Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

Gender And Religion In A Shifting Social Landscape: Anglo-Saxon Mortuary Practices, Ad 600-700, Caroline Palmer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

My thesis examines seventh-century East Anglian mortuary practices and cross-correlates grave goods and human remains to determine whether there was an expression of the sexual division of labor during this period of social and religious change. I argue that gender roles changed as a result of adopting kingdoms and Christianity. Prior to this time period, Anglo-Saxons were primarily pagan and were buried with extensive burial goods. In addition to changes in religious and burial practices, during the Final Phase (600-700 AD) there appears to have been a division of labor that was not as dichotomous in the Migration Phase (450-600 …

Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a so-called post-racial America, a new gay identity has flourished and come into the limelight. However, in recent years, researchers have concluded that not all men who have sex with other men (MSM) self-identify as gay, most noticeably a large population of Black men. It is possible that a tainted history of Black enslavement in this country that is inextricably linked with ideas of space, surveillance, subversion, and survival inform a Black male’s self-identification as being “on the down low” (DL). This begs the question: What does mainstream society view as gay-ness and how is the DL constructed …

Grieving Behaviors During Parental Bereavement In Western Societies, Victor A. Luna

Theses and Dissertations

This paper will examine the grieving behaviors of parents who have lost a child. More specifically, it will discuss how grieving behaviors that are deemed appropriate depend on one’s gender, and how societal norms discourage behaviors that are deemed inappropriate. The focus will be on industrialized Western societies.

Unending Mazes: Gendered Inequalities, Drug Use, And State Interventions In Rural Appalachia, Lesly-Marie Buer

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

Prescription opioids are associated with rising rates of overdose deaths and hepatitis C and HIV infection in the US, including in rural Central Appalachia. Yet there is a dearth of published ethnographic research examining rural opioid use. The aim of this dissertation is to document the gendered inequalities that situate women’s encounters with substance abuse treatment as well as additional state interventions targeted at women who use drugs. These results are based on ethnographic fieldwork completed from 2013 to 2016 and centered around one county seat in rural Central Appalachia. Data are ascertained through semi-structured interviews with women who have …

“Well, Don’T Walk Around Naked... Unless You’Re A Girl”: Gender, Sexuality, And Risk In Jamtronica Festival Subcultural Scenes, Kaitlyne A. Motl

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

The purpose of this study was to explore emerging issues surrounding gendered fear, threat, and violence perpetration at music festivals – particularly events that feature a synthesis of jam band and electronic dance music acts – a genre termed jamtronica by its fans. Though gendered violence perpetration and prevention have been widely studied within other party-oriented settings (i.e., sexual violence perpetration on college campuses), very little research exists to address how wider disparities of gender and sexuality permeate a community whose members frequently claim the scene’s immunity from external inequalities.

In this three-year multi-sited ethnography, I incorporate participant observations, group …

Very Long Engagements: The Persistent Authority Of Bridewealth In A Post-Apartheid South African Community, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines the persistent authority of the customary practice for forming recognized marriages in many South African communities, centered on bridewealth and called “lobola.” Marriage rates have sharply fallen in South Africa, and many South Africans blame this on the difficulty of completing lobola amid intense economic strife. Using in-depth qualitative research from a village in KwaZulu-Natal, where lobola demands are the country’s highest and marriage rates its lowest, I argue that lobola’s authority survives because lay actors, and especially women, have innovated new repertoires of lobola behavior that allow them to pursue emerging needs and desires for marriage …

Gender, Sexuality, And Categories Of Risk: Physician Views Of Cervical Cancer In Bangalore, India, Emily G. Capilouto

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

India has one of the highest rates of cervical cancer morbidity and mortality globally. Despite this, there are no national or state-wide screening efforts for cervical cancer and its prevention in India. In an effort to understand the magnitude of cervical cancer in Bangalore, India, this research draws upon data collected in hospital contexts over a month-long period to explore the ways in which physician attitudes contribute to understandings of cervical cancer and its prevention in the growing urban context of Bangalore.

Persuasive Kinship: Human–Plant Relations In Southwest Amazonia, Fabiana Maizza

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

Based on my ethnographic research with the Jarawara people, an indigenous society in the Southwest Amazonia, the article explores the idea of thinking kinship as persuasion. Among the Jarawara, children can have more than one father, which is well known in Americanist literature, but there would exist as well an original practice what we could call "multi-maternity". I also observe that the Jarawara can have diverse parental relations - some of their children are human, while others are plants. This occurs in a system of raising (nayana) in which children and plants are raised by a father and/or a mother …

Gendered Impacts Of Community-Based Conservation Initiatives In Kimana/Tikondo Group Ranch Outside Of Amboseli National Park, Megan Clemens

Master's Theses

Community-based conservation has become a common solution to addressing local communities needs and concerns when it comes to conservation initiatives associated with, or outside the boundaries of national parks. Community-based initiatives associated with Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya mark one of the first attempts to include local communities in conservation initiatives and management as well as establish systems of benefit sharing between conservation and local communities. However, a critique of community-based conservation initiatives points out they often assume community homogeneity. Assumption of community homogeneity leads to inequities in benefits sharing, exclusion of subgroups (women, ethnic minorities) or even exacerbate …

Southern Veils : The Sisters Of Loretto In Early National Kentucky., Hannah O'Daniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the experiences of Roman Catholic women who joined the Sisters of Loretto, a community of women religious in rural Washington and Nelson Counties, Kentucky, between the 1790s and 1826. It argues that the Sisters of Loretto used faith to interpret and respond to unfolding events in the early nation. The women sought to combat moral slippage and restore providential favor in the face of local Catholic institutional instability, global Protestant evangelical movements, war and economic crisis, and a tuberculosis outbreak. The Lorettines faced financial, social, and cultural pressures—including an economic depression, a culture that celebrated family formation …

"Beautifully Awful": A Feminist Ethnography Of Women Veterans' Experiences With Transition From Military Service, Kiersten H. Downs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As issues of gender inequality in the military are addressed, women will continue to fill jobs traditionally occupied by men, and ultimately take on a greater percentage of leadership responsibility. For these reasons, women will remain the fastest growing population within our active duty forces. An increased need for research, advocacy, and resources for programs and services designed specifically for women veterans is necessary in order to prepare for an upsurge in the numbers of women who will be seeking services in the years to come. This research utilized a feminist ethnographic approach for data collection and analysis. Data was …

The End Of Aids: Gender, Race And Class Politics In New York's Campaign To End The Epidemic, Lauren Suchman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since its official discovery in 1981, the story of HIV/AIDS has been a story of inequality. Not only has the virus spread more easily among those marginalized due to their gender, race, or class, but AIDS activism itself has tended to elevate the voices and needs of the more powerful over those with less privilege. While we might point to 1981, when the CDC issued its first official report on HIV, as the official “beginning” of HIV/AIDS, where and how does the story end? This dissertation examines one attempt to bring the story to a close: New York State’s “Ending …

Sex Roles And Social Change In Amazonian Ecuador, William T. Vickers

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

No abstract provided.

William Vickers And Gender Studies Of The 1970s, E. Jean Langdon

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

No abstract provided.

Riding In Circles: Horse(Wo)Manship In The American Saddlebred Community, Brianna Meyer

Celebration of Learning

Not many people know about the very small yet very dynamic sect of intense sport culture of the American Saddlebred show horse. Even those who do could always learn more, since, like any subculture, it constantly evolves and changes through time. This paper outlines the historical changes since the advent of Saddlebred showing with a focus on female involvement and feminist revolution. Gender has been an important but relatively unseen factor within the community itself—female participants today do not know the history of female involvement. But based on an emergence of women professionals and amateurs in the past 50 years, …

Do Non-Human Primates Have Gender?, Aaron Pelchat

Senior Honors Projects

As activism for trans rights and gender equality becomes ever more prevalent in the current American political discourse, so too has there been a rise in questions about gender. Are sexuality and gender linked? Aren’t there only two genders? What is the difference between gender and sex? Is there a difference? How does one DO gender? Isn’t gender just something you are born with? Helping the public understand these questions is important to transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in a time when more people are “coming out of the closet” and identifying as genders other than cisgender. As an anthropologist, …

Nightmares In The Kitchen: Personal Experience Narratives About Cooking And Food, Sarah T. Shultz

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis explores personal experience narratives about making mistakes in the preparation and serving of food. In order to understand when these narratives, referred to in the text as “kitchen nightmares,” are told, to whom, in what form, and why, one-onone and group ethnographic interviews were conducted. In total, 13 interviews were conducted with 25 individuals (men and women) ranging in age from 19 to 70. Six major themes of kitchen nightmare narratives are identified in Chapter One. Chapter Two explores one of these themes, resistance, in the context of the kitchen nightmare stories of heterosexual married women. Chapter Three …

Christians’ Cut: Popular Religion And The Global Health Campaign For Medical Male Circumcision In Swaziland, Casey Golomski, Sonene Nyawo

Anthropology

Swaziland faces one of the worst HIV epidemics in the world and is a site for the current global health campaign in sub-Saharan Africa to medically circumcise the majority of the male population. Given that Swaziland is also majority Christian, how does the most popular religion influence acceptance, rejection or understandings of medical male circumcision? This article considers interpretive differences by Christians across the Kingdom’s three ecumenical organisations, showing how a diverse group people singly glossed as ‘Christian’ in most public health acceptability studies critically rejected the procedure in unity, but not uniformly. Participants saw medical male circumcision’s promotion and …

Gender And Sexuality (First Edition), Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, Tami Blumenfield, Susan Harper, Abby Gondak

Anthropology Publications

Learning Objectives:

• Identify ways in which culture shapes sex/gender and sexuality.
• Describe ways in which gender and sexuality organize and structure the societies in which we live.
• Assess the range of possible ways of constructing gender and sexuality by sharing examples from different cultures, including small-scale societies.
• Analyze how anthropology as a discipline is affected by gender ideology and gender norms.
• Evaluate cultural “origin” stories that are not supported by anthropological data.

Do Muslim Village Girl’S Need Saving?: Critical Reflections On Gender And The Suffering Child In International Aid, Rania Kassab Sweis

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

In her chapter, "Do Muslim Village Girl’s Need Saving?: Critical Reflections on Gender and the Suffering Child in International Aid," Dr. Rania Sweis poses the following questions: What does it mean when powerful actors in western based international NGOs recognize the Muslim village girl as the ultimate savable victim'? What gendered and racialized logics arc at play in this category's strategic deployment, and what arc their tangible effects for both NGOs and village girls who receive aid'? She argues that large-scale international aid projects that aim to speak for, uplift and save Muslim village girls in Egypt and other countries …

Maracucha, Lorvelis A. Madueño

5.Two Homes

Lorvelis Madueño immigrated from Venezuela to New Orleans with her sister and her sister’s wife seeking stability after the 2014 Venezuelan protests. Madueño describes the sociopolitical climate of Venezuela, different race and ethnic understandings in the United States, gender and sexuality, and the gaita style of Venezuelan folk music. In conversations with her sister Loraine, Madueño reveals the similarities and differences in their upbringing and immigration experiences. Through these observations Madueño hopes to highlight the importance of immigrants sharing their stories.

Gender, Everyday Mobility, And Mass Transit In Urban Asia, Anru Lee

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Individual Thought Patterns: Women In New York's Extreme Metal Music Scene, Joan M. Jocson-Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Extreme metal music (EMM) is both an umbrella term and a sub-category of heavy metal. Although women have a small but steady presence in heavy metal, this number shrinks when applied to the EMM scene. Using ethnographic research, participant-observation and interviews, this study surveys women in New York's EMM scene to address participation, gender performativity and feminist musicology.

The Antipolitics Of Food In Middle-Class America, Neri De Kramer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of the food and parenting practices of a diverse group of middle-class families in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. It starts from the basic premise that the economic pressures on the American middle classes find expression in family life around the socially reproductive work of choosing food and parenting.

The current economic climate marked with extreme and rising income inequality, low growth, high unemployment and stagnating wages has complicated the reproduction process for all parents in this study, regardless of income. Scholars have described how this concern for the future of the next …

Making The Mark : Gender, Identity, And Genital Cutting, Miroslava Prazak

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition.

In an ethnography twenty years in the making, Prazak weaves multiple Kuria perspectives—those of girls, boys, family members, circumcisers, political and religious leaders—into a …

An Epigenetic Clock Analysis Of Race/Ethnicity, Sex, And Coronary Heart Disease, Steve Horvath, Michael Gurven, Morgan E. Levine, Benjamin C. Trumble, Hillard Kaplan, Hooman Allayee, Beate R. Ritz, Brian Chen, Ake T. Lu, Tammy M. Rickabaugh, Beth D. Jamieson, Dianjianyi Sun, Shengxu Li, Wei Chen, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Maud Fagny, Michael S. Kobor, Philip S. Tsao, Alexander P. Reiner, Kerstin L. Edlefsen, Devin Absher, Themistocles L. Assimes

ESI Publications

Background: Epigenetic biomarkers of aging (the “epigenetic clock”) have the potential to address puzzling findings surrounding mortality rates and incidence of cardio-metabolic disease such as: (1) women consistently exhibiting lower mortality than men despite having higher levels of morbidity; (2) racial/ethnic groups having different mortality rates even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences; (3) the black/white mortality cross-over effect in late adulthood; and (4) Hispanics in the United States having a longer life expectancy than Caucasians despite having a higher burden of traditional cardio-metabolic risk factors.

Results: We analyzed blood, saliva, and brain samples from seven different racial/ethnic groups. …

Reconsidering The Orphan Problem: The Emergence Of Male Caregivers In Lesotho, Ellen Block

Sociology Faculty Publications

Care for AIDS orphans in southern Africa is frequently characterized as a "crisis", where kin-based networks of care are thought to be on the edge of collapse. Yet these care networks, though strained by AIDS, are still the primary mechanisms for orphan care, in large part because of the essential role grandmothers play in responding to the needs of orphans. Ongoing demographic shifts as a result of HIV/AIDS and an increasingly feminized labor market continue to disrupt and alter networks of care for orphans and vulnerable children. This paper examines the emergence of a small but growing number of male …

Speaking In Tongues: Language And National Belonging In Globalizing Europe, Uli Linke

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

In contemporary Europe, the problematic concept of the nation has been recuperated to fasten subjects to political space. Under the impact of globalization, marked by increasing rates of human mobility and concurrent security concerns, European Union states have begun to push for cohesive measures to reclaim their national sovereignty. Revised immigration laws and refugee policies are publicly supported, presumably to keep the nation safe. At the same time, European countries advocate for openness and permeable borders to attract foreign capital investment. In the national interior, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments have come to coexist with the outward dissemination of promotional images …

Gender Roots: Conceptualizing "Honor" Killing And Interpretations Of Women's Gender In Muslim Society, Brittany N. Barry

What All Americans Should Know About Women in the Muslim World

The phenomenon of “honor” killing is one that has formed out of deeply rooted concepts of sexuality and gender roles in Muslim societies. These conceptions have been implemented into everyday life and social infrastructure and have created, in some places, a generally accepted power dynamic that subjugates women and generates conceptualizations about women’s sexuality and their assumed obedience. In recent decades the gender constructions of, predominantly, the Middle East and of other Muslim populations have captured the attention of Western thinkers, especially with regards to feminist thought. The Western gaze has produced a number of responses, some of which have …

Performing Gender Through Bowling, Or, "I Was In Shock Other Girls Could Bowl", Eleanor Ann Hasken

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In this thesis, I explore how bowling frames a gendered understanding of the world. I examine style, ball weight, and relationships, and others areas to discuss the ramifications of a binary understanding of gender as it is conceived in bowling centers. To complete this examination, I use interviews and personal observations from a year of fieldwork in Louisville and Bowling Green, Kentucky. I also rely on my personal experiences with the sport to provide contextual information. Drawing primarily on scholarship from Judith Butler, Richard Bauman, and Ann K. Ferrell, I theorize about gendered performances occurring in the bowling center. These …