Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

“Beejagalu Namma Jeevana” (Seeds Are Our Life): Women Farmers’ Relational Practices Of Care, Labor, And Life Within Regenerative Systems In South India, Sara F. Mehkri

Scripps Senior Theses

“Beejagalu Namma Jeevana” (Seeds are Our Life): Women Farmers’ Relational Practices of Care, Labor, and Life within Regenerative Systems in South India, examines the role of women farmers in regenerative agricultural systems in Kanakapura, Karnataka, through ethnographic fieldwork with GREEN Foundation (GF) and its farmer networks. It argues that regenerative agriculture in this context is produced through care-based multispecies assemblages that reconfigure relationships between labor, knowledge, and ecological life, generating resilient socio-agroecological systems and expanding forms of human capability.

Drawing on twenty semi-structured interviews with women farmers, participant observation, and historical analysis of agrarian change in South India, this thesis …

Shrines On Asphalt Shoulders: Documenting Roadside Memorials In Western U.S. Roadscapes, Isabella R. Sullivan

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis analyses the practice of documenting and uploading roadside memorials in the Western United States as a socially transformative process facilitated between two distinct kinds of noticing. Drawing on (auto)ethnographies of roadside memorial sites in Colorado and California, interviews with photographers and cartographers working primarily in the American Southwest, and Google Street View media, this research examines how recognition of the social negotiations involving memory and mortality that are already present in the physical shrines evolves when documenters capture and transpose them online. First, these documenters have developed the “eyes to see” roadside memorials for various significant reasons in …

(Dis)Orientations: Finding Rhythm Within Queer Nightlife In Los Angeles, Frances Bright Currie

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines how queer individuals in Los Angeles perceive, inhabit, and reshape their experiences in queer cultural spaces. Through this project, I trace the evolution of queer nightlife in Los Angeles (from early gay counterspaces, through the collectivist politics of the Queer Nation, to post-gay assimilation and contemporary “inclusive” queer nightlife) in order to examine how queer space has been shaped and reshaped by a recurring tension between the utopian promise of universality and inclusion and the material realities of exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, queer theory, and approaches to memory and the archive, I argue that queer nightlife …

Find My Friends: Location-Sharing Ideologies And Peer Surveillance Practices, Nayla Dayal

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the use of Find My Friends in the context of the Claremont Colleges. Students choose to location-share under initial rhetorical justifications of social reciprocity, and community-orientedness, and peer-safety. Drawing from ethnographic interviews conducted with users at the colleges, I argue that the infrastructure of Find My Friends in conjunction with the social and physical proximities of the Claremont environment creates a distinctive condition where users are subject to what I term as a “virtual, neoliberal, and participatory panopticon.” Here, users are seemingly empowered through the application’s neutralizing collapse of reciprocity and hierarchy that are seen in conventional …

Cold Water Immersion: Communal Intimacy And Embodied Wellness, Clara R. Louden

Scripps Senior Theses

On the shores of Lake Superior, many residents of Duluth engage in cold water immersion, or as many call it, "dipping." Through the lenses of embodied experience, magical language and modes of storytelling, and communal intimacy, dipping emerges as a uniquely bonding practice. Dippers cite cold water immersion as an immune-boosting ritual, drawing on biomedical and non-biomedical conceptions of health. Immersion in cold water, especially in nature, requires a strong sense of communal trust. By deliberately encountering danger in their day to day lives, dippers' relationships with each other and with the lake often deepen over time, hinging on the …

Love Is Dead In The Restless West: Hippies, Manson, And California Culture, 1966-1970, Rebecca Allen

Scripps Senior Theses

Though an extreme aberration from most of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s, Charles Manson’s ultimately murderous cult arguably represents something particular about American culture in the late sixties, in which youthful hostility towards the status quo sometimes grew radical, and in the case of the Manson Family cult, extremely violent. By the mid-sixties, more and more young people began to feel alienated by a culture they felt no longer embodied their larger aspirations, and as a result, were drawn to the emerging counterculture that embraced alternative lifestyles that frequently clashed with the traditional sensibilities of their parents’ generation. After …

You Are What You Eat: Social Media's Influence On Health And Beauty Practices For Young Latinx Women, Anaís Martínez Castañeda

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis delves into the experiences of young Latinx women, exploring how they internalize societal messages propagated through social media that equate whiteness with wellness and beauty standards. Conversations with young LatinX women reveal that performances of whiteness intertwine with dietary practices and notions of thinness, influencing their perceptions and behaviors. This internalization leads to harmful tendencies of body surveillance and diet restriction in an attempt to conform to dominant social media norms. Furthermore, this messaging can result in the rejection of ethnic foods and adversely impact their overall well-being. However, amidst these challenges, participants reevaluated their internalized beliefs and …

The Impact Of Museum Curation On Community And Identity: Japanese Culture At The Japanese American National Museum And The Huntington Library's Japanese Gardens, Cate Hasler

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores Japanese culture and its representation in two museum sites, the Japanese American National Museum, and the Huntington Library's Japanese Gardens. It examines the history of the sites and the curation of exhibits to determine the impact on Japanese identity and community within the Los Angeles area. Through ethnographic interviews and research, this thesis concludes that museums can be locally embedded cultural processes, where the ideas of identity and community are contested, challenging the authoritative and top-down operations of a museum as a public institution.

Good Enough To Eat: How College Students Are (Re)Forming Their Relationships To Food, Sophia Lewis

Scripps Senior Theses

In this thesis, I seek to critically examine how college students at American liberal arts institutions relate to food in their everyday lives and how those relationships to food are formed in a cultural landscape where what and how one eats can carry significant moral implications. Through a series of ethnographic interviews, I found that college students are negotiating a variety of interconnected social influences that have shaped their relationships to food, the most prominent being the ways that their parents taught them to relate to food in childhood and adolescence, cultural conceptions of health, and their own embodied reactions …

The Yak Is Back: Creating Community On The Digital Bathroom Stall Wall, Georgia Bates

Scripps Senior Theses

Offering access to an expanded world of contacts, activities, and self-expression, the internet has been changing the traditional landscape of the college experience for nearly two decades. The manner in which students interact with the world around them is augmented and transformed by the affordances of digital social networks like Yik Yak, an anonymous, hyperlocal networking app that has found its main market on college campuses. A hybrid ethnographic approach to Yik Yak based on participant observation and in-depth interviews spanned from Fall 2021 to Spring 2023, engaging with concepts of place and affect as they were intertwined with student …

Reframing Type One Diabetes Care: Everyday Rituals At Bearskin Meadow Camp, Emily Radner

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis focuses on how counselors at Bearskin Meadow Camp approach care as medical and social caregivers to campers with Type One Diabetes (T1D). T1D is a chronic illness that involves constant self-regulation. The counselors, many of whom are past campers and live with T1D themselves, are personally invested in providing care and support to the campers. Their personal motivations as well as the intentional approach to care of Bearskin Meadow shapes camp as a unique space of diabetes care. The care they practice works against some aspects of mainstream biomedical care of T1D, such as the tendency to classify …

Desalination And Development: Locating The Missing Masses In Dakar’S Water Network, Marina Riad

Scripps Senior Theses

The introduction of desalination technology to the water network in Dakar, Senegal marks a monumental change in how state and commercial interests aim to solve systemic problems using novel technologies. Desalination aims to transform the ocean surrounding Dakar into potable water, a vital resource in the growing metropolis. However, this desalination project must integrate itself within a network of social, historical, political, commercial, and ecological influences shaping the role of desalination in urban Dakar. With millions of dollars and an entire ocean mobilized towards solving Dakar’s water problems, it may come as a surprise that this project will only provide …

America's Best Idea: Settler Colonialism And Recognition In The United States National Park Service Website, Madison Gates

Scripps Senior Theses

By examining closely how the National Park Service misrepresents their history and current relationships with Indigenous communities I work to demonstrate the depths of this misrepresentation and the impacts it has on various Indigenous communities and nations. In the first chapter, I explain how the history of national parks is founded on fundamentally opposed conceptions of land between Indigenous people and settlers and how this difference was used as justification for settler violence. In chapter two I explore the ways in which the National Park Service uses cultural collaboration to further tourist experience at the expense of respecting and properly …

Detangling Black Hair: Hair Journeys, Discrimination, And Reconciliations Of Cultural Appropriation Among Claremont College Students, Amalia Raquel Barrett

Scripps Senior Theses

This ethnography details the experiences of discrimination and reconciliations of cultural appropriation among Black women and those perceived as Black women at the Claremont Colleges. 26 semi-structured ethnographic interviews were conducted over Zoom video conferencing to collect responses to questions including: How do my participants wear and describe their hair, and what experiences in their life do they relate to their hair? What challenges related to hair do my interviewees perceive in life outside college? How do my participants actively reconcile and critically rationalize the dynamic between Black hair being worn by Black women and by non-Black women? What patterns …

Summer Treatment Programs: Counselors And Care Practices, Christina X. You

Scripps Senior Theses

Employing a mixed psychosocial and pharmacological approach, STPs offer six to nine weeks of intensive treatment for children deemed to have social and behavioral difficulties. One major asset STPs claim is their natural, fun setting—a true summer camp space for activities and open peer interaction—in which children learn positive behaviors that they can generalize into external social settings. Yet STPs are also highly structured. Staff, who are often undergraduate and graduate students, are trained in operant learning strategies to promote “positive” and suppress “maladaptive” behaviors, strict activity guidelines, and evaluations for procedural adherence. The program was developed based on the …

College Students "Coupling Up" With Reality Dating Shows: The Interpersonal Relationships Fostered By Reality Dating Show Viewership, Juliana Romeo

Scripps Senior Theses

On college campuses across the US on Monday evenings, groups of college students cluster around laptops and dorm lounge TVs to watch The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. Viewership of reality dating shows is clearly a popular social activity among students, but why? What needs are college students fulfilling with their viewership of this genre? This thesis explores college students’ relationship with reality dating shows and specifically how college students connect the realities of the contestants, the media space, and their everyday lives. Over nine months, I conducted ethnographic interviews and focus groups with twenty-one college students at residential colleges …

Tracing Biometric Assemblages In India’S Surveillance State: Reproducing Colonial Logics, Reifying Caste Purity, And Quelling Dissent Through Aadhaar, Priya Prabhakar

Scripps Senior Theses

Tracing Biometric Assemblages in India’s Surveillance State seeks to understand the historical conditions that rendered the nation-state of India as having the world’s largest biometric surveillance system: Aadhaar. Surveillance practices used by the British Raj mirrors the current social order of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as they use surveillance to similar ends in today’s political economy, through the intersecting forces of neoliberalism and ethnonationalism. This thesis is an exploration into how India’s current surveillance regimes cultivate biometric surveillant assemblages through Aadhaar. Contrary to claims that Aadhaar was created to empower the poor, I argue that these surveillance regimes …

Migration And Women’S Relationships To The Land And Food In Myanmar, Allison Joseph

Scripps Senior Theses

Abstract

In the 21st century, Myanmar has become the largest migration source country in the Greater Mekong Sub-region. To achieve its economic and political goals, the government has conducted extensive confiscation and reallocation of communal lands, which has resulted in a growing class of landless and dispossessed citizens. Under the new laws, rural women are disproportionately impacted and more vulnerable to the processes of dispossession, often lacking the rights or resources of their male counterparts to fight for the land of their ancestors. This has resulted in the wide-scale disinheritance of Myanmar’s rural women from their land and food, as …

Labor Experiences Of Public High School Counselors: Neoliberalism, Productivity, And Care, Avery Harwood

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the day-to-day realities for public high school counselors inside their schools. The national average student-to-counselor ratio in public high schools in the U.S. is 482:1. This is almost double the recommended counselor caseload by the American School Counselor Association, which recommends 250 students per counselor. However, counselors’ inflated caseloads are not the only reason why counselors are overworked. Using a year’s worth of ethnographic research, I analyze the bureaucratic and care labor practices of counselors and the ways in which their labor exploitation reflects years of neoliberal discourse influencing the functioning of public education. This neoliberalization of …

'If I Don't Have That, No Learning": Significance Of Student-Centered Affective Labor Among Public High School Teachers In Tacoma, Wa, Delaney Dawson

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how public high school teachers in Tacoma, WA, USA conceptualize the values and rewards of their career through their professional interactions at various levels of the educational institution. By analyzing teachers’ career motivations, goals, and definitions of success, it becomes clear that these teachers most highly prioritize their affective labor and the relationships they build with their students. Teachers consistently emphasize the non-financial, student-centered elements of the compensation they receive for their work, and their grievances about the structure of the school system primarily center around the constraints placed upon their performance of student-centered affective labor by …

La Modernité Tunisienne Dévoilée : Une Étude Autour De La Femme Célibataire, Madison Wagner

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explains recent accounts of discrimination and cutbacks in reproductive health spaces in Tunisia. Complicating dominant analyses, which attribute these events to the post-revolution political atmosphere which has allowed the proliferation of islamic extremism, I interpret these instances as a manifestation of a deeply rooted stigma against sexually active single women. I trace this stigma’s inception to the contradictory way that Habib Bourguiba conceptualized modernity after independence, and the responsibility he assigned to Tunisian women to embody that modernity. This responsibility remains salient today, and is putting Tunisian women in an increasingly untenable and vulnerable position.

After independence, Bourguiba …

Fear Of Change: Autonomous Vehicle Technology And The Automobile As A Cultural Artifact, Alexis Shoemaker

Scripps Senior Theses

The automobile is a cultural artifact embedded in our lives and imbued with meaning. Autonomous vehicle technology stands to alter not just the way we drive or whether we drive, it also has the power to fundamentally change the way we live. The development of driverless cars enables the examination of the complex relationships that individuals have with the automobile and reveals the fears associated with this technological change.

Too Much Of A Good Thing: A Look Into The Educational Climate Of Port Townsend Washington, Rebecca Stewart

Scripps Senior Theses

The concept of choice as it applies to the American educational system has been a topic of intense discussion in recent years. Since the development of this central institution, the freedom of scholastic choice has been an intricate part of the United States’ academic landscape. However, scholars have noted a recent shift as the country has started to take a more neoliberal approach to schooling. In order to better understanding of the concept of choice on a more individualistic level, I conducted a number of personal interviews with parents raising their children in the small rural town of Port Townsend, …

When Malbec Became Argentine: An Analysis Of The Quality Wine Revolution In Mendoza, Dominique Lee

Scripps Senior Theses

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Argentine wine industry experienced a shift from quantity to quality production which occurred while economic policies in Argentina opened economic opportunities for investment in the country. With these new opportunities, the industry began to focus on producing quality wine because of the desire to export and compete in the international market. As foreign investment entered Mendoza, the heart of Argentine wine country, new ideas and knowledge about wine production began to disseminate into the region and everyday practices. The shift from quantity to quality production was a paradigm shift in that it ushered …

Menageries Multiple: An Introduction To Zoological Multiplicity In The Modern American Zoo, Emily D. Gratke

Scripps Senior Theses

American zoological parks have been sites of intense consumer and scholar interest since their origination in the 20th century. Today, zoos reside at a tenacious hub of ideologies, practices, and priorities contributed to by various stakeholder groups. I propose that the foundational cause of this tension is zoological multiplicity: the theory that through human practices and perceptions, animals can embody multiple identities. Via an exploration of zoological multiplicity in American zoos with specific focus on zoo management, zoogoer, and animal activist stakeholder groups, this project proposes the widespread acknowledgment and understanding of zoological multiplicity as a method to improve animal …

Computer Science Education At The Claremont Colleges: The Building Of An Intuition, Lauren Burke

Scripps Senior Theses

In this thesis, I discuss how the undergraduate computer scientist is trained, and how they learn what I am calling computational intuition. Computational intuition describes the methodology in which computer scientists approach their problems and solve them through the use of computers. Computational intuition is a series of skills and a way of thinking or approaching problems that students learn throughout their education. The main way that computational intuition is taught to students is through the experience they gain as they work on homework and classwork problems. To develop computational intuition, students learn explicit knowledge and techniques as well as …

Mexican Masculinities: Migration And Experiences Of Contemporary Mexican American Men, Zandalee Springs

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examined how four Male Mexican American post-undergraduate college students constructed their views on what it means “to be a man”. The method of oral histories not only for it’s power but also for its ability to offer a different perspective than that given by theory. Oral histories offer a rich perspective that has the power to challenge dominant narratives. The thesis was set up to reflect the way that the past informs the future. Through beginning with the history of U.S.-Mexico border relations via NAFTA, the Bracero Program, and the Border Patrol, one grasps the contentious relationship between …

Domestic Violence Advocacy In California: Social Influences, Legal Limitations, And Client-Centered Practice, Claire Shum

Scripps Senior Theses

This project explores domestic violence advocacy in California by tracing historical, social, and cultural influences; examining the limit of the law and bias of those who uphold it; and analyzing a local domestic violence agency that provides services to survivors. Through the frameworks of anti-essentialization, and intersectionality I analyze gender roles and stereotypes ingrained in our culture. The essentialization of what it is to be a women renders women’s differences invisible, making it difficult for law and policy to address. By looking at domestic violence through an intersectional lens, the multi-layered nature women’s experiences can be revealed. However, not all …

Discourses Of Menstruation: Public And Private Formations Of Female Identity, Emily G. Matteson

Scripps Senior Theses

Menstruation is a biological process, but it is also laden with cultrual meanings that produce society's understandings of both the body and "womanhood." The experiences of those who menstruate both reveal and inform the ways that culture mediates the relationships between biology, the body, sex, and gender. This study examines the ways that students at Scripps College, a women's college in Claremont, CA, understand and experience menstruation as part of living in an environment where the majority of students identify as female. Through ethnographic interviews, I demonstrate the ways that students use menstruation to re-envision distinctions between public and private …

An Ethnographic Inquiry: Contemporary Language Ideologies Of American Sign Language, Anya A. Leyhe

Scripps Senior Theses

Historically, American Sign Language (an aspect of Deaf culture) has been rendered invisible in mainstream hearing society. Today, ASL’s popularity is evidenced in an ethnolinguistic renaissance; more second language learners pursue an interest in ASL than ever before. Nonetheless, Deaf and hearing people alike express concern about ASL’s place in hearing culture. This qualitative study engages ethnographic methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviewing as well as popular media analysis to understand language ideologies (ideas and objectives concerning roles of language in society) hearing and Deaf Signers hold about motivations and practices of other hearing Signers. Although most hearing ASLers …