Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

Opening Plenary Address At The Catholic Peacebuilding In Times Of Crisis: Hope For A Wounded World Conference, H. E. Cardinal Charles Bo

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Introduction - Volume 6, Issue 2, Ronald Pagnucco

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Summary Report Of Discussions At The Forum “Nepali Diaspora Organizations In North America: Achievements, Opportunities, And Challenges”, Coppell, Texas, Usa July 2022, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

The forum “Nepali Diaspora Organizations in North America: Achievements, Opportunities and Challenges” was held at the annual convention of the Association of Nepalis in the Americas (ANA) in Coppell, TX, USA on July 2, 2022. Nepalese Society of Texas (NST) hosted the convention and forum. As studies related to diaspora have become important topics in the fields of development, community culture, sociology and anthropology, ANA decided to include this topic in the forums organized at the national convention.

The global Nepali diaspora population in 2022 is estimated at 800,000. Although no authoritative statistics is available, the Nepali diaspora in North …

Evaluating Social Support And T2d Risk Factors Among Members Of Rural-Dwelling Grandparent-Headed Households, Brittany L. Smalls, Abebola Adegboyega, Kelly Nb Palmer, Jennifer Hatcher

Journal of Appalachian Health

Purpose: This study examines the associations of social support and type 2 diabetes (T2D) risk factors among members of rural-dwelling, grandparent-headed households (GHH).

Methods: Prospective data were collected from rural-dwelling members of GHH with no known diagnosis of T2D. Data collected on family characteristics, T2D clinical risk factors, and social support were assessed.

Results: Sixty-six grandparents and 72 grandchildren participated in the study. The average age and HbA1Cs were 59.4 years and 6.2% ± 1.4 for grandparents and 11.8 years and 4.9% ± 0.6 for grandchildren. Most grandparents were found to have prediabetes or undiagnosed diabetes. The number of people …

Care And Migration: A Reflexive Account Of A Researcher With A Migration Background, Menal Ahmad

The Qualitative Report

The importance of a researcher’s positionality has been well documented in prior studies. Yet, reflections on cross-cultural research from the positionality of a researcher with a migration background are rare. In this paper, I respond to this knowledge gap through a reflexive account of my positionality as a researcher with a migration background who has conducted cross-cultural research concerning dementia care. Following critiques of “ethnic matching,” I apply a reflexive approach in which researcher positionality is understood as intersectional. I illustrate how both commonalities and differences within the researcher-researched relationship impact rapport-building and power dynamics. Also, I highlight how a …

Celebrating Hmong: A Minute Ethnography Of Hmong Americans In Minneapolis, Madison Baczuk

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

The Hmong people are a culture that originated in Southern China. However, many Hmong people fled to the U.S (among other nations) with the conclusion of the Vietnam war. Like other Asian cultures, the Hmong people are collectivist and give priority to family members of greater age and of the male gender. The Hmong celebrate birth, marriage, and death through sacred rituals and traditions that honor their ancestors. The Hmong language is in danger of extinction due to globalization. Yet, globalization also brings the general public greater knowledge and exposure to the wonderful culture of the Hmong people.

Community Self-Reliance Of Rural Tourism In Indonesia: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Husen Hutagalung, Dedi Purwana, Usep Suhud, Amirul Mukminin, Hamidah Hamidah, Nurti Rahayu

The Qualitative Report

Community-based tourism villages have now become a worldwide concern because of their tremendous impact on strengthening the empowerment of local communities as well as on enhancing social responsibility in a sustainable manner. This study aims to explore the meaning of self-reliance in tourism village communities since it is a key indicator of the progress of community-based tourism villages. This study adopted a qualitative approach with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to investigate the meaning of people's experiences from inter-subjective activities in a double-hermeneutic process between researchers and people who experience them. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight (8) research subjects from …

Cultural Tourism, Religion And Religious Heritage In Castile And León, Spain, Miguel González-González, Óscar Fernández-Álvarez

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Tourism is a driving force of the economy for many countries around the world. The large number of architectural and intangible World Heritage Sites have consolidated those countries in their strong positions as cultural tourism destinations. Within cultural tourism, religious tourism is particularly prominent. This work focuses on Spain and specifically on some of its regions which lack beaches but possess a wealth of religious cultural heritage, such as Castile and León, which have viewed such heritage as an asset to attract a different kind of tourist. The objectives of this study are to highlight the value of religious heritage …

Evaluation Criteria And Rubric For Anth 101: Introduction To Cultural Anthropology, Antonia M. Santangelo

Open Educational Resources

This rubric was designed to access the readiness and appropriateness of an open educational resource textbook for an introduction to cultural anthropology course

Startup Futures: Entrepreneurs, Investors And Imaginaries Of Care In Global India, Ipshita Ghosh

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation examines the emerging cultures of venture capital-driven, technology-infused startups in India and the multiple ways in which they shape the nation's entrepreneurship landscape. Based on findings drawn from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Delhi's startups, I argue that entrepreneurship serves as a cultural and ideological formation that creates a new regime of values and reshapes our social, political, and civil life. In this sense, I suggest that previous studies on entrepreneurship which focus purely on its economic impacts (or lack thereof) tend to undervalue the long-lasting cultural transformations created through it. One of the primary ways in …

Ethnographic Insight On The Construct Of Blackness: Heritage, ‘Home,’ Community, And Reality In Carver City-Lincoln Gardens, Tampa, Florida, 1928-2021, Lisa Katina Armstrong

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study is a community-engaged investigation of the experiences and impacts of Black people living in the segregated space called “Carver City-Lincoln Gardens.” This study aims to advance scholarly and mainstream conversations about one racialized community; it is a significant space because the Lincoln Gardens Area was explicitly designated by the Department of Defense as a residential space for Black veterans after World War II to purchase homes. By exploring this housing arrangement through an anthropological lens, the findings indicate that a mixed-method, collaborative ethnography reveals nuances that might be glossed over when communities are racialized. This study also seeks …

Crafting A Scene: The Nexus Of Production And Consumption Of Tampa Bay Craft Beer, Russell L. Edwards

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the construction of a local craft beer scene, from perspectives and behaviors of both producers and consumers. It is situated within the Greater Tampa Bay area, and as such offers an ethnographic account of this phenomenon at a community level. Participant observation across a wide range of spaces and events across several years were combined with semi-structured interviews from 27 consumers and 17 producers in the local area to investigate how the scene is constructed and maintained and what consumers do within it. These ethnographic insights were combined with the results of structured methods, such as: freelisting …

“Even If You Have Food In Your House, It Will Not Taste Sweet”: Central African Refugees’ Experiences Of Cultural Food Insecurity And Other Overlapping Insecurities In Tampa, Florida, Shaye Soifoine

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the United States, resettled African refugee populations experience food insecurity at rates up to seven times higher than those of the general population. In Tampa, Florida, anthropologists have documented high levels of food insecurity among Central African refugee households since members of this population began to be resettled in the area in 2016. Utilizing an intersectional lens and drawing upon theoretical concepts such as cultural food security, navigational capital, and social reproduction, this thesis examines how Central African refugees, particularly women, experience food (in)security and other overlapping forms of (in)security as they integrate into US systems of structural inequality …

Ethnofiction And Interior Protest: Scholar-Activism In The Yemenite Children Affair, Tova Gamliel

The Qualitative Report

In this article, ethnofiction is discussed as a scholar-activist methodology that offers advantages for interior protest within community borders. The case study centers on the affair of the abducted Yemenite-Jewish children in Israel. Ethnographic studies and the researcher’s experience with members of the community serve as sources for a dramatic dialogue that reflects the definition of, and coping with, a problem as the topic of protest in the affair. The connection between the case study and its sources of information is stressed and the ethnodrama is instantiated as a transformative methodology. The findings on the acceptance of this ethnofiction in …

Puritan Patriarchal Construction Of American Sexual Morality And Woman's Worth: A Daughter's Response, Savannah Mather

Honors Projects

While modern conceptions of Puritanism regard it as an artifact of American history, whose woman-killing theologies are long buried and forgotten, the bible in my father’s closet and the recently leaked Supreme Court draft to overturn Roe. Vs. Wade would argue otherwise. Cotton Mather’s favorite book Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion outlined both the ideals and detriments of the Anglo-American female identity. In this text, white women were taught to absolve themselves of the “nakedness” in dress Puritan settlers associated Indigenous people with. A woman’s ability to align herself to the ideals of chastity determined her own and her …

Misinformation And Disinformation: Detecting Fakes With The Eye And Ai, Victoria Rubin

Data and Test Instruments

How do we detect, deter, and prevent the spread of mis- and disinformationwith the human eye and AI? How does theory inform the practice, and how do theevidence-based research and best practices in lie-catching and truth-seekingprofessions—inform AI? The book looks into well-established human practicessuch as the routines and processes used in detective work, journalism, and scientificinquiry, and how they contribute toward innovative AI solutions. The book explainsthe principles, inner workings, and recent evolution of five types of state-of-the-artAI technologies suitable for curtailing the spread of mis- and disinformation:automated deception detectors, clickbait detectors, satirical fake detectors, rumordebunkers, and computational fact-checking tools.

Navigating The Cairene Table: Food And Family Between What Is Ideal And What Is Real, Iman Afify

Theses and Dissertations

Our daily encounters with food, especially during our childhood, play a crucial role in shaping and informing our identity and our habitus. In this research, by using multimodal and auto ethnography, I argue that due to the guiding path that our senses carve for us, we make sense and contextualise our surroundings through our senses, and not only the five senses of vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch, but also through our inner senses of time and temporality, and how time and memory play an important role in the registration of our surroundings through our bodies and senses. I am …

Borders: A Story Of Political Imagination, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

This article traces three different political imaginaries about borders, suggesting that the dominant imaginary—the one of border walls, driven by a fear of invasion—is only one way to live in the world. The goal is to make space in our political imaginations to rethink how we live together, including thinking beyond nation-states as containers that keep people in or out. By first showing how the vision of invasion is built and maintained with intersecting transnational technologies and ideologies, I open the way to thinking otherwise. Second, I trace the counterpolitics of borders developed by artists and activists, resisting borders and …

Bringing People Back Into Public Health Data: Community Feedback On A Set Of Visualization Tools - Summary Report, Alejandro Cerón, Mia Glover, Quisi Rodriguez-Oregel, Dani Thompson, Tom Adams, Naomi Asakura, Kaela Belknap, Anna Block, Nicole Boehler, Hannah Boeve, Sarah Bomers, Sasha Borovok, Grace Bryan, Kate Buffington, Majesty Cain, Beth Carideo, Haley Chesno, Grace Connell, Jake Corbett, Camille Cruz, Chloe Dawkins, Anna Denniston, Lydia Dickens, Sophie Duplock, Samuel Dwinell, Avery Ess, Sam Ferman, Ellis Geis, Ethan Graupmann, Xander Hedrick, Angel Hernandez-Miramontes, Grant Huyghe, Sara Ibrahiem, Anna Jamieson, Ian Kang, Allie Kris, Erin Lawrence, Maddie Leake, Ryan Leary, Taylor Loh, Charlotte Monroe, Alexander Nguyen-Lopez, Henry O’Daffer, Cat Parish, Jaylee Recountre, Grace Rizzo, Noah Roseth, Grace Rothstein, Katie Sage, Marie Saltzmann, Stephen Shlain, Riley Shores, Mackenna Simson, Mark Teneza, Jack Weinmeister, Justin Weinzweig, Alison Wenman, Patch Whelan, Lea Zimmerman

Anthropology: Undergraduate Student Scholarship

This course-based study is a product of the University of Denver’s Spring 2022 The Social Determination of Health (ANTH 2424) class. The study aimed to understand how well a set of public health visualization tools tells the data stories about people in Colorado, and about important public health problems. For this, a team of almost sixty undergraduate students taking the class, coordinated by three graduate teaching assistants, and directed by the course instructor interviewed a total of fifty-six people from Colorado, qualitatively analyzed those interviews, and wrote reports that draw conclusions and recommendations.

Sunbelt Schooling: Publics And Politics Of Education Advocacy In Phoenix, Arizona, Matthew Chrisler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For the past forty years, public education in the United States has been the target of both neoliberal and conservative education reforms that have imposed austerity and privatization, set limits on racial, gendered, and sexual citizenship, increased school responsibility for social reproduction, and winnowed visions of public education as both a universal social entitlement and site of participatory democracy. These reforms emerged from, and remain powerfully anchored in, the United States Sunbelt, a crescent of metropolitan suburbs spanning southern California to Florida. This region propelled the conservative revolution in American politics but is also the site of progressive organizing that, …

All Aboard The Abortion Pill Train: Activism, Medicine, And Reproductive Technologies In The Republic Of Ireland, Brenna Mccaffrey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The successful legalization of abortion in the Republic of Ireland in 2018 is one of many recent political changes amidst ongoing global debates about the role of reproductive freedom in modern societies. This dissertation follows these changes through both clandestine and highly public social movement activism, deliberative and legislative political processes, and dynamic shifts in medical service provision over a three-year period from 2017 to 2020. I center the abortion pill as a medical and pharmaceutical technology that has been under-examined by scholars as an agent of change in the story of Ireland’s abortion debates. The emergence of non- profit …

Building The Revolution: Ideology, Affect And Gender In Bolivarian Caracas, Andreina I. Torres A.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Building the Revolution: Ideology, Affect and Gender in Bolivarian Caracas,” examines the Bolivarian Revolution (1998-present) as a heterogenous shifting political process, and terrain of struggle in which a multiplicity of actors disputed the meanings and direction of socialism in Venezuela. During three years of ethnographic and archival research in Caracas (between 2014 and 2017) I researched one of the many Campamentos de Pioneros (Pioneer Camps) that was part of the Movimiento de Pobladores y Pobladoras de Venezuela (Venezuela’s Settlers’ Movement). The pioneers sought to “rescue” and occupy centrally located land in the national capital in order to build housing for …

North Of The Grid: The Black Experience Of 17th -19th Century Rural New York City, Stephanie E. Barnes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, transatlantic slavery was a racial project and template for race-making which created a country that relied on institutions that were organized and performed through social stratification. Today, the nation still operates on systemically racist institutions that have benefited whites while disadvantaging ‘others.’ The narratives presented in American history are rooted in whiteness and benefit the white community while marginalizing nonwhites. Over two hundred years of slavery history in this country has been purposely manipulated and left out. My research focuses on using an historical archaeological framework to research and share the lives of free and enslaved …

Why, New York City? Gauging The Quality Of Life Through The Thoughts Of Tweeters, Sheryl Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a resource for social data, Twitter’s platform has been used to measure the quality of life through sentiment analysis. This capstone project explores another methodological technique—querying Twitter data around specific keyword terms to determine dominant topics, word patterns, and sentiment leanings in a geographical area. Focusing on New York City and Los Angeles for comparative analysis, the keyword term “why” will be used to build a Python analysis around topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Using this approach, the analysis reveals social and cultural differences, the overall sentiment of tweets, and subjects of interest to tweeters.

GitHub Repository for all …

The Cultural Dilemma Of The American Education System: An Observation Of How It Lives In Montessori, Amaya Varma

University Honors Theses

This thesis acts as a case study examining the culture of a Montessori school by highlighting major themes from a selection of interviews. The intention is not to measure the amount of diversity in this school, but rather to provide an observation of people's understanding of the concept. It intends to show the limits and contradictions of any schooling project which concerns the structural constraints of the American education system. It reveals an internal "culture of kindness" which is constructed in this school and argues that Montessori education could be amenable to instilling certain values which allow for students to …

Everything To Lose: Extraction, Racism, And Survival On Wet'suwet'en Land, Anne Spice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work critically analyzes the role of extractive industry in the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples and occupation of Indigenous lands, and examines how Indigenous resistance to oil and gas projects augments the damaging effects of fossil fuel extraction and create alternative possibilities for life in the face of catastrophic environmental crises. In Wet’suwet’en territory, in Northern British Columbia, Canada, construction has begun on the fracked gas Coastal GasLink pipeline, despite the opposition of local Indigenous leaders and chiefs. Several Indigenous land reoccupation camps have been set up by Wet’suwet’en people to resist the pipeline’s construction, and the resulting conflict …

The Role Of Native Hawaiian Spiritual Practices In Social Systems And Environmental Stewardship, Christina A. Hornbaker

Social Sciences

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Native Hawaiian spiritual practices played a role in social systems and stewardship practices. Lightfoot and colleagues (2013) suggest that more archaeological research is needed on traditional resources and environmental management practices. The authors point out that “landscape management practices… are subtle and not prone to leaving smoking guns in the archaeological record” (Lightfoot et al. 2013), which makes such sites difficult to document without ethnographic accounts. Due to this subtlety, I will mainly be pulling information from interviews or oral histories from Hawaiian descendants, early explorers and missionary accounts, ethnographers, and …

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

Examining The Cross-Cultural Competence Of United States Christian Missionaries Engaged In Developing Indigenous Leaders: A Mixed Methods Study, Craig W. Goodman

Dissertations

For the past two millennia, missionaries have crossed from one culture to another to bring the Christian message to all cultures of the world. Questions about the effectiveness of these mission efforts have been asked and researched by many; however, one key question remains unanswered: what personal attributes help a person to be more competent at crossing cultures as they interact with people from other cultures? Although cross-cultural competence has been studied in a variety of fields over the past 50 years, the models and assessments used have never been applied to Christian missionaries.

To address this deficiency, this parallel …

Helmets Off: An Exploratory Investigation Into The Philanthropic Activity Of Black Nfl Players, Eugena Anderson

Dissertations

The term philanthropist typically conjures up images of older, wealthy White males. When taking account of a more diverse population, the term generosity provides a more inclusive framework to understanding the experiences of those marginalized from the study and practice of philanthropy. Using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach, this qualitative investigation explored one of several groups of individuals engaging in acts of generosity and brought the Black athlete experience into academic and philanthropic conversations. This research provided knowledge from real-life experiences of current and former Black NFL Players (BNPs) to inform various stakeholders who seek to support their activities. …