Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

What Does A Pandemic Sound Like? The Emergence Of Covid Verbal Art, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

In times of social upheaval, people create and engage with verbal art for entertainment and a feeling of connection. While millions of people were forced to stay home to reduce the spread of COVID‑19 from March to July 2020, verbal artists posted recorded performances online and viewers had more time than usual to watch and share them. COVID verbal art refers to songs, poems, and comedy skits that mention social and physical distancing, quarantine and isolation, hygiene and cleaning practices, everyday experiences during the pandemic, as well as social and political critiques of policies and practices that explicitly mention COVID‑19 …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

An Emergent Legionnaires' Disease Syndemic: Water Supply Systems, Infrastructural Violence, And Afflicted Lives In The South Bronx, Ny, Eduardo Piqueiras

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines how contemporary approaches to Legionnaires’ disease (LD) narrowly view it as a biomedical entity that obscures critical moral, temporal, and contextual dimensions creating gaps in how LD “cases” are defined and mitigated. Those who receive an LD diagnosis experience many unique challenges (e.g., personal, existential, community-based, and environmental) yet little is known about how this group of individuals experience recovery and attach meaning to their individual experiences. Using an anthropological lens of illness and recovery and a syndemics view of infrastructural violence this study examines those inadequately addressed multiple dimensions which limit our ability to confront the …

A Beaded Hair Comb Of The Early Ming Dynasty, Valerie Hector

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

This article describes an unprovenanced artifact: a 700-year-old beaded hair comb probably entombed with a woman who died between 1405 and 1446 during China’s early Ming dynasty. It is intended to establish basic facts and stimulate further research. The comb may be the first intact example of mainland Chinese beadwork to undergo radiocarbon dating as well as laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analysis. The lead-potash (Pb-K) composition of the comb’s glass coil beads resembles that of coil beads recovered from jar burials of the 15th-17th centuries in Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains. Thus, the comb links glass coil beads ostensibly made …

Insight Into The 17th-Century Bead Industry Of Middelburg, The Netherlands, Hans Van Der Storm, Karlis Karklins

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

During the first half of the 17th century, several beadmaking establishments operated in the city of Middelburg in the southwestern corner of the Netherlands. Bead wasters recovered from several find sites in the old part of the city reveal the diversity of the product line which featured beads decorated with straight and spiral stripes. Several chevron types were also produced. There are similarities with wasters found at contemporary beadmaking sites in Amsterdam, indicating that both production centers made similar bead varieties. Few of the bead varieties represented have correlatives in the areas of North America that were under Dutch control, …

What Do You Meme? An Analysis Of How College Students At Central Washington University Use Memes, Skyler Smith

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Memes have become a key part of modern living on the Internet. However, it is still unclear who is creating, sharing and interacting with memes. This study examines meme use in college students at Central Washington University while also examining the definition of a meme within the population. Data were collected via questionnaire and interviews resulting in 14 responses and 18 total interviews conducted with 6 participants. Analysis suggests that college students use memes as an important component of private conversations and to reiterate their public identities. On the other hand, meme making is not as prevalent as other types …

Coffee Is Fluid: A Discussion On Coffee And Its Modernity, Emma L. Angell

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Coffee's worldwide popularity, and especially among Americans, has grown significantly over recent decades. This is credited to the rise of corporate coffee shops like Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, as well as the inescapable presence of coffee marketing on the internet and social media in our everyday lives. This thesis traces coffee's popularity from its early days as a facilitator in increased production rate in factories during the Industrial Revolution up to the popularity it has gained on TikTok and other social media platforms in the 21st century. My research examines the growth of coffee culture in America through participant observation …

Beadmaking During The 17th And 18th Centuries In Eu County, Normandy, Guillaume Klaës

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

This paper reconstructs the history of a family of French beadmakers in Eu County, Normandy, from 1687 to 1747, as well as the context of their migration from the urban beadmaking center of Rouen. While Normandy had produced windowpane and bottles since the Middle Ages, artisans who made “crystal” soda glass – the glass of beads – were newcomers from Italy and Languedoc. They founded glassworks in Paris and Rouen in the late 16th century. Conflicts with Rouen artisans and merchants led the Mediterranean glassworkers to migrate to Eu County in 1634, where their crystal factories spun off a rural …

Materializing And Embodying Sex And Gender: Interpreting Gender And Sex Variance In Iron Age Pre-Roman And Roman Britain Mortuary Contexts, Morgan Martin

Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Embodying Power And Agency In Ancient Egypt: Manifestations Of The Self And Society Through Artifacts And Religious Beliefs, Shannon Mckelvey

Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Structure Versus Agency Through A Materialist Lens, Alyssa Moreau

Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Intent And Impact: How State And International Policy Affects Internally Displaced Peoples In African Countries, Kyana Burgess

Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Moving Toward Ethical Treatment Of African American Heritage, Kailey Parker

Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Yellowtail Snapper: Human-Ecological Relationships In The South Florida Fishery, Brent Stoffle, Amanda D. Stoltz

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

In 2018 over a period of five months researchers from National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC) conducted a study with fishermen and local business owners who participate in the South Florida Yellowtail snapper fishery. Fishermen were asked about changes in their targeting strategies over the last several decades; and they perceive these changes to have altered the health and the biology of the snapper species. The changes are perceived as partially responsible for improving both the overall abundance of Yellowtail and having sped up its the growth and reproductive cycles. This is a case where …

Marked Membership: Anthropological Perspectives On North American Contemporary Tattooing, Rosalie A. Johnson

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Tattooing has persisted across time and space, often developing across ancient civilizations, even before cross-cultural contact. With the current oldest verified tattoos on the mummified body of Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old Tyrolean Iceman, up to current-day tattooing, a variety of uses and meanings have been ascribed to the practice. A majority of anthropological research has been dedicated towards indigenous tattooing traditions, external perceptions of marked individuals, and tattooing's deviant associations. Only a marginal amount of work has been geared towards the internal perceptions and cultural structuring of tattoos within modern societies, especially in the West. Frequently, a ‘tattoo community' is assumed …

To Influence?: Exploring The Socio-Ecology Of Zoo-Morphic Imagery On The Northern Colorado Plateau, Ralph J. Hartley

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

TO INFLUENCE?: EXPLORING THE SOCIO-ECOLOGY OF ZOO-MORPHIC IMAGERY ON THE NORTHERN COLORADO PLATEAU

Figurative zoo-morphic imagery is but one of a broad variety of created morphologically distinct depictions that can be used, both in isolation and in complexly configured modes of communication, to exploit the sensory responses of viewers. While contemporary observations of zoo-morphic petroglyphs and pictographs (i.e. rock-art) elicit varied interpretations and assignments of meaning relative to broader re-constructions of past socio-cultural systems, it is often assumed that the imagery reflects the creator’s intimate knowledge of behavior and habitat of the subject. In contemporary and recent historic times communicating …

The Role Of Forensic Anthropological Techniques In Identifying America's War Dead From Past Conflicts, William Belcher, Calvin Y. Shiroma, Lesley A. Chesson, Gregory E. Berg, Miranda Jans

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The Scientific Analysis Directorate of the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is a unique entity within the U.S. Government. This agency currently houses the world's largest, accredited skeletal identification laboratory in the world, in terms of the size of the scientific staff, global mission, and number of annual identifications. Traditional forensic anthropology is used for the formation of a biological profile (biological sex, stature, population affinity/ancestry, and age) as well as trauma and pathologies that may be compared with historical records and personnel files. Since World War II, various scientists associated with DoD have conducted …

The Role Of Forensic Anthropological Techniques In Identifying America's War Dead From Past Conflicts, William Belcher, Calvin Y. Shiroma, Lesley A. Chesson, Gregory E. Berg, Miranda Jans

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The Scientific Analysis Directorate of the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is a unique entity within the U.S. Government. This agency currently houses the world's largest, accredited skeletal identification laboratory in the world, in terms of the size of the scientific staff, global mission, and number of annual identifications. Traditional forensic anthropology is used for the formation of a biological profile (biological sex, stature, population affinity/ancestry, and age) as well as trauma and pathologies that may be compared with historical records and personnel files. Since World War II, various scientists associated with DoD have conducted …

Disrupted Identities And Forced Nomads: A Post-Disaster Legacy Of Neocolonialism In The Island Of Barbuda, Lesser Antilles, Sophia Perdikaris, Rebecca Boger, Edith Gonzalez, Emira Ibrahimpašić, Jennifer D. Adams

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

In the aftermath of the forced evacuation of the island of Barbuda due to Hurricane Irma, the Barbudan people have experienced an exile and return to a ‘new’ geographical, political, and economic context, albeit on the same island. With the specter of climate change and the potential impacts on island communities and nations, we use Barbuda, sister island of Antigua in the Lesser Antilles, to examine the trajectory of nomadic identities as they navigate changes that threaten contemporary land relationships and culture. Since its first permanent settlement in the 17th Century, the island geography of Barbuda has been fundamental to …

Who’S Doing The Dishes?: Reproductive Labor, Gender, And Middle-Class Subjectivities In Rabat, Morocco, Miriam Ruth Dike

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

The dissertation uses reproductive labor as a lens to examine how gendered and classed subjectivities are continuously created, performed, and subtly transformed within and outside of urban middle-class Moroccan households. Reproductive labor is broadly defined as unpaid and paid labor associated with caregiving and domestic roles including but not limited to cleaning, cooking, and child care. Subjectivities are the perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires of subjects within uneven relations of power. This research is based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rabat-Sale, Morocco including fifty-seven semi-structured interviews with married working- and middle-class Moroccans, as well as extensive participant observation …