) have recently asserted, “culture” is something one does, rather than something one has. That is, human beings produce, perform, and reproduce culture every day. Policy implementation …