Anthropology Commons^™

Words Of War: The Rhetorical Weapons Of Folklore After October 7, Steve Siporin

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

The chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” became well known after the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War (October 7, 2023) due to its widespread use at anti-Israel demonstrations and on news broadcasts, social media, and YouTube videos. A retort that mocked the inability of demonstrators who espoused the slogan to answer the questions “Which river? Which sea?” also circulated widely. Noncombatants on the domestic front relied on these two items of folklore (among others), a chant and a retort, to support their aims and satisfy their emotions. This essay traces the origins of each of …

Jewish Women’S Folk Memory Of Argentine Schooldays, 1900–1955, Jacqueline Laznow

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

This essay explores the folkloric formation of Jewish-Argentine female identity through schoolyard experiences and domestic resistance in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on interviews with women who later made aliyah, the study analyzes these accounts as personal experience narratives, arguing that painful memories of antisemitism and “otherness” are cognitively restructured through folk processes into a symbolic frame for communal interpretation. These narratives function as “legend discourse,” sparking commentary and intergenerational transmission, and serve as mechanisms for reconstructing daily life within a dominant Christian culture. They reveal a “hyphenated” Jewish-Argentine identity reimagined from the perspective of the narrators’ …

Folk Narratives Of “The Wandering Jew” (Atu 777) In Latvian Folklore, Svetlana Pogodina

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

This essay reports field-collected texts of “The Wandering Jew” (ATU 777) recorded in the twentieth century in Latvia to determine if they are distinctive within the global tradition of the folk narrative. The Archives of Latvian Folklore (Latviešu folkloras krātuve) collection contains versions of the narrative recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. These texts have not previously been published in English translation. An interpretation is made that the narratives borrow elements from Jewish stereotypes that exist in a local folklore tradition. Comparing the Latvian material to the European and Slavic versions of the story of the Eternal Jew, a major …

Introduction: The Folklore And Ethnology Of Antisemitism, Simon J. Bronner

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

A global rise in incidents and beliefs in the twenty-first century that monitoring and polling organizations label “antisemitic” raises several questions addressed by contributors to this special issue. A basic one is definitional regarding discourse about the shifting meaning of antisemitism in light of post-Holocaust events and digital age communication. A historical question is whether contemporary forms of antisemitism are connected to or a break from the term’s nineteenth-century roots. Related to that issue in modern discourse is whether antisemitism is an umbrella concept or separate from anti-Judaism, anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, and anti-Zionism movements. The materials of folklore—both as esoteric forms …

The Missing Void: Lack Of Pockets In Womenswear And Its Effect On Daily Life, Clare Bolon

Ursidae: The Undergraduate Research Journal at the University of Northern Colorado

Pockets give power to people who possess them. Yet, an estimated half of the U.S. population —women— frequently wear garments lacking useful pockets. Why? Womenswear is molded by beauty standards. This study brings an anthropological perspective on gender inequality in the U.S. by examining modern clothing and the differences in pocket access by gender. 127 participants were recruited for a mixed methods survey, most from a medium-sized university in the Mountain West region. Survey questions explored the attitudes and experiences of people who wear women’s clothing regarding pockets (or the lack thereof) and its impact on their daily lives. Open-ended …

Jerusalem, City Of David Visitor Center: The Early Islamic, Medieval And Late Ottoman Pottery, Benjamin J. Dolinka

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The excavation at the entrance to the Visitor Center in the City of David uncovered a small but significant assemblage of ceramics, all from stratified contexts, including bowls, basins, storage jars, jugs, a cooking pot and a clay tobacco pipe. The pottery dates from the Abbasid period (ninth–tenth centuries CE), the medieval period (mid-twelfth–late fourteenth centuries CE) and the late Ottoman period (mid- to late nineteenth century CE). The ceramic evidence from the excavation provides important insights into the occupational history of the site during these periods.

Jerusalem, City Of David Visitor Center: The Late Roman And Byzantine Pottery, Debora Sandhaus

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

This article analyzes two pottery assemblages excavated at the entrance of the City of David Visitor Center in Jerusalem, providing important evidence for the occupation and development of the city during the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. The first assemblage, recovered from above the floors of the Stratum VI building, is a homogeneous domestic collection dominated by serving and food-preparation vessels, including arched-rim basins, bowls/lids and a complete Bet Naṭṭif lamp. These finds date the structure to the third–fourth centuries CE and suggest activities associated with food preparation and communal use rather than storage. The second assemblage, recovered from a …

Jerusalem, City Of David Visitor Center: Remains From The Late Roman–Late Ottoman Periods, Joe Uziel

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The following report presents the results of an excavation conducted on the summit of the City of David, Jerusalem, which exposed remains of six strata, spanning the Late Roman to the Medieval–late Ottoman period. Although the excavation area was quite narrow, important remains were exposed, contributing to our knowledge of the settlement and character of this portion of the city. Several surfaces interpreted as roads were exposed, beginning with an Abbasid road and continuing until the Medieval–late Ottoman period. Beneath these surfaces, a layer of garden soil, similar in character to the layer exposed in the Giv‘ati Parking Lot, was …

Singulars: Performing The Reverse Turing Test, Halim Madi

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Singulars is an ongoing series of performance systems in which I co-create poetry with a language model trained on an anthology of English poetry alongside my own writing. Across three works—carnation.exe, versus.exe, and reinforcement.exe—I stage live reinforcement loops in which my poems and the model’s responses compete for audience votes. The audience functions as an embodied feedback mechanism, shaping the evolution of both the machine and the human poet in real time.

This paper examines what happens when a poet becomes both author and training data. Drawing from creativity research, metacognition, and social cognition, I reflect …

More Than Just A Celebration: Gift Exchange In U.S. Culture, Macie Hazelton

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

My graduation party may seem like a simple celebration to some, but when viewed through an anthropological lens, it becomes a rich example of how gift exchange continues to shape relationships in U.S. culture. Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s theory of the obligations to give, receive, and return, as well as insights from Godbout, Benson, and Carter, I argue that cards, money, food, and even the thank-you notes exchanged at my party reveal a cultural system of reciprocity that strengthens social bonds during a major life transition. By examining how my community participated in this cycle of bringing gifts, supporting me, …

Indigenous Is More Than A Label: The Intersectionality Of Colonialism And Indigenous Cultural Practices, Rizal Agaton Howes

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Indigeneity is a multi-faceted identity and idea complicated by a multitude of racial, ethnic, political, historic, and legal contexts. The identity of an Indigenous person, which in this essay I use to refer to people native to the Canada and United States area pre-colonialism, goes beyond a look, a level of ancestry, or an enrollment status. Indigeneity is something lived, something intangible yet undeniably adaptive and oppressed. My understanding of my Indigeneity as an Ojibwe-Anishinaabe and Muscogee person fundamentally changed upon a particularly unique powwow experience with my mom. One powwow and significant conversation with her prompted my consideration of …

Notes From The Field - Conference Proceedings, Summer Fellows 2025, Center For Latin American, Caribbean, And Latino Studies (Clacls)

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

CLACLS presents proceedings papers from the third CLACLS Summer Fellows Showcase Conference, held on November 12, 2025.

The daylong event showcased the research endeavors of fourteen Summer Fellows, who offered succinct presentations on their projects funded by the CLACLS Summer fellowship. The included three panels: “Feminist and Queer Critical Perspectives”, “Language, Archive and Power”, “Social Movements and Political Imaginations.”

Illuminating Sanja Matsuri: Lived Religion And Festival Practice In Asakusa, Caleb R. Merckle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Sanja Matsuri, a major Shintō and Buddhist festival in Asakusa, Tokyo, through the lenses of lived religion, participant observation, autoethnography, and anthropology. Departing from institution-centered approaches, it foregrounds the experiential dimensions of festival participation, showing how physical devotion, collective movement, and festive intensity function as expressions of spiritual meaning. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023 and 2025 included participant observation, informal interviews with local and foreign participants, and Reflexive Discourse Analysis of fieldnotes and bilingual transcripts. Analysis reveals a dynamic interplay between formal sacralization strategies — such as mitama-ire rituals and structured processions — and spontaneous, informal participant …

Khirbat Jābir: The Sculptured Decorations From The Bathhouse, Rivka Gersht

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The excavation of the bathhouse at Khirbat Jābir yielded twelve marble items: a female head and eleven architectural members; among them a small Corinthian capital, a bracket ornamented with a lion head, a richly decorated small pediment and a champlevé revetment plaque. All twelve items were found out of their original display context; almost all are reused spolia or recycled pieces. The workmanship of the recycled items indicates that the craftsmen employed at the Khirbat Jābir bathhouse were skilled stone carvers but had no experience in shaping figural images. The rather good workmanship of the capital and the champlevé revetment …

Khirbat Jābir: The Pottery Finds / ח'ירבת ג'אבר: ממצא כלי החרס, Aviva Bouchenino

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The excavation at Khirbat Jābir yielded pottery dating from the Byzantine period through the Early Islamic period, indicating continuous activity at the site during these periods. Most of the pottery was characteristic of the Byzantine period, including local wares typical of both northern and southern Israel, as well as imported wares from North Africa, Asia Minor and Cyprus. Byzantine-period clay pipes, apparently associated with the bathhouse water-supply system, were also found. The pottery assemblage from this period enables dating the activity in the bathhouse to the fourth–seventh centuries CE. A smaller portion of locally produced pottery vessels dates to the …

Khirbat Jābir: A Late Byzantine Bathhouse, An Early Islamic Building And Ottoman-Period Remains / ח'ירבת ג'אבר: בית מרחץ משלהי התקופה הביזנטית, מבנה מהתקופה האסלאמית הקדומה ושרידים מהתקופה העות'מאנית, Orit Segal

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

Excavations at Khirbat Jābir in Zikhron Ya‘akov revealed three strata (III–I). The earliest Stratum III yielded a well-preserved bathhouse dated to the late Byzantine period (sixth–seventh centuries CE), likely a public complex lavishly decorated with marble elements, which served a small, well-established community comprising several households in the area. In Stratum II, dated to the beginning of the Early Islamic period, the bathhouse was converted into a manor house or a farmhouse. Its plan was slightly altered with the construction of new walls, and its rooms were paved with stones robbed from the original phase of the bathhouse. The latest …

Judaism And Catholicism: Possibilities Of An Inter-Spiritual Dialogue, David Neuhaus

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines the possibilities of an inter-spiritual dialogue between Catholics and Jews. Describing the transformation of the Catholic attitude to Jews andJudaism in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, moving from a teaching of contempt to one of respect, it analyses the far-reaching reformulations of Catholic theology that promote an interreligious dialogue. After centuries of traumatic history, Jewish reactions have been hesitant. However, the past decades have led to a burgeoning relationship that can indeed flower into a mutual inter-spiritual dialogue that deepens the faith of both Catholics and Jews.

Jainism And Catholicism – Dialoguing Spiritually, Bryan Lobo

Journal of Global Catholicism

The inter-spiritual dialogue between Jainism and Catholicism lends itself towards discovering similarities and dissimilarities between the two spiritualities. Recognizing this discovery, this paper, without claiming to be exhaustive as regards the spiritual themes, discusses the chosen themes to facilitate greater reflection and potential to re-discover elements that can help the growth of understanding and practicing the preferred spirituality.

Hindu Poetry And The Project Of An Inter-Spiritual Catholic Theology, Francis X. Clooney

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article engages the work of the Indian south Indian Tamil-language Vaiṣṇava poet saints known as the Alvārs. The article specifically focuses the First HundredHoly Linked verses of Poykai Ālvār to argue for inter-spiritual learning between Catholics and Hindus. The article concludes with personal reflections on this encounter within the context of the global Catholic Church

Overview And Acknowledgments, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

An overview and introduction to the present issue on Inter-Spiritual Dialogue.

A Comparison Of Regional Food Systems And Food Security In Rural Mississippi And Italy, Reinhard M. Knerr, Athan M. Gregory, Anne Cafer

Journal of Human Sciences and Extension

In the Mississippi (MS) Delta, more than 40% of residents are food-insecure despite predominantly agricultural land use. We hypothesized that limited social networks and non-navigable food market systems constrain MS producers, limit market viability, and hinder regional food sovereignty. This ethnography compared rural Italian and Mississippian food systems through semi-structured interviews of food producers, processors, and marketers. We described differences in social networks between groups that led to differential capacities to share capital and to overcome producer and labor constraints. We also described key differences in governmental and Extension support of local food systems. Finally, we provided suggestions for addressing …

Fundamental Uncertainties Invalidate The Precision Of Obsidian Hydration Dating: A Rapa Nui Case Study, Robert Dinapoli, Carl P. Lipo

Anthropology Datasets

Obsidian hydration dating (OHD) measures water absorption into volcanic glass to estimate artifact age. Recent studies using infrared photoacoustic spectroscopy (IR-PAS) claim ±30-year precision, comparable to radiocarbon dating. We tested these claims by applying Bayesian hierarchical models to 242 published IR-PAS measurements from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Standard OHD practice treats burial temperature and humidity as known constants; we instead modeled them as uncertain variables and propagated that uncertainty through the rate equation. Realistic dating uncertainties are ±300 years, ten times larger than the claimed value. The 95% credible interval for any individual date (~600 years) exceeds Rapa Nui's entire …

A Comparative Study Of Aging And Cortical Folding In Chimpanzees And Olive Baboons, William D. Hopkins, Angela M. Achorn, Michele M. Mulholland, Elizabeth R. Magden, Steven J. Schapiro, Courtney L, Fults, Jean‐Francois Mangin, Adrien Meguerditchian

Anthropology Faculty Publications

In light of the evidence that nonhuman primates naturally develop Alzheimer's disease neuropathologies, there is a renewed interest in research on the comparative biology of aging, including neurological changes across the age groups in species with diverse lifespans. In this paper, we examined age‐related differences in two measures of cortical folding, mean depth and fold opening, in a sample of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and olive baboons (Papio anubis). We found significant species differences in the slope and pattern of age‐related changes in cortical folding. As predicted, chimpanzees showed negative linear associations between age and mean depth and …

Conflict-Mediated Group Size Regulation: A Theory Of Supraoptimal And Suboptimal Group Size, Eric Schniter

ESI Working Papers

Observed group sizes rarely match the size that would maximize what each member gets from belonging. We propose a two-part theory in which group size is regulated by two related conflicts: insider-outsider conflict over admission, and within-group conflict as crowding, competition, and social tensions intensify with size. Three strategies are available: admission, exclusion, and fission. The first part shows that even when exclusion is unavailable, fission dynamics alone drive group size away from the optimum in both directions, with the pattern set by how prospective joiners encounter groups and by the geometry of fission. When joiners compare groups across a …

Polarized Truth Decay & The Role Of Education In A Democracy, Sonja Varbelow, William Yaworsky

Anthropology Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to delineate the causes and dangers of truth decay for a democracy, the role education has played in the process, and how education can present a resistance to this dangerous trend. Truth decay has been characterized as an increase in quantity of opinion over fact, divergent views on what constitutes a fact, and decreased confidence of traditional sources of information. We agree that truth decay is a serious problem but would characterize it somewhat differently. Opinions, divergent views, and decreased confidence in traditional sources of information are not detrimental by themselves. Instead, we see …

Anthropology 230 "Culture And Crime": Syllabus, Assignments And Brightspace Quiz Files, Eliza Darling

Open Educational Resources

As part of a project to convert online asynchronous sections in John Jay’s fully online program to OER, Dr. Eliza Darling compiled all of her materials for a 200-level anthropology course, “Culture and Crime,” into a single PDF that can be easily converted to other file types. The assignments and lessons make frequent use of open pedagogical principles. Dr. Darling has also included 14 quizzes as ZIP files that can be imported directly into any LMS, including Brightspace, Canvas, and Blackboard. Because these quizzes are already packaged for LMS import, instructors can add them directly to a course shell without …

The Sociologists And The Anthropologists: Intellectual Imaginations Of Mennonite Settlements In The Paraguayan Chaco, Samuel Boucher

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

The debates over Indigenous rights and missionary intervention in Paraguay’s Chaco were shaped not only by international declarations and local conditions but by the sociologists and anthropologists who interpreted—and contested—them. North American sociologists such as J. Winfield Fretz, Jacob Loewen, and Calvin Redekop studied the Mennonite colonies as agents of modern development, weighing the achievements and shortcomings of their mission efforts. The Paraguayan anthropologist Miguel Chase-Sardi cast those same colonists as foreign capitalists exploiting their Indigenous neighbors, drawing international scrutiny through his contribution to the 1971 Barbados Declaration and its charge of ethnocide. The ensuing clash with administrators such as …

Reimagining Chinese Folk Toys In Contemporary Life Through Illustration And Toy Design, Huimin Huang

Theses - ALL

This research explores how traditional Chinese folk toys can be reinterpreted through contemporary illustration and toy design. The research subjects are cloth tigers, fish lanterns and clay dolls. These three respectively carry cultural meanings as protection, celebration and happiness. With the changes in modern lifestyles, these handmade toys have gradually withdrawn from daily life and are more often preserved as cultural heritages. This article focuses on how to bring these traditional cultural elements back into contemporary life through visual narrative and product design. This project takes the seven-year-old girl, named Nannan, as the core character. She is dressed in traditional …

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 …

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal Of Anthropology Fall 2025 Edition, Heyi Zhang, Eda N. Gokdemir, Layla Cyhn, Jason Kim, Thuần L. Trần

The Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Anthropology

No abstract provided.