Anthropology Commons^™

Language, Life, And Indigenous Knowledge: Cultural Contexts In Advanced Kaqchikel Maya Language Education Approaches To Indigenous Language Revitalization In Kik'aslemal Ri Kaqchikela': An Advanced Kaqchikel Maya Language Textbook, José Israel Herrera

Journal of Maya Heritage

Abstract. This article examines the relationship between Indigenous language revitalization and the continuity of socially embedded systems of knowledge through the case of advanced Kaqchikel Maya language education. Drawing upon scholarship on Indigenous pedagogies, linguistic anthropology, and Indigenous epistemologies, the article explores how culturally grounded approaches to language learning contribute not only to the development of linguistic competence but also to the reproduction of memories, values, and intellectual traditions. Particular attention is devoted to Kik'aslemal ri Kaqchikela': An Advanced Kaqchikel Maya Language Textbook, whose thematic organization and collaborative development illustrate broader processes of knowledge production and cultural continuity. Rather than …

Editor’S Introduction, Michael D. Pante

Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints

No abstract provided.

Reframing Kabyle Resistance In Marc Garanger's Femmes Algériennes 1960, Lea Wong

Journal of Amazigh Studies

This article examines the identity photographs taken by Marc Garanger as a site of Kabyle women’s resistance in the Algerian War. Over the course of 1960, Garanger moved between various wartime displacement camps across Kabylia, photographing indigenous people for the production of identity cards––a crucial from of colonial population control. Since its publication, Garanger’s Femmes algériennes has become an ambiguous symbol of resistance in the Algerian War, largely due to the subjects’ perceived antagonistic posture and gaze. This article takes a forensic approach to analyzing Kabyle women’s wartime adornment, uncovering a new framework for conceptualizing Algerian women’s agency grounded in …

Representations Of Women Safeguarding Living Cultural Heritage For The Future In 21st Century Kabyle Cinema, Sheila Petty

Journal of Amazigh Studies

This article examines cinematic representations of how some Kabyle women relate to and shape claims to Amazigh (Kabyle) land, language, tangible and intangible cultural heritage; how they navigate and safeguard cultural memory; and how this is depicted in three Kabyle films: La Langue de Zahra/ Zahra’s Mother Tongue (Fatima Sissani, France/Algeria, 2011); Nnuba (Sonia At Qasi-Kessi, Algeria, 2019; and Azar/Racine/Root (Malik Bourkache Daoud, Algeria, 2023). The article also probes how the filmmakers use tangible cultural heritage (documentary film) to document, transpose, and transmit intangible cultural heritage (memories, poetry, song, stories). Through an analysis of the narrative form and cinematic style …

Listening To Taos Amrouche, A Kabyle Woman’S Singing Voice In A Context Of Exile And Immigration : Between A Search For Intimacy And Independence, Melek Chekili

Journal of Amazigh Studies

This article analyzes the vocal, musical and literary strategies Algerian Kabyle singer and writer Taos Amrouche employs to determine the place voicing holds for her in contexts of colonization, exile and migration. I demonstrate through her singing career and her 1975 autobiographical novel l’Amant Imaginaire, that within the ambivalences stemming from her birth in Tunisia to exiled Kabyle Christian converts and her emigration to France, Taos Amrouche’s singing voice provides a space where those ambivalences can co-exist. By being adamant about keeping her artistic activity close to her body and explicitly referring to sex in her writing, she exerts …

Skeletons Vs. Mummies: Osteological Trauma On Bog Bodies As A Measure For Cultural Change In Ancient Europe, Miranda Hoodenpyl

University Honors Theses

Bog bodies are some of the most well known archaeological finds in the world, and are preserved human remains found in wetlands. Researchers use the information stored in the bones of bog skeletons and mummies to learn about cultural lifestyles, travels, diet, and diseases throughout time in Northern Europe and the British Isles. Through multiple cultural changes and migration, the "bog body phenomenon" has remained an unusual treatment displayed throughout time. This literature review looked at skeletal trauma on bog remains to identify cultural change over time in Northern Europe and the British Isles, spanning the Neolithic, Bronze, Iron, and …

Ka Here Tāngata:1 Mātauranga And Te Ao Māori In Biocultural Kākāpō (Strigops Habroptilus) Conservation Approaches, Sophie Perfetto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This master's thesis examines conservation as a form of living cultural heritage practice through the co-management of kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus), a critically endangered parrot and taonga species in Aotearoa New Zealand. Situated within ongoing histories of colonial dispossession and Western frameworks of land and species management, contemporary kākāpō conservation is shaped through the partnership between the Department of Conservation’s Kākāpō Recovery Programme and Ngāi Tahu. Drawing on semi-structured interviews collected during fieldwork from July to August 2025, this study examines how institutional partnerships structure decision-making, authority, and responsibility in contemporary conservation governance. Findings demonstrate that Māori knowledge systems …

Reseeding Relations: Comparing Museum And Indigenous Seed Sharing & Rematriation Protocols In The Midwestern United States, Madeline G. Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) paved the way for the repatriation of ancestors and certain cultural objects to Indigenous communities, museums still struggle to address other forms of cultural returns. Heritage seeds, those which hold cultural significance to Indigenous peoples, held within museum collections perpetuates the colonization of Indigenous lifeways. This research examines rematriation as an Indigenous form of cultural return better suited to address these needs than limited repatriation models. I analyze how museums are working to create rematriation processes for their collections which reflect diverse Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies through a three-tiered approach: …

The Case For The Exclusion Of Exclusion: Intellectual Property, Masculine Legal Reason, And The Ethics Of Care, Ragya Shoukry

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that current legal ideals of objectivity and neutrality are historically gendered and inseparable from the development of capitalist property relations and imperial expansion. It traces origins that begin with early modern witch hunts and Francis Bacon’s empiricism, where a new “scientific rationality” emerges alongside intensified patriarchal violence. The thesis then examines John Locke’s labour-based justification of property and the figure of the rational individual, showing how this framework legitimizes enclosure, dispossession and colonial appropriation under the guise of improvement and development. Building on this foundation, the analysis turns to moral psychology and how its allegedly universal stage …

Tel Shor: Jewelry, Dress And Cosmetic Articles From Three Persian Burials, Amir Golani, Eli Yannai

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The excavation northwest of Tel Shor exposed the partial remains of a Persian-period cemetery. Within the burial site were three intact tombs, two belonging to adult females and one to a child of undetermined sex. The burial goods include a rich corpus of jewelry, comprising earrings and finger rings, pendants, beads for necklaces and a few dress and cosmetic articles. The good state of preservation of the tombs allowed the funerary items to be studied in their archaeological context. Two of the tombs were exceptionally rich in finds, indicating the high social status of the deceased.

Tel Shor: The Glass Vessels, Tamar Winter

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

Among the glass vessels from Tel Shor is a cast bowl adorned with beaded decoration, dated to the late Hellenistic period, which contributes to the currently meager data on the distribution of this quite rare type. A third-century CE bottle, unearthed alongside a Roman-period clay bottle, supports the attribution of the tomb in which they were found to the Roman period.

Tel Shor: Stamped Amphora Handles, Donald T. Ariel, Tania Panagou

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The excavation at Tel Shor yielded three closely dated stamped amphora handles: two Rhodian, dating to 158–137 BCE, and one Knidian, dating to the third quarter of the second century BCE.

Tel Shor: A Cemetery From The Persian Period And Finds From The Late Chalcolithic–Roman And Ottoman Periods In The Western Jezreel Valley / תל שור: בית קברות מהתקופה הפרסית וממצאים מהתקופות הכלקוליתית המאוחרת–הרומית והעות׳מאנית במערב עמק יזרעאל, Eli Yannai

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

A salvage excavation c. 50 m northwest of Tel Shor uncovered a cemetery dating to the Persian period, as well as two Iron Age graves and one Roman-period grave that overlies a Persian-period cist grave. Pottery sherds dating from the late Chalcolithic period, the Early, Intermediate and Middle Bronze Ages and the Iron Age were also found, indicating settlement at the site from the fourth millennium BCE through the Persian period. Above the Persian-period cemetery stratum were a settlement surface and refuse heaps dating from the Hellenistic period. The Roman-period grave may indicate that the area continued to serve as …

Social Innovation In The Peacebuilding Sector, Michelle Helman, Phd, Katherine Ronderos, Mariafernanda Burgos-Ariza

Peace and Conflict Studies

Social innovation is an expanding practice in the peacebuilding sector. In this article, three peace scholar-practitioners reflect on our experiences as peacebuilders and consider the utility, tensions, and possibilities for peace and social innovation in theory and in practice. We draw insights gleaned through a focus group workshop with peacebuilding colleagues and highlight three case study examples from Colombia, the Philippines, and Kenya, each demonstrating the challenges and opportunities of social innovation in the peace sector. In doing so, we offer a reimagining of- and recommended action steps to engage innovation through a collaborative, feminist design approach. This article contributes …

Tinjauan Buku What Is Religious Authority? Menyemai Sunnah, Merangkai Jamaah, Amri Mahbub Alfathon

Antropologi Indonesia

A new conceptualization of religious authority has emerged from Ismail Fajrie Alatas’ What is Religious Authority. Through his ethnographic study, Alatas provides a rich and detailed account of the formation of this authority by examining the life history of Maulana Habib Luthfi bin Yahya. Additionally, he meticulously illustrates the migration of the Ba’Alawi community from Hadramaut to Indonesia, a region that has become a melting pot of Islamic traditions and a site for articulating the Sunnah and building communal networks. Alatas’s discussion of the formation of religious authority is fundamentally anchored in three key concepts: authority, the Sunnah-community relationship, …

Kanak-Ish Misfits: Queer Imaginaries, Racialized Borders, And The Politics Of Care In Berlin, Germany, Faruk Seref

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines queer Muslim experiences of border politics, racialization, and care in Berlin, Germany. By formulating bordering as a domineering and oppressive practice of boundary-making, I study how global bordering mechanisms shape and disrupt structures of care, caring, and being cared for. With an intersectional focus on race, gender, sexuality, and sex, I argue that borders are simultaneously materialized and challenged in varying localities, including the nightclub, the queer scene, the diasporic neighborhoods, and households. Ultimately, viewing collective care as fundamental to survival, healing, resistance, and building non-punitive lifeworlds, I theorize the counter-hegemonic practices of queers of color through …

Conga Santiaguera: A Century Of Innovation And Competition, Nick Herman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Santiago de Cuba is home to the island’s biggest, oldest, and most famous carnival.  Any local resident will confirm that “sin conga no hay carnaval (without conga there is no carnival).” In Santiago, conga refers to a vibrant street procession, the music that drives it, and the ensemble that makes the music.  Conga Santiaguera: A Century of Innovation and Competition presents a musical history of the conga from roughly 1910 to 2010.  This project, https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/conga employs an eBook, musical analysis, oral histories, and audiovisual media to show how the conga has been constantly reinvigorated by innovation, competition, and Afro-Diasporic …

Selama Ibu Dan Bayi Aman: Lotus Birth Dan Negosiasi Keselamatan Dalam Praktik Kebidanan Di Indonesia, Dyah Pratitasari

Antropologi Indonesia

This article reads lotus birth—the practice of leaving the umbilical cord intact until it separates naturally—as an ethnographic event that illuminates how biomedical power operates in contemporary Indonesian midwifery. Drawing on reflexive ethnography of two births attended by the author as a doula—one at a maternity clinic in South Tangerang (2020) and one at a home birth in South Jakarta (2022)—the article argues that the phrase "as long as mother and baby are safe" does not function as a neutral condition. Rather, it operates as Gramscian hegemonic common sense: appearing self-evident and beyond question, while simultaneously determining which …

Kitchen Table Press: A Case Study Of Regression To The Neoliberal Mean, Alaina Disalvo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the idealistic founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980 and its slow downfall, culminating in the cession of ownership of the Press to a university in 1992. It traces the ideological development of Kitchen Table Press’s key founders, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde, and their respective relationships to the ideologies of other renowned feminist figures of the era, specifically June Jordan and Adrienne Rich. It examines the history of the Press through historical, intersectional, affective, and socialist lenses. This thesis argues that neoliberal pressures can bend even the most radical organizations away from their …

Narrative Roots - What We Inherit, What We Tell, What We Become: Intergenerational Storytelling, Meaning-Making, And Mental Health, Adam Sholder

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This capstone synthesis explores how the family stories we inherit and the stories we tell across generations shape who we become, with particular attention to their impact on identity and mental health. Drawing on narrative identity theory, reflective practice, and relational understandings of family life, it introduces the Recursive Narrative Integration Model, which positions intergenerational storytelling as both a method of inquiry and a mechanism of meaning-making. Informed by a recursive process of creative and reflective writing, this synthesis approaches storytelling not only as an object of study, but as a lived and generative practice through which experience and narrative …

Making Noise Through Law: Indigenous Legal Mobilisation Against A Power Plant In “French” Guiana, Pierre Auzerau

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

In so-called “French” Guiana, or Guyane, the Kali’na village of Atopo Wipi has fought for years against a hydrogen power plant being built on their land. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 in Guyane and Western Europe, where I collaborated with various stakeholders to support Atopo Wipi’s resistance to the power plant, my research focuses on the legal dimensions of the Kali’na’s struggle to protect their land. Specifically, this article examines how the Kali’na navigated different normative frameworks, including international human rights standards and French law, to fight the project. Through this analysis, I show how the …

“Ese Dia Que Se Va El Patron An Hecho Fiesta”.* Historicities Of Successful Resistance Against Hacienda Bosses Among The Kukama (Peru, 1933-1945), Arno R. Holl

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This paper analyzes two cases of resistance by Kukama workers within the debt slavery system of habilitación in the Peruvian Amazon during the first half of the twentieth century. It discusses the similarities and differences between the two cases, and positions the workers and their accounts of events and agency within the historical, social and cosmological framework of the time and region. Through the examples studied here, the hierarchies, power dynamics, spirituality, lifestyles, traditions, and cultural changes that shaped Kukama communities at the time become visible from an emic perspective. The paper places special emphasis on how historical events are …

Dr. Kacey Grauer Faculty Spotlight, Katelyn Trimble

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

An interview with Dr. Kacey Grauer of the University of Denver's Department of Anthropology.

Khirbat Khuwweikha (Kafr Kanna): Hiding Complexes From The Roman And Early Byzantine Periods In The Jewish Galilee, Yinon Shivtiel, Dror Barshad, Dina Avshalom-Gorni, Nili Ahipaz, Ruthy Lewis-Bloom, Yonatan Adler, Ram Bouchnick, Yarden Pagelson, Uri Berger

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

Decades of research on Roman-period hiding complexes in the Galilee have identified 85 such complexes to date. Like the hiding complexes found in Judea, they were used as places of refuge during periods of distress under Roman rule in the country. Extensive archaeological excavations conducted in the hiding complex at Khirbat Khuwweikha, near Kafr Kanna and northwest of Nazareth, have yielded impressive finds, including pottery, glassware, metal items, coins, an ostracon and bones. Such a large quantity of diagnostic finds is rare in Galilean hiding complexes, and the assemblage attests to the use of the complex by Jews during three …

La Maquiladora De Sueños Is Where The “American Dream” Ends: The Socio-Cultural Impact Of Hai(T)Ijuanenses In The United States-México Borderlands, Pedro Aleman Perfecto

Master's Theses

Historically, Tijuana has been the destination for migrants who have been left out from the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world. The city is at the epicenter of globalization where many transit, leave, and arrive. Sometimes considered a “third country” due to its binational and bicultural identity with its sister city, San Diego, California. The growing number of Haitian refugees that arrived in Tijuana in the mid 2010s to seek asylum in the United States overwhelmed the city’s infrastructure and left the Haitian community vulnerable, yet it created new opportunities and reshaped new identities in the region. …

Kicau Kericau: The Chirps And Warbles Of A Bird-Human Story, Airien Ludin

Masters Theses

This thesis tells the tale of bird-human relationships and what it means to live alongside one another, subverting the hierarchical view of humans as above birds inherited from colonial history. It asks how the practice of illustration can function as a site of Two-Eyed Seeing, where scientific and local knowledge are held together as an entangled narrative. It also examines how mendongeng (storytelling), as I have experienced it within Indonesian culture and everyday contexts, can help us understand birds as a companion species with their own agency.

This project takes two forms: first, a picture book titled Sun Bird …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …

The Ever-Changing Immigration Experience: An Oral History On The Impacts Of Immigration For Connecticut Latine Residents / Una Experiencia En Cambio Constante: Una Historia Oral De Los Impactos De La Inmigración Por Habitantes Latines En Connecticut, Sam S. Arevalo-Hoefer

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper is an oral history study focused on Latine immigration experiences in Connecticut from six different individuals sharing their stories and perspectives on the immigration process. I focus on the act of testimony as a source of grassroots knowledge and attempt to spread this notion of community wisdom further through the creation of zines (small-batch, self-published, non-commercial shortform magazines) as a means of making information more accessible and reaching a larger audience on a local level.

I use oral histories as a method of research that can achieve a deeper, more human understanding of how macro level political decisions …