Anthropology Commons^™

The Fast And The Furious, Sharon Lomurno

Sharon L Lomurno

The Fast and the Furious

Wednesday night I had received a tip from Eric Altman of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society. The report was coming from an area about 2 hours away from me and he couldn’t get to it and asked if I wanted to take it over. I said heck yeah and I called the witness with the number Eric provided.

The witness claimed he was out in the field walking his dogs when the dogs became frightened and bolted back to the house. He saw a large ape-faced beast pacing back and forth just behind the pines that …

Journalism In A Pr World, Michael I. Niman Ph.D.

Michael I Niman Ph.D.

Mike Niman discusses the future of journalism in a PR-dominated communication environment. In particular, he examines the migration of talent from journalism to the PR industry, the collapse of mainstream journalism and the role of an emergent alternative media as American journalism goes through metamorphosis from what it was to what it could become. Journalism is a social good that should equip people to understand and resist spin. Niman argues that mainstream American journalism, rather than rising to this challenge, has transparently succumbed to serving as an arm of the corporate PR industry, thus laying the groundwork for its own …

Territorializing Indigeneity And Powwow Markets, Blaire Gagnon

Blaire Gagnon

North American powwows are presented by organizers and presumed by society at large to be Native events. Research has rarely considered the processes by which powwows become places or the role of territorialization in that process. This article examines the socio-spatial practices powwow organizing committees employ to construct powwows and their arts and crafts markets as places from undifferentiated space and the responses to these practices. I suggest that powwow committees construct powwow space as a form of sovereign political space from which they can manage relations with multiple constituencies and in which contemporary conceptions of Nativeness are negotiated.

Indigenismo From Below? Carlos Castaneda, New Age Anthropology And Identity Politics, Ageeth Sluis

Ageeth Sluis

This paper explores the intersections between Carlos Castaneda’s work on shamanism, indigenismo, and larger changes within the field of anthropology from the 1960s to 1980s. Castaneda introduced a large readership to Mexico at a time when the Americas saw pronounced socio-political and cultural changes. Despite criticism by fellow anthropologists, Castaneda's bestselling books became instrumental in constructing new indigenous identities, a magical Mexico, and new directions in anthropology. This paper seeks to understand Castaneda within a larger historical context of the historical trajectories of indigenismo and changes in gender and race identity politics both in Mexico and the U.S. due to …

Engendering S2013tatus And Value In The Powwow Art Market, Blaire Gagnon

Blaire Gagnon

This article examines the relationship between people and objects in the powwow arts and crafts market. Over the past century, the field of Indian art developed a system of valuation that employs the "negative relationship" to create a hierarchy of people, objects, and markets. Central to this system are regimes of value associated with art and commodity. I argue that the presence of the mass-produced makes it possible for artisan-vendors to employ the negative relationship to define, value, and make sustainable the artistic in the powwow market context. Ultimately, this marks artisan-vendors and mass-produced vendors as position-takers with the Indian …

Palestinian Refugees, The Nation, And The Shifting Political Landscape, Randa Farah

Randa R Farah Dr.

This article briefly examines the historical causes that led to the uprooting of the Palestinians in 1948, who today represent one of the longest and largest refugee situations in contemporary history. It then draws on field research on refugees in Jordan to trace some of the pertinent political and ideological shifts since the Palestinian Nakba. Its emphasis is on refugee camps, approached here as palimpsests refracting different historical periods, which for the purpose of this article are divided into: the Nasserite period in the 1950s and early 1960s, the heyday of the Palestinian national liberation movement, beginning in the mid-1960s, …