Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

Using Photography As A Creative, Collaborative Research Tool, Ailsa Winton

The Qualitative Report

Drawing on debates in the complementary fields of participatory, youth and visual research methods, the paper discusses an experimental photography project carried out as part of a broader study with young people in Mexico City on spatial experience, belonging and exclusion. The paper describes the mechanics of the project, considers the kind of data it produced, and discusses the different outcomes for participants and researcher, including its difficulties and limitations. It finds that the creative, collaborative approach used has potential for opening the research process to embrace creative, reflexive, complicated “selves,” but warns that this outcome is not automatic: collaboration …

A Shadow Place: Plumwood Mountain, Natasha Fijn

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This photo essay features the journey from the main highway, up a long bush track, to Australian environmental philosopher Val Plumwood's home in a clearing amongst dense, temperate rainforest, on the edge of a steep escarpment. The highway is the contact zone, where humans and other beings collide with one another. The intention of this photo essay is to draw attention to such contact zones, acting as conduits to our urban environments, and to ask us to acknowledge the shadow places along the way that make a different kind of contribution to our lives.

Chaco Landscapes: Data, Theory And Management, Ruth Van Dyke, Stephen Lekson, Carrie Heitman, Julian Thomas

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The Colorado Plateau is a land of long horizons punctuated by dramatic buttes, mesas, and mountain ranges. The rich cultural heritage and natural beauty of this region hold meaning for the millions of tourists who visit each year to experience this iconic landscape. Many of these same places on the Plateau are still considered central to indigenous religious practices, histories, and oral traditions of descendent communities in the region. This landscape is also defined by the complex connections and histories of diverse resident communities. Ancient communities of the Plateau are the focus of ongoing major anthropological investigations into such issues …

Music And The Migrant: A Transnational Account Of Cumbia, Irene L. Mekus

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper looks into the cultural synthesization and the transnational ties of cumbia between Latin America and the United States. Three case studies look at the story of migrants and their transnational ties through cumbia and are analyzed through an ethnomusicology framework.

Pilgrimage, Spiritual Tourism And The Shaping Of Transnational ‘Imagined Communities’: The Case Of The Tidjani Ziyara To Fez, Johara Berriane

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This paper aims at analysing the role of the transnational Tidjani pilgrimage to Fez in shaping a sense of belonging among West African adepts and their identification with Morocco. It is based on the assumption that the Tidjani pilgrimage has contributed to the shaping of a religious ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1996) encompassing West Africa and Morocco and to the reinforcement of the position of Fez as its ‘socio-cultural centre’ (Cohen, 1992). This paper explores the different historical and political factors that contributed to the evolution and maintaining of the Tidjani pilgrimage practice and to giving sense to it, and analyses …

Archiving Governance In Palestine, Caitlin M. Davis

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

During the 1980s, a historical turn within the discipline of anthropology fueled an ‘archival imaginary’, which encouraged scholars to enter archival spaces, study their documents, and collect the historical ‘context’ that had been missing from previous ethnographic texts. The archive, in other words, became a repository, a site for the extraction of information about a particular topic. In the historiography of Palestine, these activities have proved fruitful; new historians have mined military and state archives in ways that have illuminated the nefarious details regarding the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Fewer scholars, however, have positioned ‘the archive’ as a subject (not …

Off The Lip Conference - Transdisciplinary Approaches To Cognitive Innovation. Conference Proceedings, Sue Denham, Michael Punt, Edith Doove, Martha Blassnigg, Raluca Briazu, Kathryn Francis, Agi Haynes, Guy Edmonds, Adam Benjamin, Matthew Emmett, Iris Garrelfs, Christopher B. Germann, Joanna Griffin, Diane Humphrey, Bryanna Lucyk, Christie Purchase, Rachel Sansone, Emily Baxter, Amy Ione, Frank Loesche, Abigail Jackson, Alexis Kirke, Eduardo Miranda, Luke Rendell, Simon Ingram, Yutaka Nakamura, Gi Taek Ryoo, Eugenia Stamboliev, Michael Straeubig, Chun-Wei Hsu, Pinar Oztop, Mihaela Taranu, Sundar Sarukkai, James Sweeting, Minami Hirayama

Off the Lip Conference - Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation

The promise of cognitive innovation as a collaborative project in the sciences, arts and humanities is that we can approach creativity as a bootstrapping cognitive process in which the energies that shape the poem are necessarily indistinguishable from those that shape the poet. For the purposes of this conference the exploration of the idea of cognitive innovation concerns an understanding of creativity that is not exclusively concerned with conscious human thought and action but also as intrinsic to our cognitive development. As a consequence, we see the possibility for cognitive innovation to provide a theoretical and practical platform from which …

Modeling Food Security, Energy, And Climate And Cultural Impacts Of A Process: The Case Study Of Shea Butter In Sub-Saharan Africa, Colleen Claire Naughton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Millions of people in the world, particularly women and people in sub-Saharan Africa, suffer from hunger and poverty. Three of the major 2015-2030 United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to eliminate hunger through food security and sustainable agriculture, eradicate poverty, and achieve gender equality through women’s empowerment. Shea trees and their associated fruit and butter can play a major role in each of these three SDGs for women and their families throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Shea trees are located over a wide expanse stretching more than 5,000 kilometers across over eighteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These trees produce fruit that …

Culture And Coping: A Qualitative Study Of A Sri Lankan Village Post Tsunami, Charlotte Nirmalani Gunawardena, Damien Sanchez, Piyadasa Kodituwakku, Michael Hollifield, Chandanie Hewage, Kalum Bopagoda, Krishantha Weerarathnege

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

On the tenth anniversary of the Tsunami on December 26, 2014, Sri Lankan newspapers highlighted the issues that still prevail in Peraliya and other tsunami affected regions in Sri Lanka such as unresolved housing problems, displacement from homes near the ocean, poor infrastructure, and loss of livelihood (Hussain, December 26, 2014, p. AA1), and at the same time commemorated “the resilience of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who rose from the debris and the carnage, picked up the pieces and soldiered on amidst the tears and the pain” (Editorial, Sunday Times, December 21, 2014, p. 12). A …

Lucumi And The Children Of Cotton: Gender, Race, And Ethnicity In The Mapping Of A Black Atlantic Politics Of Religion, Akissi M. Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I have examined claims to religious authenticity, purity, legitimacy and authority through the lens of a Black and African American Orisa community in Brooklyn, New York. Through these claims, made both internally and to a broader Orisa community within the United States and throughout different locales in the Black Atlantic, I have articulated how they are more often than not linked to very non-religious aspects of social life. Members of this community, and the broader Orisa Atlantic of which they are a part, do not practice this tradition in a social, cultural, or political vacuum. In fact, …

From Coercion To Consent?: Governing The Formerly Incarcerated In The 21st Century United States, Karen G. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With over 650,000 incarcerated people returning to their home communities each year, prisoner reentry reform has recently become as an important strand of penal policy innovation intended to address the barriers that former offenders face. Through ethnographic research in four correctional institutions in the Midwest, I trace the use of evidence-based practices and policies as they relate to prisoner reentry and risk reduction. This dissertation intervenes in the debates on mass incarceration and prisoner reentry and offers insights on how evidence-based practices and policies are being mobilized to mitigate the costs of mass incarceration. I show how the scientization of …

Through The Gateway: Marijuana Production, Governance, And The Drug War Détente, Michael Polson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1996 voter approval of medical marijuana laws in California, marijuana policy has become increasingly liberalized. Producers, however, have remained in the greyest of grey market zones. Federal anti-drug laws and supply-side tactics have intensively targeted them even as marijuana has become more licit. In this legally unstable environment, marijuana patient-cultivators and underground producers have articulated and asserted themselves politically and economically, particularly as the likelihood of full legalization has increased. This dissertation explores how producers navigated the nebulous zone between underground and medical markets. I argue that even as producers supplied marijuana to a formalizing, regulated medical industry …

Empowerment From Within: Supporting Palestinian Women’S Struggle Against Violence, Ortal Bensky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent reports by the United Nations and local non-governmental organizations present a troubling increase in incidents of violence against Palestinian women in Palestine. These are cases of domestic violence, where the attackers are Palestinians, and political violence, where the attackers are Israeli settlers and soldiers. These violent incidents include attacks on body and property. Most incidents are neither dealt with by the Palestinian authorities nor by the Israeli government and judicial system. There is not sufficient international pressure to enforce justice. The purpose of this study is to offer alternative ways to prevent violent crimes, enforce relevant laws, and provide …

Millets From The Margins: Value, Knowledge And The Subaltern Practice Of Biodiversity In Uttarakhand, India, Priya R. Chandrasekaran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Millets from the Margins: Value, Knowledge and the Subaltern Practice of Biodiversity in Uttarakhand, India analyzes what is at stake for small-scale, predominantly women, farmers as local varieties of rainfed food grains such as finger millet are being newly commodified and valued as a biodiversity resource. With support from a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, I conducted seventeen months of ethnographic research with farmers, activists, scientists, NGO leaders, government officials, transnational functionaries and agribusiness representatives in segregated yet interconnected realms ranging from a village in the Himalayan foothills to transnational institutions in Rome.

This work demonstrates …

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Frit-Core Beads In North America, Karlis Karklins

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Among the earliest European beads to reach North America is a distinctive group generally referred to in the archaeological literature as frit-core or frit-cored, so called because their interiors consist of sintered sand rather than solid glass. Likely produced in France, they are restricted to northeastern North America and have short temporal ranges, making them ideal chronological indicators for the latter part of the 16th century and the very early 17th century.

The Fichtelgebirge Bead And Button Industry Of Bavaria, Karlis Karklins, Sibylle Jargstorf, Gerhard Zeh, Laure Dussubieux

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Venice and Bohemia are generally considered to be the principal bead manufacturers of Europe. Yet Germany, especially the Fichtelgebirge region of northeastern Bavaria, produced large quantities of glass beads for the world market beginning in the 15th century, if not even earlier, and continued to do so well into the 20th century. The Fichtelgebirge industry is especially notable for two things: 1) the utilization of furnace-winding technology which, based on our current knowledge, was not employed to a significant degree elsewhere in Europe during the post-medieval period, and 2) the localized use of Proterobas, a greenish igneous rock, to produce …

Beads At The Place Of White Earth - Late Neolithic And Early Chalcolithic Aktopraklık, Northwestern Turkey, Emma L. Baysal

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

The site of Aktopraklık in northwestern Turkey was inhabited during the Late Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic periods, from the mid-7th to mid-6th millennia B.C. The site lies in a region that came to link Anatolia with Europe through the introduction of early farming practices and has already provided much information about the groups which inhabited the area along with their domesticated plants and animals. Although scientific techniques have led to recent breakthroughs in our understanding of the dynamics of change in the region, it is material culture that continues to form the foundation of archaeological research into daily life. Aktopraklık …

Reviews And End Matter

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Contact in the 16th Century, edited by Brad Loewen and Claude Chapdelaine, reviewed by Marvin T. Smith

Flower Forever: Bead Craft from France and Venice, by Ragnar Levi, reviewed by Alice Scherer

Beads from Germany: Idar-Oberstein, Lauscha, Neugablonz, by Floor Kaspers, reviewed by Valerie Hector

Forging Fresh Food Chains In The Americas, Lisa B. Markowitz

The Chautauqua Journal

No abstract provided.

Rituals And Performance In Gastronomy, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

I would like to explore, in this paper, the performative and ritualistic aspects of gastronomy and sharing meals. Because eating is something we have to do quite often, it is filled with a social function that is very culture dependent. At the same time, in every culture, we find some performative and ritualistic elements associated with eating and sharing a meal.

In this paper, I will interrogate the performative and ritualistic aspects of family meals as well as meals that have a function like a meeting or a reunion. In a second part, I will explore how some chefs articulate …

Presentation Of The Issue On Cuisine & Performance, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

"Gastronomy is an important part of our culture. The way we eat says a lot about who we are, what culture has shaped us, and the choices we have made concerning our food and the way we eat it. Gastronomy is surrounded by many rituals, and we often perform the way we eat. Besides, since we need to eat every day, we are engaged in rituals and performative acts related to gastronomy every day."

Indigenous Curation At The Denver Museum Of Nature And Science, Julia Marie Strunk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the questions of how and why indigenous curation is incorporated into collections care and management for American Indian sacred, ceremonial, and religious items at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) through the examination of staff discourse. This thesis also discusses the importance of incorporating non-Western ontologies and epistemologies into classically Western science and natural history museums, and how this helps reconcile differing collections care and management practices. Through the presentation and examination of data and literature, I argue that it is important to include indigenous curation in museums because it aids in cultural revitalization and …

Interpreting The Intangible: Challenges To The Display Of Dance Objects In Museums, Kathryn Louise Brundige Grossman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes Indigenous and non-Western dance objects in museums, examining the role of theory from material culture studies, critical museology and museum education on approaches to their interpretation and display. To explore this topic, I conducted a comparative analysis of Indigenous and non-Western dance object displays at four museums - Denver Art Museum, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Norman, Oklahoma - investigating the use of Native voice, reflexive analysis and multisensory elements in the exhibits' organization, narrative …

The Aids House: Orphan Care And The Changing Household In Lesotho, Ellen Block

Sociology Faculty Publications

HIV/AIDS has brought the connections between care and relatedness into sharp relief. In the midst of social change driven largely by the AIDS epidemic, the house has emerged as the most stable element connecting kin in Lesotho. Houses provide spaces that frame human actions, transform relationships, and reflect the social order. The house is a key crossroads for human movement. It is also the site where physical connections, emotional bonds, and feelings of love and affection are nurtured. Most significantly, it is the site where physical acts of caring take place. Based on extensive ethnographic research, I demonstrate that the …

Paternity Matters: Premarital Childbearing And Belonging In Nyanga East And Mokhotlong, Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, Ellen Block

Sociology Faculty Publications

In this article we discuss the role that fathers and paternal families play in acknowledging and caring for children born outside of a recognised union in two southern African communities – Nyanga East, South Africa and Mokhotlong, Lesotho. While these communities are geographically and culturally close, there are important differences in the responses to the care of children born outside of a recognised union. In Nyanga East, despite not paying damages, the genitor and the paternal family are increasingly becoming involved in the care of children, even when they are no longer in a relationship with the mother; whereas in …

Playing With Knives: The Socialization Of Self-Initiated Learners, David F. Lancy

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Since Margaret Mead’s field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a range of societies. One improbable commonality has been the tolerance, even encouragement, of toddler behavior that is patently risky, such as playing with or attempting to use a sharp-edged tool. This laissez faire approach to socialization follows from a reliance on children as …

“I Can See My Values In Places”: Relationships, Place, And Growing Old In Detroit Neighborhoods, Wendy Daniel Bartlo

Wayne State University Dissertations

The central focus of this dissertation is to examine the inextricable link between persons, their social worlds, and their environments. I do this through an ethnographic study of senior members of non-biologically based kinship groups with an affiliation to place. Critical to this examination is the city of Detroit itself, as members of these groups ultimately collectively identify as Detroiters through space and time. It is this collective identity, strengthened mostly through their defense of an outsider deemed unsuccessful city that renders Detroit a good place for the older person to maintain connections, participate socially and civically, and to organize …

Attitudes Of Mothers And Daughters Towards Menstrual Suppression, Jacqueline M. Devaney

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Recent biomedical advancements, cultural practices, and individual preferences have altered the ways in which biological process such as menstruation are perceived and managed. Increasingly, women are interested in suppressing menstruation to alleviate its negative symptoms, including bloating, menstrual cramps, fatigue, and irritability. This topic is especially relevant for adolescent girls, as mothers and daughters might have to negotiate attitudes towards daughters’ menstrual suppression. Therefore this study aims to examine how this topic is discussed and understood within the mother-daughter dyad. It is also important to consider how these attitudes are shaped by cultural background, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and religion. Through …

Table Of Contents (V. 28, 2016)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.