Anthropology Commons^™

Talking With The Dead From Southern Mexico: Tracing Bioarchaeological Foundations And New Perspectives In Oaxaca, Ricardo Higelin Ponce De León, Guy David Hepp

Anthropology Faculty Publications

In recent years, bioarchaeological research has emerged as one of the principal tools for studying diverse aspects of ancient society through the analysis of human remains. Oaxaca, Mexico is a culturally diverse region of Mesoamerica that today boasts at least sixteen discrete ethnolinguistic groups. Bioarchaeology in Oaxaca has traditionally focused on the Late Formative and Classic period (500 BCE–800 CE) Zapotec city of Monte Albán, and on its hinterland. Largely descriptive, these studies provided basic discussions of health, nutrition, and funerary offerings. Beyond the Valley of Oaxaca, much less comprehensive bioarchaeological research has been undertaken to date. Never before have …

Chunchucmil’S Urban Population, Scott R. Hutson, Aline Magnoni, Traci Ardren, Chelsea Blackmore, Travis W. Stanton

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Conclusions, Scott R. Hutson

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Architectural Group Typology And Excavation Sampling Within Chunchucmil, Scott R. Hutson, Aline Magnoni, Bruce H. Dahlin

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Map Of Chunchucmil, Scott R. Hutson, Aline Magnoni

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Connections Beyond Chunchucmil, Traci Ardren, Scott R. Hutson, David R. Hixson, Justin Lowry

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction: The Long Road To Maya Markets, Scott R. Hutson

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Marketing Within Chunchucmil, Scott R. Hutson, Richard E. Terry, Bruce H. Dahlin

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In The United States (Berkeley, Ca: University Of California Press, 2013), Rosalynn A. Vega

Anthropology Faculty Publications

In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Seth Holmes uses ethnographic detail to explain how social processes naturalize structural violence in the U.S./Mexico migrant labor system. In essence, the book serves as an “ethnographic witness” to how racism and the neoliberal global economy undergird the everyday suffering of Mexican migrants. Holmes’ book is the result of five years of ethnographic research among the Triqui people of Oaxaca, Mexico. During this time, Holmes lived with Triqui indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca, accompanied migrants during their illegal border crossing through the Arizona desert, and was jailed with his informants. In the United …

Racial I(Nter)Dentification: The Racialization Of Maternal Health Through The Oportunidades Program And In Government Clinics In México, Rosalynn A. Vega

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Using an ethnographic approach, this article examines the role of racialization in health-disease-care processes specifically within the realm of maternal health. It considers the experiences of health care administrators and providers, indigenous midwives and mothers, and recipients of conditional cash transfers through the Oportunidades program in Mexico. By detailing the delivery of trainings of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) [Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social ] for indigenous midwives and Oportunidades workshops to indigenous stipend recipients, the article critiques the deployment of “interculturality” in ways that inadvertently re-inscribe inequality. The concept of racial i(nter)dentification is offered as a way of …

Commodifying Indigeneity: How The Humanization Of Birth Reinforces Racialized Inequality In Mexico, Rosalynn A. Vega

Anthropology Faculty Publications

This article examines the humanized birth movement in Mexico and analyzes how the remaking of tradition—the return to traditional birthing arts (home birth, midwife‐assisted birth, natural birth)—inadvertently reinscribes racial hierarchies. The great irony of the humanized birth movement lies in parents’ perspective of themselves as critics of late capitalism. All the while, their very rejection of consumerism bolsters ongoing commodification of indigenous culture and collapses indigeneity, nature, and tradition onto one another. While the movement is quickly spreading across Mexico, indigenous women and their traditional midwives are largely excluded from the emerging humanized birth community. Through ethnographic examples, the article …

Exchange Networks From Close-Up: The Case Of Lipari Obsidian, Andrea Vianello, Robert Tykot

Anthropology Faculty Publications

A systematic study on obsidian tools in Calabria and Sicily carried out by the authors have revealed the uniqueness in the patterns of production, exchange and consumption of Lipari obsidian. The study has concentrated on the Middle Neolithic primarily, with other Neolithic and Bronze Age contexts recognised at a later stage in the research since many contexts, especially in Sicily, have been excavated by pioneering archaeologists, some over a century ago, or were mislabelled. The chronology is Early Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, with very few materials dating Middle Bronze Age. A review of chronological contexts is in progress, which …

Where The Water Sheds: Disputed Deposits At The Ends Of The Danube, Tanya Richardson

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Objecting (To) Infrastructure: Ecopolitics At The Ukrainian Ends Of The Danube, Tanya Richardson

Anthropology Faculty Publications

In southern Ukraine, two hydraulic infrastructures continue to exist despite environmentalist campaigns that have exposed them as fragile, broken or unprofitable. The Danube-Dnister Irrigation Project (DDIS), a Soviet mega-project that diverted water from the Danube and turned the Sasyk estuary into a reservoir, receives state funding despite a 1994 ban on its use for irrigation. The Bystre Shipping Canal, built in 2004 despite domestic and international opposition, is losing money but continues to operate. These cases exemplify the material politics of infrastructuring in which infrastructure is understood as an antagonistic process of assembling networks of humans and nonhumans rather than …

Colonial Subjugation And Human Rights Abuses: Twenty-First Century Violations Against Brazil’S Rural Indigenous Xukuru Nation, Marcia Mikulak

Anthropology Faculty Publications

This article addresses the struggle of rural Xukuru indigenous peoples in Pesqueira, Pernambuco, Brazil as they organize to stop historical violence against them and work to regain their constitutional right to their ancestral lands. The article illustrates what a single researcher working along-side rural people's and NGOs can do to make change in an oppressive state. With the birth of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 and the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, member states have often provided rhetorical validity to human rights documents and conventions; a rhetoric that is often ignored upon return to …

Hacia La Justicia Sociocomunicativa: Trabajo De Campo Multi-Situado, Teoría Transnacional E Hiper-Auto-Reflexividad, Rosalynn A. Vega

Anthropology Faculty Publications

En este escrito, reconozco que las narrativas del padecer se despliegan dentro de ámbitos discursivos y ofrezco varios métodos para avanzar hacia la justicia sociocomunicativa. Primero, sugiero llevar a cabo el trabajo de campo “multi-situado” y que este método etnográfico sea respaldado por teoría multisituada. Enfatizo la importancia de la hiper-autoreflexividad al intentar disminuir las inequidades estructurales que puedan influir al antropólogo en su obtención de narrativas del padecer y su interpretación semiótica de ellas. Analizo unas narrativas breves que surgieron de mi trabajo de campo sobre el parto humanizado en México para demostrar cómo el biopoder condiciona lo que …

Settlement-Size Scaling Among Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems In The New World, W. Randall Haas, Cynthia J. Klink, Greg J. Maggard, Mark S. Aldenderfer

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Settlement size predicts extreme variation in the rates and magnitudes of many social and ecological processes in human societies. Yet, the factors that drive human settlement-size variation remain poorly understood. Size variation among economically integrated settlements tends to be heavy tailed such that the smallest settlements are extremely common and the largest settlements extremely large and rare. The upper tail of this size distribution is often formalized mathematically as a power-law function. Explanations for this scaling structure in human settlement systems tend to emphasize complex socioeconomic processes including agriculture, manufacturing, and warfare-behaviors that tend to differentially nucleate and disperse populations …

Producing Goods, Shaping People: The Materiality Of Crafting, Julia A. Hendon

Anthropology Faculty Publications

The study of craft production has a long and venerable history in archaeological research on ancient societies. In this chapter, I consider the crafting of useful and desired things from a materiality perspective by looking at the interactions between the craftpersons, the materials with which they work, and the ways that their end products are valued in society. I use two examples: working with fibers by the Maya of Mesoamerica and with metals by the Moche of Andean South America. These are two very different kinds of materials whose characteristics affect how one interacts with them. Crafting was a part …

The Archaeology Of Disjuncture: Classic Period Disruption And Cultural Divergence In The Tuxtla Mountains Of Mexico, Wesley D. Stoner, Christopher A. Pool

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Reconstructing human interaction systems has been a major objective of archaeological research, but we have typically examined the topic in a conceptually limited manner. Most studies have—intentionally or unintentionally—focused on how trade, communication, conquest, and migration foster cultural similarities over long distances. It has largely been a positivistic endeavor that exclusively features groups linked through a single network but glosses over how alternative networks intersect with the former through common nodes. Models of long-distance interaction have largely ignored variation in how external influences are negotiated across space within the receiving region. We adapt Arjun Appadurai’s concept of disjuncture to conceptualize …

How The Commons Was Changed: Politics, Ecology, And The History Of Floodplain Institutions, Lisa Cliggett

Anthropology Faculty Publications

A review of The Contested Floodplain: Institutional Change of the Commons in the Kafue Flats, Zambia. By Tobias Haller. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013.

Mapping Indigenous Self-Determination In Highland Guatemala, Patricia A. Mcanany, Sarah M. Rowe, Israel Quic Cholotio, Evelyn Caniz Menchu, Jose Mendoza Quic

Anthropology Faculty Publications

The challenges of building research partnerships around community mapping are critically reviewed in reference to the politics of heritage and identity among Indigenous Maya communities in highland Guatemala. This paper discusses how the goals and interests of archaeologists meshed with those of indigenous mappers in five communities that chose to participate in the mapping program. Based on responses to a survey about the mapping project, participants report joining in order to enhance self-determination, gain cartographic literacy, and improve life opportunities. Community authority over the project and a broad base of participation (including young and old, male and female) proved essential …

Environmental Justice And Community-Based Participatory Research In Texas Borderland Colonias, Adelita G. Cantu, Margaret A. Graham, Ann V. Millard, Isidore Flores, Meaghan K. Mugleston, Iris Y. Reyes, Ester C. Carbajal

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Objective

An innovative academic-community partnership studied daily decisions in communities of mostly Spanish-speaking, low-income residents of colonias in Hidalgo County, TX, about risk of exposure to fish contaminated by PCBs at an Environment Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site.

Design and Sample

The team used focus group interviews with colonia residents and content analysis to assess knowledge of risk related to the Superfund site, the Donna Reservoir and Canal System.

Results

(1) many lacked knowledge of the Superfund site contamination; (2) a few participants fished at the lake, knew people who did so, and consumed the catch, but most participants feared …

On The Limits Of Liberalism In Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict And Conservation In Ukraine's Danube Delta, Tanya Richardson

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Participatory management techniques are widely promoted in environmental and protected area governance as a means of preventing and mitigating conflict. The World Bank project that created Ukraine’s Danube Biosphere Reserve included such ‘community participation’ components. The Reserve, however, has been involved in conflicts and scandals in which rumour, denunciation and prayer have played a prominent part. The cases described in this article demonstrate that the way conflict is escalated and mitigated differs according to foundational assumptions about what ‘the political’ is and what counts as ‘politics’. The contrasting forms of politics at work in the Danube Delta help to explain …

Putting A Price On Zen: The Business Of Redefining Religion For Global Consumption, Joshua A. Irizarry

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Over the past several decades, Zen has become a mark of global cosmopolitanism. Largely divorced from its religious context, the word “zen” appears in many languages with a remarkable diversity of accepted meanings and usages. In this paper, I outline the historical and cultural factors which have contributed to the dramatic semiotic transformation of Zen in the popular imagination and international media over the past century. I demonstrate that ideas about Zen have evolved through strategic cultural and linguistic associations, and show how the resulting polysemy has led to Zen becoming an ideal marketing byword—one that is freely …

A Postscript—Changing Configurations Of Gender And Family In The Philippines: Does Liberation Theology Provide A Cultural Framework For The Study Of The Family?, Kathleen Nadeau

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rapprochements Between Theology And The Social Sciences: A Round Table Discussion On Women And The Catholic Church, Agnes Brazal, Eleanor Dioniso, Kathleen Nadeau, Emma Porio, Mary Racelis

Anthropology Faculty Publications

This event was convened by Budhi in order to pursue more thoroughly and with greater depth some points of discussion that were raised in the Symposium on the Filipino Family: Catholic and Women’s Perspectives, which was organized by the Department of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University (AdMU), and held on September 13, 2014.

Prior to the round table discussion (RTD), the panelists were given an outline of questions, which were prepared by Dr. Patricia Lambino, Mr. Michael Liberatore, Ms. Rachel Sanchez, members of the Theology Faculty of the Loyola Schools, AdMU, and Dr. Jean Tan, editor of Budhi.

Four of …

Re-Visiting The Field: Collaborative Archaeology As Paradigm Shift, Patricia A. Mcanany, Sarah M. Rowe

Anthropology Faculty Publications

The emphasis of the JFA on field methods resonates strongly with current disciplinary interest in multivocality and participatory research. In this new epistemology of inclusiveness, communities play an active role in the production of archaeological knowledge as well as in the conservation of cultural heritage. From the perspective of archaeologists trained in the U.S. who conduct research in Latin America, we historicize changes in the triadic relationship among archaeologists, contemporary communities, and things of the past. This examination focuses on the evolving social context of archaeological practice. The social milieu within which archaeology is conducted is explored further by reference …

Neoliberalism, Interrupted. Edited By Mark Goodale And Nancy Postero. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. 317, Rosalynn A. Vega

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Neoliberalism, Interrupted presents Latin America as a global laboratory for new forms of governance, economic structures, and social mobilization. The volume’s title signals a repeated theme throughout the chapters: in Latin America, neoliberalism is simultaneously being challenged and naturalized. At present, Latin America is a site of social, political, and economic experimentation on the one hand and intractable structural vulnerability, violent resistance, and retrenchment on the other. New forms of contestation render other potential ideologies for radical social change unthinkable.

Multiple Osteochondromas In A 16th–19th Century Individual From Setúbal (Portugal), Nathalie Antunes-Ferreira, Eugénia Cunha, Carina Marques

Anthropology Faculty Publications

An archaeological survey at the church of Nossa Senhora da Anunciada (Setúbal, Portugal) uncovered the remains of 92 individuals. Historical and archaeological data suggest that the inhumations occurred between 1531 and 1839. The present work reports the pathological features of a mature male individual exhibiting multiple osseous bony projections and bone deformity, mainly affecting the metaphyseal and adjacent diaphyseal regions of the long bones. The macroscopic and the radiological analyses of the lesions suggest multiple osteochondromas as the most probable diagnosis. This is the first archaeological case of this disease known on the Portuguese territory and in southern Europe.

Working With Clay, Rosemary A. Joyce, Julia A. Hendon, Jeanne Lopiparo

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Evidence from sites in the lower Ulua valley of north-central Honduras, occupied between a.d. 500 and 1000, provides new insight into the connections between households, craft production, and the role of objects in maintaining social relations within and across households. Production of pottery vessels, figurines, and other items in a household context has been documented at several sites in the valley, including Cerro Palenque, Travesía, Campo Dos, and Campo Pineda. Differences in raw materials, in what was made, and in the size and design of firing facilities allow us to explore how crafting with clay created communities of practice made …