Anthropology Commons^™

L’Imaginaire Du Poisson Amoureux Chez Les Romancières Francophones De La Caraïbe, Christiane Ndiaye

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The criticism has rarely studied the Caribbean sentimental novel. This article examines some of the terms of the writing of love among some writers of the Caribbean (Thérèse Herpin, Irmine Romanette, Marie Berté, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau, Marie Chauvet, Marie-Célie Agnant, Kettly Mars, etc.) in order to identify significant configurations. Indeed, while novelists incorporate several characteristics of the canonical sentimental novel, we can also detect in these texts miscegenation semiotics which link them both to the sentimental novel as a genre, to the realistic classic novel, and to the conventions of exotic literature and tales. Thus emerges in this corpus …

Soleil, Sexe Et Vidéo: La Comédie Populaire Aux Antilles, Françoise Naudillon

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The comedy of manners presented in the form of play or in the form of sketches or playlet by the medium of videos and DVDs is a phenomenon that develops in Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana, but also in France. These productions are the link between communities in the Creole area (Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana) and the outside (metropolitan France and diaspora). They will be analyzed for their popular and scholarly features between erudite comedy and farce, between traditional and postcréolitaire cultural affirmation, between Creole and French, between Italian theatre and yardplay, between creole comedy and vaudeville, between negropolitan diaspora and …

Rediscovering Reo: Reflections On The Life And Anthropological Career Of Reo Franklin Fortune, Caroline Thomas

Pacific Studies

Reo Fortune’s legacy to anthropology has been overshadowed by his relation- ships with friends and colleagues, many of whom came to see him as difficult. Professional differences and personality clashes pervaded his career. Despite this, he was once regarded as the foremost anthropologist of his era. Fortune’s contribution to anthropology is reflected in his major publications and journal articles that illustrate the diversity and complexity of his fieldwork.

Australian Aboriginal Ethnometeorology And Seasonal Calendars, Philip A. Clarke

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

This paper uses a cultural anthropological approach to investigate an indigenous Australian perspective on atmospheric phenomena and seasons, using data gained from historical records and ethnographic fieldwork. Aboriginal people believe that the forces driving the weather are derived from Creation Ancestors and spirits, asserting that short term changes are produced through ritual. By recognizing signals such as wind direction, rainfall, temperature change, celestial movements, animal behaviour and the flowering of plants, Aboriginal people are able to divide the year into seasons. Indigenous calendars vary widely across Australia and reflect annual changes within Aboriginal lifestyles.

Enquêtes Occultistes : Les Policiers Antillais Face Au Surnaturel, Françoise Cévaër

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Being rational and Cartesian, the detective novel is often bound by powerful constraints which seem not very compatible with the supernatural and the fantastic often defining West Indian writing. Through the analysis of Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique (1988) and Haitian Gary Victor’s Les cloches de la Brésilienne (2006), we will nevertheless see how well they work together, the irrational taking hold of the detective novel, leading paradoxically to the progressive elimination of Cartesian practices and challenging an exclusively rational portrayal of the world.

Ethnology And Indigenism In The Brazilian Northwest Amazon, Robin M. Wright

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

Article review of De Volta ao Lago de Leite. Lasmar, Cristiane. Sao Paulo: Edusp/ISA/NuTI. 2005. 285 pp., illustrations, maps, references. RS37,00 (paper). ISBN 85-7139-621-3. [www.editoraunesp.com.br].

Cidade do Indio. Andrello, Geraldo, Sao Paulo: Edusp/ISA/NuTI 2006.445 pp., illustrations, map, tables, references, R$54,00. (paper) ISBN: 85-7139-659-0.[www.editoraunesp.com.br]

Becoming A Real Woman: Alterity And The Embodiment Of Cashinahua Gendered Identity, Cecilia Mccallum

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

As they grow, Cashinahua boys and girls acquire gendered human agency through their embodied experiences and the conscious work of their kin and close affines. Men and women come to occupy specific relations with the interior and the exterior of the social domain they construct through their daily productive and consumptive activities, such that women are associated with the former and men with the latter in the constitution of sociality. A classic ethnological depiction might say that, in the first instance, relations with the exterior are conducted by men, take the form of predation or of exchange and use the …

Comparative Studies And The South American Gran Chaco, Isabelle Combes, Diego Villar, Kathleen Lowrey

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

No abstract provided.

Puyo Runa: Imagery And Power In Modern Amazonia, Marc A. Brightman

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

Book review of Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia. Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 336 pp., 29 figures, 3 maps, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-252-03239-X (cloth), 0-252-07479-3 (paper).

The Napo Runa Of Amazonian Ecuador, Evan Killick

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

Book review of The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador. Michael Uzendoski. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 216 pp., 12 figures, 3 maps, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-252-07255-3.

Guest Editor's Note, Gerald Sullivan, Sharon W. Tiffany

Pacific Studies

PACIFIC STUDIES

SPECIAL ISSUE: The Gang of Four: Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, Reo Fortune, and Margaret Mead in Multiple Contexts

Narrative, Voice, And Genre In Margaret Mead’S Coming Of Age In Samoa, Sharon W. Tiffany

Pacific Studies

My contemporary reading of Coming of Age in Samoa explores Margaret Mead’s experimental ethnography as a textual artifact whose social history may be interpreted within a framework situated in gender, time, and place. Mead’s ethnography appeared to reinforce consumer-culture representations of female alterity and “free-love” in the South Seas, yet her text challenged these popular images with a radical counternarrative. Mead’s case study approach to the problem of adolescence, as well as her fieldwork photographs, created a narrative and visual space that questioned the dominant anthropological discourse of her day. Mead’s woman-centered book, combined with her publisher’s astute marketing strategies, …

Of External Habits And Maternal Attitudes: Margaret Mead, Gestalt Psychology, And The Reproduction Of Character, Gerald Sullivan

Pacific Studies

Some critics have thought of Margaret Mead’s research in culture and person- ality as a mechanical reduction of character types to child-rearing techniques. However, a closer reading of her work reveals that, by 1938, Mead understood character to arise in the social and communicative interactions between caregivers and their charges. For Mead, techniques such as swaddling were powerful means by which caregivers communicated attitudes to children, but those same techniques were not sufficient to either form a child’s character or produce an attitude within a caregiver. This article takes up the examination of this more psychologically dynamic Mead. It attends …

Dreams Of Fortune: Reo Fortune’S Psychological Theory Of Cultural Ambivalence, Roger Ivar Lohmann

Pacific Studies

Reo Fortune’s first book, The Mind in Sleep, published in 1927, considers dreams in which one’s attitudes contradict waking opinions. Fortune was keenly aware of his own conflicting perspectives and abhorred ethnocentrism. He argued that rejected beliefs remain subconsciously. Individuals hold contradictory beliefs using two capacities: logical and emotional representation and connection. The former is more accessible when awake, the latter in dreams. Fortune’s subsequent ethnographic studies attended to dreams and ambivalence. His theory encouraged his rejection of stereotyping by the “culture and personality” school of thought, and can be used as a model of cultural ambivalence with ongoing anthropological …

Writing Lives: Ruth Benedict’S Journey From Biographical Studies To Anthropology, Judith Schachter

Pacific Studies

Ruth Benedict’s early biographical essays illuminate her anthropology and, especially, the humanism that guided her choice of subjects, her style of writing, and her goals in the profession. I examine the biographical essays, written in response to World War I, and then assess the contribution of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, written at the end of World War II. With the speech she made to the American Anthropological Association in 1947, Benedict completed the circle, proposing a new anthropology that would include the emotions, ethics, reasoning, and experiences of individuals. A response to the behaviorist social science of the times, …

Ruth Benedict And The Study Of Thai Culture, Nicola B. Tannenbaum

Pacific Studies

In this paper, I place Thai Culture and Behavior in the context of Benedict’s work and life, American anthropology, and Thai studies. The paper begins with a summary of Benedict’s study and a critique of her Thai ethnography. This is followed with a discussion of its initial reception when it was first published and its later place in biographies about Benedict. Finally, I turn to my initial question of the role of Thai Culture and Behavior in Thai studies. Here I examine the two subsequent anthropological studies of Thailand: Embree’s seminal essay, “Thailand—A Loosely Structured Society,” the first field- workbased …

The Ecology Of The Anthropological Mind: Gregory Bateson’S Influence On Three Late Twentieth-Century Pacific Scholars, Phillip V. Guddemi

Pacific Studies

The influence of Gregory Bateson’s path-breaking ethnography, Naven, is well acknowledged in anthropology, as well as his collaborative work with Margaret Mead on Bali. Bateson’s later work, however, departed from anthropology, as conventionally conceived, to focus on issues of communication, psychiatry, animal ethology, cybernetics, and epistemology. These ideas have been influential for relatively few anthropologists. This essay focuses on the influence of Bateson’s later ideas on three anthropologists, all of them Oceanists: Roger Keesing, Robert I. Levy, and Roy Rappaport. These scholars shared an exposure to Bateson’s ideas prior to their popularization in collected essays published in Steps to an …

Vol. 32 No. 2-3 (2009): Pacific Island Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 32, No 2-3-Jun/Sept 2009 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance And Cognition In Pastaza Quechua, Michael A. Uzendoski

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

Book review of Sounds Like Life: Sound-symbolic Grammar, Performance and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics) by Janis B. Nuckolls. 1996. Oxford University Press [http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/].

The Crisis Of Late Structuralism. Perspectivism And Animism: Rethinking Culture, Nature, Spirit, And Bodiliness, Terry S. Turner

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

The paper takes as its point of departure an assessment of the achievements and limitations of structuralism as exemplified by the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, with particular attention to its applications to Amazonian ethnographic data. I attempt to identify the original contributions of structuralism, while explaining how it has distorted and misunderstood the Amazonian cultural structures and themes that it has sought to analyze by misapplying its own theoretical and methodological concepts, thus giving rise to what I call the “Crisis of Late Structuralism.” I then suggest how recent developments in Amazonianist anthropology, notably the rethinking of animism by Philippe …

Derek Freeman And Margaret Mead: What Did He Know, And When Did He Know It?, Paul Shankman

Pacific Studies

Derek Freeman’s published autobiographical statement and his biographers’ account of his life report that, before he went to Samoa in 1940, Freeman was a cultural determinist strongly influenced by Margaret Mead’s work. While in the islands, Freeman stated that he discovered that Mead was wrong about Samoan culture and felt responsible for refuting her work, thus establishing a linear progression in his critique of Mead from his own first trip to the islands to the eventual publication, some four decades later, of Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983). Interviews with Freeman suggest, however, …

Introduction: On Four Anthropologists And Their Histories, Virginia Yans

Pacific Studies

This introduction discusses ten essays concerning Pacific anthropologists Gregory Bateson, Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead, and their colleague, Ruth Benedict. The intellectual and personal engagement of these four social scientists with each other is well known and heavily documented in archival collections: they worked as “before-the-text” collaborators in fieldwork and in formulating culture theory. My Introduction highlights the epistemological and textual strategies the contributors to this special issue employ to describe the “Gang of Four.” These essays demonstrate how a group of contemporary anthropologists think about the past and the history of their discipline. As a remedy for the disruption of …

Clyde Kluckhohn And The New Anthropology: From Culture And Personality To The Scientific Study Of Values, John S. Gilkeson

Pacific Studies

This essay examines Clyde Kluckhohn’s relations with Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson in two contexts: the school of culture and personality, and the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life convened during the Second World War. Kluckhohn strongly identified with the Boasian tradition. Enlisting in the Boasian campaign to make Americans more “culture-conscious,” Kluckhohn joined Benedict and Mead as a public intellectual. In this capacity, Kluckhohn sought to clarify the concept of culture and to widen its currency, emphasized the affinity between anthropology and psychiatry, and, after 1945, searched for …

“More Like Fighting Than Like Waiting”: Mead, Method, And The Proper Object Of Knowledge In Anthropology, Maureen Molloy

Pacific Studies

This paper examines the critical reviews of Margaret Mead’s and Reo Fortune’s early books and Mead’s responses to them. It argues that these reviews demonstrate a consensus about proper anthropological practice and the proper object of anthropological knowledge. Mead’s response was to go the offensive. She demonstrated her competence in the traditional fields of anthropology through her authorship of Kinship in the Admiralty Islands (Mead 1934) and her ability to generate “pure” knowledge and to provide historical context in The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (Mead 1932a). Most significantly, however, Mead challenged the consensus about the proper object of …

Energetic Path Finding Across Massive Terrain Data, Andrew N. Tsui

Master's Theses

Before there were airplanes, cars, trains, boats, or bicycles, the primary means of transportation was on foot. Unfortunately, many of the trails used by ancient travelers have long since been abandoned. We present a software tool which can help visualize and predict where these forgotten trails might lie through the use of a human-centered cost metric. By comparing the paths generated by our software with known historical trails, we demonstrate how the tool can indicate likely trails used by ancient travelers. In addition, this new tool provides novel visualizations to better help the user understand alternate paths, effect of terrain, …

Cultural Responses To Climate Change In The Holocene, Richard Prentice

Anthós

Variable Holocene climate conditions have caused cultures to thrive, adapt or fail. The invention of agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals allowed sedentary societies to develop and are the result of the climate becoming warmer after the last glaciation. The subsequent cooling of the Younger Dryas forced humans to concentrate into geographic areas that had an abundant water supply and ultimately favorable conditions for the use of agriculture and widespread domestication of plants and animals. Population densities would have reached a threshold and forced a return to foraging, however the end of the Younger Dryas at 10,000 BP …

From Sugar To Blackberries: Restructuring Agro-Export Production In Michoacán, Mexico, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

In recent years, economic crisis in the sugar industry and the closure of an important sugar mill in Michoacán, Mexico, have fostered the entry of transnational agribusinesses that contract with local growers for blackberry production. Land concentration is under way as wealthy growers rent ejido (agrarian-reform) land to grow berries and small-scale growers shift to less capitalized berry production or migrate out of the region. An analysis of the impact of this transition, part of the globalization of the agro-food system, on campesinos, workers, and their communities reveals that a general improvement in the economy has been accompanied by increased …

Thomas, Patricia (Fa 400), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text paper (click on "Additional Files" below) for Folklife Archives Project 400. Paper: "Murder Ballads of Kentucky" written by Patricia Thomas for a Western Kentucky University folk studies class.

An Empirical Test Of Hirschi's Theory Of Delinquency, Barbara R. Vanderpool

Theses & Honors Papers

Delinquency has been examined by many disciplines. There is no single explanation for delinquency. This study tests Hirschi's Theory on a group of adolescents that violate laws that have not been adjudicated delinquents. These adolescents have not been labeled delinquent, but have been placed in a facility to assist at-risk adolescents. A modified version of Elliot's National Youth Study questionnaire was used to measure delinquency. This data gathered indicated a significant decline in delinquency while participating in the program. Hirschi's theory is an empirical test found to be relevant to these adolescents.

Diasporic Identities In Israel: A Study Of Ethiopian Jews, Erich S. Roberts

Anthropology Department Honors Papers

Contemporary concerns of anthropology stress the role of power relations in framing the study of a marginalized people within society. In this study, the present predicament of the Ethiopian community in Israel is examined through the highly political processes of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and identity construction. Each of these factors hold implications for the ways by which a dominant European nationalist ideology in Israel has come to impose forces of authority upon subjugated, non-European ethnic groups. The Ethiopians are one such group. The point of divergence between the community of Ethiopian Jews and Israel’s national identity has caused the Ethiopian …