anthropology

A while ago Kerim wrote a post on the difference between ‘mining’ and ‘harvesting’ strategies of publication. It touched off a lot of interesting discussion, but lacked a concrete example of what Kerim was talking about. So I wanted to offer one here: how I am mining my World of Warcraft research for publications.

My ultimate goal for my WoW (as World of Warcraft is known) research is a book — now in its third draft. Along the way, however, I am ‘mining’ my research by producing several other publications. The two I want to discuss here are Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (full text is OA — the publisher forget to get me to sign a CTA so I can release the work as I like. They are OK with this). The second is a draft paper I recently gave at a theater studies conference entitled Feeling Powerful and Being Powerful: Virtuosity and Expressive Individualism in World of Warcraft.

If you read these papers, you can see that there are a lot of similarities between them. Both chronicle my work with my guild. Because WoW is way more exotic to Americans then Papua New Guinea (“Black people in a forest? Got it. People killing monsters online? What now?”) I spend a lot of time describing what goes on online. But there are important differences in them as well.

Each paper was written for a different occasion. “Being in WoW” was written for a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly dedicated to ‘knowledge production’. As a result, I felt like I had to shoehorn my piece into that category. “Feeling Powerful” was written for a panel on “Economies of Showing” and so it had to be fit into that category.  Ironically, the panel organizers just wanted to do something on ‘showing’ but the conference theme was ‘economics’ so they changed to title to make sure they’d be included.

I think this is a good example of a general phenomena in the life of the mind: you are always thinking, thinking thoughts that are very abstract and in flux. Then particular occasions arise and they act like molds that you pour your molten thoughts into.

The papers address their occasion, but they don’t pander to it. They both reach through their occasions to address wider points in the literature I’m addressing.

“Being in WoW” made two and half points: first, it argued against the idea that virtual worlds were compelling because they looked ‘real’. Rather, I argued that they were compelling because they were places where people could socialize. Second, I took issue with the idea that we ought study virtual worlds ‘on their own terms’ and do ‘the culture’ of ‘a world’. Rather, I argued that virtual ethnography should study communities of people and how those communities used multiple spaces, some real and some virtual, to create themselves. My half point was that Coming of Age in Second Life legitimated ‘the culture’ of ‘a world’ ethnography by comparing it to ethnography of the Pacific, and as a Pacifcist I pointed out that this was a lousy description of how Pacific Islanders and Pacificists actually thought of themselves and their cultures.

“Feeling Powerful” made a series of related, but different points: that success in WoW affirm’s player’s ego ideals, that a virtual space affects actual personalities, and that this is what we should expect given that American WoW players have a western culture of ‘expressive individualism’. One reason WoW is so popular is because it is a place where this dynamic is powerfully performed. Once we realize this, we can see it is more compelling a virtual world than Second Life: Second Life was built around Western presumptions that all human beings want to be creative artists, which I argue is not true — romantic creation is just one species of expressivity. For this reason we should expect to see SL fascinate Americans because it speaks to their culturally-laden perceptions about what people want out of life, but more Americans to actually play WoW, which actually gives it to them. And this is in fact exactly what we see.

Basically, both of these papers make the same broad claims, but they differ in the specific points they make, the audiences they address, and the concrete data they use. In the final book version a lot of this material will be incorporated. The ethnographic exposition will be all the better for having been written and revised mutliple times, and I’ll be better able to make my points better because I’ve already made them in ‘rough draft’ form in the published articles. Best of all, the length of the book will allow me to connect them together and to add a broader overview since details on these arguments can just be cited in the book, rather than made there.

There are some people who feel you should ‘never present the same paper twice’ and I think that this is true. There is also reason to be cynical of the culture of ‘minimally significant differences’ used by people who make minor tweaks to present the same basic paper at different conferences over and over again. However, taking the same project and turning it over and over again to fit the situation and as part of creating a larger and more integral work is good academic practice — as well as good for the CV — if you can take different bits of data from your fieldwork and slot it in to whatever intellectual preoccupation you have that fits the occasion.

This past Thursday I spent the morning floating in a sensory deprivation tank. I saw it on sale through Groupon and I thought, why not? An interesting experience, it was very relaxing and left me with a kind of euphoria which permeated my being for another two hours after the event. It put me in a gentle, mellow mood for the rest of the day.

I found out about this place by following a link from an io9 post to a website called Float Finder, which puts people in touch with their local sensory deprivation center and also seems to be a hub for a whole tank-subculture. The io9 piece is really worth a read too, especially the bit on sensory deprivation pioneer John C. Lilly, a man who took intramuscular LSD until he discovered he could speak to dolphins.

Or as io9 puts it–

Calling John C. Lilly eccentric would be akin to calling the Beatles a popular band – somehow “eccentric” just doesn’t do the man justice.

Perhaps it was the mystique of Lilly that inspired Altered States (1980), something of a cult flick among anthropologists, which stars William Hurt eating muscimol and floating in a tank until he manages to somehow de-evolve into a rampaging hominid. Personally I find the movie a bit of a dud (its been 12 years since I first saw it and haven’t really been tempted to revisit it) and I’m a fan of creature features and so-bad-its-good flicks.

The movie is best remembered for its funky, toxic freakouts: Ok, so, you just saw the best part. But if you want to put it in your Netflix queue, you’ll be in good company among the consciousness studies crowd. Your enjoyment of the film may or may not be improved by being an actual altered state.

I arrived at Float First early to watch an instructional video which emphasized safety, comfort, and not touching your eyes. “The only thing that can ruin a float is getting salt water in your eyes,” the attendant told me. While I sat through the orientation an older woman arrived for her second float and proceeded directly to her session. I, on the other hand, got the full tour. The attendant showed me the I-sopod and shower. I used the bathroom and rinsed off before climbing into the pod.

Because I had read the business’ website ahead of time I intentionally consumed less coffee than usual, but I did ingest 60mg of pseudoephedrine for my sinus congestion. I was not high, people. Just saying.

The room was a bit chilly when I stepped out of the shower. I climbed into the pod, which was lit with gentle colored lights and closed the bay door shut that was hinged like a hatchback trunk. Inside the water was warm and inviting, maybe less than a foot deep. Soon the air became moist and heavy. I pushed the button to kill the lights and began to experiment with getting comfortable.

Some soft New Age music played as I sloshed around. The density of the water was so high it was pushing my shoulders up while my head was tilting back and I found it slightly uncomfortable to keep my arms at my side. The attendant had recommended keeping one’s arms above the head. Eventually I found it worked best to support my head by lacing my fingers together and resting that way.

I thought back to the advice the attendant gave me, “Try not to let your thoughts race. Don’t think: ‘How long have I been in here? When will the cool stuff start?’ The best thing to do for your first floating experience is just try and take a little nap.”

I stretched out. In the darkness and silence I could hear my muscles move. A full body stretch sent my heart racing, a pleasant sensation. In the distance I could sense vibrations. Perhaps these distant sounds came from the pod’s plumbing or maybe from the restaurant next door but I don’t think I hallucinated them. In fact I don’t think I had any auditory hallucinations at all. I have, in the past, have purely auditory dreams with no visual component so I wondered if that would manifest itself somehow in the tank, but not this time.

Once the lights were out it didn’t stay dark for long. Specks of visual apparitions were present almost immediately. It wasn’t until later that they became really bright. I spent most of the time floating with my eyes open, but I tried closing them too. In general the visuals were more intense with my eyes open though it was pitch black either way.

One difficulty in my experience was in keeping still. Any gentle movement could disturb the float as the body slowly, softly touched into the side of the pod where it was bounced back and forth like a pin ball in slow motion. The more calm the body became the more calm the mind. I think the sensation of the mind leaving the body probably works best if you’re motionless, but I became fidgety and curious about exploring my surroundings. In addition to stretching my limbs I tried sitting up a few times too.

At their most intense the visual effects were quite remarkable. My mental state was a bit like being caught in that threshold right before you fall asleep, but somehow lucid. Quieting the mind was the primary benefit I was looking to gain but I found it was not easy to do. At first I found myself thinking about work, about my mother’s death, about family problems concerning the foster family of my adopted daughter’s siblings. By concentrating on my breathing (one of the only things you can hear inside the pod) I was able to calm my mind with limited success. It was in this state of calm that I experienced the most pronounced visual hallucinations.

There was one hallucination in particular that, like an old friend, I’ve known since childhood. Every now and then I experience it still just as I’m falling asleep. It’s a bright slowly moving flash of white light. If you can, picture the rotating lantern at the top of a lighthouse. From a stable vantage point it would seem dim as the lamp was turned away from you then slowly sweeping across your field of vision becoming brightest as it shown directly at you before diminishing when he lamp rotated away.

My old friend the lighthouse was particularly well defined in the tank, usually moving from right to left across my field of non-vision. The light blobs had an amoeba-like shape, getting thick and then thin as it moved or growing tails like fish. They were yellowish to white, but not blindingly bright (those are especially unwelcome while falling asleep as they startle me awake). Accompanying this was a crackling lightning, a sort of shimmering Northern Lights in electric purple. This hallucination moved much faster and its shape more vascular. Typically these two hallucinations coincided although they didn’t seem to have anything to do with one another – meaning they didn’t interact or interfere with each other.

The really intense light shows were relatively brief and seemed to coincide with letting my mind go, concentrating on breathing, and not trying to force myself to see things.

Something special was happening with my sense of touch and awareness of body. The water is heated to the temperature of your skin and the air inside the pod quickly comes to match it. With the high density of the water countering the effects of gravity and it being total darkness one does not have a sense of the body as being discretely bound in the ordinary sense. Over time you stop feeling the water and only have the sensation of being suspended – floating like a grape stuck in a Jello mold. Sometimes this would bring about a sensation like falling or flying. I found I could trigger this with a stretch prompting my heart give a little race as I squeezed the blood in my muscles. In that rush there was a feeling like coming down for a landing.

The sensation of flying, the visuals, and the mental state of calm weren’t all neatly packaged. It took a little effort, but one gets the feeling that with practice you could get better at it.

After an extended period of time of not being able to orient my body I found I could convince myself that I was standing up rather than lying prone. Then, as an experiment, I tried to convince myself that I was standing on my head. This was somewhat harder to do. In a third experiment I tried to image that I was actually floating face down instead of face up, but couldn’t quite pull it off. Around this time my arms began to feel very heavy and moving them took real effort. It was a bit like Han Solo must have felt trapped in carbonite, as I pushed against what seemed to be a solid surface but was only air.

Well into the session now, my thoughts began to change too. I was tumbling through memories from the recent past going backwards. I thought of my life here in Virginia, my wife and how fetching she was in college. I saw others of my friends from college and the places we would go. I saw my high school and people I knew then. I remembered family vacations as a little boy and thought of my mother.

With my hands I touched my belly and legs. The Epsom salts had made my skin soft and pleasantly slimey. I brought a finger to my mouth and the salt tasted terrible, it made me spit. My muscles loosened and I could hear my stomach gurgle to itself. A knot in my back unkinked itself and my spine gave a crack like a knuckle.

In the distance the New Age-y music crept back in. This was my cue that an hour had passed and the session was over, but I didn’t want to leave. I waited a minute longer and the music gently made itself more present (you never know, I might have hallucinated it so I wanted to be sure). I made my way over to the light switch and the dim purple light was like a bold sunrise. I squinted. It was time to wake up, it was day even if my pupils still thought it was night. I pushed open the pod bay door and cold air rushed in. I scampered wet feet to the shower and turned on the hot water and steam. The salt sloughed off; my cell phone rang. It was time to go back to “reality”.

I dressed and prepared to leave. The attendant at the front desk offered me a bottle of water and spoke to me briefly about the experience. I told him about the difficulty I had in fidgeting and quieting the mind, which he assured me were typical of first time users. He quickly excused himself to ready the room for the next customer.

The drive home was truly pleasant and then I enjoyed a short walk around my neighborhood, stopping for tea at a friend’s house. I felt so mellow and peaceful, like having just stepped out of a hot tub after receiving a full body massage and waking from a satisfying nap all combined. Colors seemed brighter and the real world a little more magical.

The floating experience was worthwhile. I can definitely see how like massage or acupuncture the effects of floating would be cumulative. It was a treasure to have such a peaceful respite from what had been a stressful week. Highly recommended.

Alma College rung in the new year with a new major to offer students – Anthropology! Below is an excerpt from their press release. Read the entire article here.

Due to strong interest from students, Alma College has added anthropology to its expanding list of majors.

Mary Theresa Bonhage-Freund, associate professor of sociology and anthropology, says anthropology has long been a popular “program of emphasis” (POE), which is an academic option for students who choose to create an interdisciplinary focused concentration beyond traditional majors. She wasn’t surprised when a student signed up to major in anthropology on the first day that students could do so.

“This term, we had to add another section of the introductory anthropology course because there was a waiting list for it,” she says. “With this kind of student demand, adding anthropology to Alma’s majors makes a lot of sense.”

Bonhage-Freund says the skill set that students develop as a result of studying anthropology is in high demand, ensuring that they can explore career possibilities in a wide variety of fields.

Click here to read the entire article.

Filed under: Anthro in the Media, Resources

A recent call to local people to report anything unusual that they have spotted at the shoreline or under the sea has already resulted in several promising sites for a new archaeological project. Tip-offs from islanders led to a possible medieval fishing village and finds of 5,000-year-old pottery submerged in a loch. A local man – JJ McDonald – told the team that he knew of a “medieval fishing station”. Photographed from above, the landscape shows high potential for new site discovery of all periods of history. Notably, this area near North Loch Euport is called ‘Havn’ (the Norse word for harbour) on Ordnance Survey maps. A previously unknown complex of fish traps and evidence of coastal occupation south of Lochboisdale on South Uist was discovered during flight surveys. At Loch Duna – a freshwater loch – a local diver has discovered ceramics which date to the early Neolithic period. He reported his discovery of the 5000-year-old pottery to the local museum just days after attending the first public lecture on underwater archaeology given by the Outer Hebrides Coastal Community Marine Archaeology Pilot Project (OHCCMAPP) team in July. The call went out in 2011 to fishermen, beachcombers, divers and residents in the Western Isles. The project searches for previously unidentified prehistoric and historic remains in the coastal and marine areas of the Isles, all the way from Berneray to the Butt of Lewis and all islands in between. Many of these places are only accessible for short periods each day due to the tides – or are now fully submerged because of rising sea levels – and have not always been looked at in detail by archaeologists. As a result, it is hoped that this project could lead to a number of significant new discoveries. Speaking on behalf of the project, Dr Jonathan Benjamin of WA Coastal & Marine said: “As full time archaeologists, we don’t have the benefit of observing the shoreline between the low and high tides, day in and day out, year after year. That’s why we’re relying on the knowledge of people who live and work on or near the sea, and who might have noticed something out of the ordinary, either in a fishing net, or at an especially low tide. Their tip-offs can lead to significant discoveries. We’re also explaining to people the sorts of things that we’re interested in, because they may have seen or noticed things in the past, but disregarded them as not important. “Until now, there’s been no major study focused on the marine archaeology of the Outer Hebrides, and by beginning with the intertidal and shallow waters, aerial survey and community engagement, we hope to be able to demonstrate that there is a vast amount of knowledge, literally waiting to be discovered by archaeologists working with local residents on land, in the air and underwater.” Now members of the project team have had a chance to fly over some of the remote sites they’ve been told about, with a Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) aerial survey team. Aerial photographs have been taken with the advantage of low winter sunshine which tends to highlight archaeological features in the landscape. Already they have identified several sites as warranting further investigation – possibly even full ground and underwater archaeological surveys – in the future. The project – a partnership between RCAHMS, WA Coastal & Marine, Historic Scotland and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (CNE-Siar) – aims to get local people involved in sharing their knowledge about features in the landscape in order to build up a picture of how people lived and worked on the islands over the last 9,000 years. Remains found on the coastline, or even now fully underwater, can then be recorded, cared for and preserved. With rising sea-levels and the power of the tides, many of these sites are at risk of being lost. Speaking about one of the most promising tip-offs received to date, Dr Alex Hale, archaeological investigator at RCAHMS, said: “Meeting JJ MacDonald was one of those fortuitous moments that can only happen when you are in the field. We bumped into JJ at his boat shed, by chance, and the amount of knowledge he has of the local environment is incredible. He’s obviously very knowledgeable about the area of South Uist where he lives and was able to help us identify sites that we’ll now be able to investigate further, such as the fishing station.” _____________ References: Past Horizons. 2012. "Outer-Hebrides survey builds a new picture of the past". Past Horizons. Posted: Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/01/2012/outer-hebrides-survey-builds-a-new-picture-of-the-past

Two articles in the latest issue of Nature prompted this note. The first claims that China’s historical culture inhibits science:

“Two cultural genes have passed through generations of Chinese intellectuals for more than 2,000 years. The first is the thoughts of Confucius, who proposed that intellectuals should become loyal administrators. The second is the writings of Zhuang Zhou, who said that a harmonious society would come from isolating families so as to avoid exchange and conflict, and by shunning technology to avoid greed. Together, these cultures have encouraged small-scale and self-sufficient practices in Chinese society, but discouraged curiosity, commercialization and technology. They helped to produce a scientific void in Chinese society that persisted for millennia. And they continue to be relevant today.”

The second article is titled, Research in Asia Heats Up: US Indicators Reveal Challenges and Opportunities as Science Momentum Shifts to China. It reports that:

“Asia, led by China, is on track to displace the United States as the world’s science and technology powerhouse. That message is loud and clear in the 2012 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators, a nearly 600-page snapshot of the state of global research that looks at education, academic infrastructure, the knowledge-based workforce and international markets.”

So what has happened to the two “cultural genes” of Confucius and Zhuang in China? And what is going on with what one might caricature as the U.S. “cultural genes” of curiosity, commercialization, and technology? Just thinking.

The 2011 AAA Photo Contest is a showcase of anthropology at its best. Of the 93 photos submitted, AAA members selected their favorites in each of the four categories: Practice, People, Place and Process. You can view the top 20 photos in Anthropology News. Here on the AAA blog, we will feature several of the photos in the blog series, Photo Friday.

Title: Shaping an Earthen Pot Photo Courtesy of Doranne Jacobson Contest Category: People Caption: A village potter creates a water storage vessel, continuing a subcontinental tradition of more than 4,000 years. His young son looks on, starting to learn skills passed from father to son for untold generations. India’s potter castes proudly bear the title Prajapati, or Lord of Creatures, reflecting their ability to transform ordinary clay into essential household and ritual vessels as well as sacred images. Today, however, increasing use of plastic and tin containers is putting many potters out of business. This potter’s brother works as a van driver, and his son may not be able to earn a living practicing their ancestral occupation. Nimkhera, Madhya Pradesh, India, March, 2010.

Look for details on the 2012 AAA Photo Contest in late April!

Missed last week’s photo? Click here.

Filed under: Career/Funding/Awards, Publications

Door Claire van de Graaff – Als eerstejaars studente Culturele Antropologie en Ontwikkelingssociologie heb ik een bijbaantje bij de ´Heineken Experience´, waarvoor ik regelmatig word ingezet bij het tappen en uitserveren van bier bij manifestaties. In oktober van dit jaar werd ik uitverkoren om mee te gaan naar de Rugby World Cup 2011 in Nieuw Zeeland dat door Heineken gesponsord werd. Vanuit mijn werkplek, de Heineken VIPbox in het Eden Park Stadion van Auckland, heb ik vier wedstrijden kunnen aanschouwen die gespeeld werden voor 60.000 uitzinnige toeschouwers.  Voorafgaand aan twee van die wedstrijden heb ik de uitvoering van een ritueel gezien dat voor kippenvel zorgt: de haka dans door het nationale rugbyteam van Nieuw Zeeland, de All Blacks.

Mijn studie antropologie, die ik in september van dit jaar begonnen ben, bleek na slechts enkele weken al zijn vruchten af te werpen. Als beginnend antropoloog heb ik met extra aandacht dit ritueel geobserveerd en zodoende kon ik het vergelijken met de ideeën van George Gmelch (2000) over de rol en betekenis van rituelen in het honkbal in de Verenigde Staten.

Haka is de naam voor verschillende typen ceremoniële dansen van de Maori uit Nieuw Zeeland. Door middel van een bepaald soort van deze dansen vraagt men de goden om hun zegen voor een succesvolle afloop van bijvoorbeeld de oorlog, een jacht, of in dit geval een rugbywedstrijd. De dans wordt op een vaste plek in een groep uitgevoerd en bestaat uit het collectief maken van bepaalde bewegingen van het lichaam en het gezicht, zoals het rollen met de ogen en het uitsteken van de tong; ook worden er teksten uitgesproken en grommende geluiden gemaakt [zie bijvoorbeeld: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjVqZkDZrgg&feature=fvst].

Naast het Nieuw Zeelandse team voeren ook de rugby ploegen van Fiji, Samoa en Tonga voor aanvang van elke wedstrijd een eigen rituele dans uit. De gewoonte staat vanwege het intimiderende karakter de laatste jaren bloot aan steeds meer kritiek, vooral vanuit Europese hoek.

Tegenwoordig is de haka die uitgevoerd wordt door het Nieuw Zeelandse rugbyteam misschien wel het bekendst. Deze haka heet de ‘Ka Mate’ en de oorsprong ervan zou liggen rond 1820, toen Maori leider Te Rauparaha op de vlucht was voor een vijandige stam. Tijdens die vlucht herhaalde Te Rauparaha telkens de woorden “ka mate, ka mate” (ik sterf, ik sterf). Uiteindelijk kwam hij terecht bij een bevriende stam en vroeg de leider, een vriend, hem te verstoppen. Zijn vriend stemde toe en Te Rauparaha was in veiligheid.

Zeker van het feit dat hij in leven zou blijven herhaalde hij de woorden “ka ora, ka ora” (ik leef, ik leef) en “tenei te tangata puhuruhuru nana nei i tiki mai whakawhiti te ra” (dit is de harige man die de zon terugbracht zodat ze weer kon schijnen). De ‘harige man’, ook bedoeld als moedige man, was eigenlijk zijn vriend die hem bescherming gaf. De zon die weer scheen was een toespeling op het feit dat hij weer een toekomst en een dag te leven had.

Tijdens het kijken naar de haka voorafgaand aan de eerste halve finale tussen Nieuw Zeeland en Australië zag ik overeenkomsten tussen het uitvoeren van deze dans en het artikel ‘Baseball Magic’ van Gmelch, waarover ik enkele weken daarvoor een presentatie had gehouden in mijn bachelorwerkgroep. In dit artikel bespreekt Gmelch verschillende vormen van ritueel gedrag bij honkbalspelers: van pruimtabak kauwen tot het eten van kip en van het dragen van de juiste schoenen tot het niet wassen van ‘gelukskleren’; het zou allemaal bijdragen aan het winnen van een wedstrijd. Gmelch vergelijkt dit geloof in de kracht van rituelen – hij spreekt van ‘bijgeloof’ – met de rituelen van vissers op de Trobriand Eilanden voordat zij de zee op gaan.

De bekende antropoloog Malinowski liet in zijn beschrijving van deze rituelen zien dat naarmate er meer risico in het spel is, het geloof in rituelen belangrijker is. Wanneer Trobianders gaan vissen op de lagune, waar weinig wind is en altijd vis, maken zij veel minder gebruik van rituelen dan wanneer zij gaan vissen op zee, waar de uitkomst van de vangst veel meer afhankelijk is van factoren als wind en stroming. Zo ook wordt in het honkbal door de spelers met de meest onzekere activiteiten als het werpen en slaan van de bal meer belang gehecht aan de rituelen dan bij het lopen.

Twee keer heb ik de Ka Mate gezien, maar de indrukwekkendste van de twee ging vooraf aan de finale van het toernooi op 23 oktober, gespeeld door Nieuw Zeeland en Frankrijk. Er hing vanzelfsprekend veel van die wedstrijd af en de spanning was om te snijden. De internationale rugbybond heeft regels opgesteld voor het verloop van de haka: de rugbyregels schrijven voor dat beide teams zich bij het uitvoeren van een haka opstellen achter de tienmeterlijn op hun eigen speelhelft, de lijn die zich op tien meter aan weerszijden van de middenlijn bevindt. Toen het Nieuw Zeelandse team de haka uitvoerde, liep het Franse team hand in hand op hun tegenstander af en overschreed daarbij niet alleen de tienmeterlijn, maar ook de middenlijn. Volgens de Franse aanvoerder Thierry Dusautoir stonden sommige van zijn spelers zo dicht bij hun Nieuw Zeelandse tegenstanders dat ze elkaar een kus hadden kunnen geven. Een reactie op de haka zoals die van het Franse team is de afgelopen decennia wel vaker vertoond.

Volgens de aanvoerder van het Nieuw Zeelandse team, Richie McCaw, hadden zij op de reactie van de Fransen gerekend. Volgens de Maori traditie is het zelfs beter als de tegenstander zich roert, dan wanneer zij er onbewogen naar kijkt. Hieruit blijkt dat de haka inderdaad bedoeld is om de kans op succes te vergroten maar ook om de tegenstander te imponeren.

Ik was in ieder geval geïmponeerd en of de Fransen dat ook waren of niet, de Nieuw Zeelanders wonnen.

Claire van de Graaff. E-mailadres: clairevandegraaff@hotmail.com

Gmelch, G. (2000). Baseball Magic. Geraadpleegd op http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/Baseballmagic.pdf.

A gust of wind whipped the context sheet from under my hand, leaving a long, thin, bloody line across the back of my thumb. I sighed, but it only added to the current tally of open wounds on my hands–four. Most are small, little nicks on my knuckles from troweling over rocks and happily there aren’t any opened blisters. I’ve had a particularly stubborn cut on the back of my other thumb that refuses to heal–I cleaned and bandaged it immediately, but it seems like no matter what I do I have a dirty, shredded rag instead of a bandage at the end of the day and a bright red line of infection around the wound.

My knuckles are already thick, but they seize a bit sometimes, especially my right forefinger, my “troweling finger”, which has an awkward bend common to archaeologists. One of my friends here told me that he wakes sometimes with his fingers hooked and has to bend them back into place. My knees creak and pop and I have bruises along my shins from kneeling on rocks–we don’t have desks on site and we often have to crouch on our knees over our paperwork to protected from the wind, or rain, or sun.

Sometimes when I kneel, troweling across the 40/60 salty, silty sand I think I can actually feel the ground leeching the water from my body–the heels of my palms and my fingertips are chafed, dry and callused. Last time I was in Doha I went to a fancy shopping center that carried fine silk and linen dresses–my fingers rasped and caught as I touched them. The haptics of class, I suppose.

Most academic archaeologists have never spent more than a month or two at a time digging, indeed many professional archaeologists are the same–who can pay for long excavation seasons in this economy anyway? We aren’t doing the hardest excavation in archaeology; trowels in sand cannot compare to shovels in clay, even on the windiest of days. Working with your hands is a fairly romantic notion these days, and it’s one of the things I love about archaeology, dirty bandages and all.

But we know we can’t do it forever. The knees go. The back goes. Problems with eyes, hands, even the skin can remove us from our profession. I had a few pre-cancerous lesions burnt off of my face a couple of years ago, accompanied by a stern warning by the dermatologist to stay out of the sun as much as possible. And I’m certainly one of the lucky ones. I know at least a dozen people who have had to change careers after a physical malady.

The visual in archaeology is often emphasized in academic circles, with occasional nods toward the other senses adding to “a sense of place.” We awaken our senses, what does it feel/taste/smell like to be on an archaeological project? How can we share that with others? I’m writing about some of that in my dissertation, but now “being in the field” is becoming so normal that it is hard to remember to share. Sometimes I’d rather deaden my senses, something that can be difficult in a country where alcohol is mostly illegal. I wonder if reflexivity is easier when performing a rarified, vacation-like excavation after a year of teaching. The lived experience of archaeological investigation and engagement with place can be exhausting.

It’s the weekend–I think I’ll go back to bed.

A few years ago my wife Veronica (who is also a cultural anthropology graduate student) was doing her M.A. fieldwork in Yucatan, Mexico.  I was there with her.  We were staying in a decent sized pueblo, about three thousand people (although it seemed like much less for some reason).  We rented a room from a family for the summer–we found out later that two of the kids in the household were actually moved out of that room to make space for the two visiting anthropologists, but that’s another story of micro-politics for another time.  Lets just say that these two kids weren’t all that happy with the arrangement, and they made it pretty clear.  If only we had known!  Anyway, we worked out a deal.

Moving on.  While my wife was doing interviews, I ended up playing games and hanging out with a lot of the local kids.  Not a bad gig, eh?  Well, I was also the free research assistant, and I went along on many of the interviews, too.  In addition I did a stint of archaeological survey work for a few weeks–just to let you know that it wasn’t all just homeruns and striking out little kids for me that summer (kidding, of course, I let some of them get hits).  But I did play a lot of baseball with the kids when there was downtime.  We used to play tons of games in the solar (i.e. yard) of the house where we were staying.  These games included about 4-5 kids from the family we were renting from, and a whole slew of kids from around the pueblo.  Pretty fun.  Whenever I got back to the house all the kids wanted to play.  Often, they totally wore me out.   It became a pretty regular thing.  But then, I noticed something.

The kids who came over to play were only from certain households.  Other kids never came by, or were explicitly told to stay away by the kids in the household where we were renting.  I didn’t know this was happening at first…but I slowly started figuring things out.  Certain kids would approach me and ask about baseball when I wasn’t at our house, and I thought it was strange that they never actually came over…until the whole mystery started to make more sense.  I also remember some kids hanging out on the edge of the yard, leaning on the wall watching us play.  I’d ask them if they wanted to play, but they would politely refuse every time.  Why didn’t they every want to actually  play?

Well, it’s because those kids who didn’t come over, or who refused to play, knew more about the surrounding community politics than Veronica and I did at the time.  Sure, in some cases, this was a matter in which some kids just don’t like some other kids.  But in many other cases, there was more to it–some of the histories and politics of the adults in the community were filtering down through the kids, and this was showing up in something seemingly innocuous like these afternoon baseball games.  And these kids knew all about it.  In short, some of the kids in the pueblo were persona non grata at this house because of the bad relationships among all their parents.  Now, this isn’t really a shocking reality, but in the context of doing anthropological fieldwork, it was an important lesson.

Why?  Because we realized that where we were staying had its own small, but definitely important, politics effects.  Some members of the community felt comfortable coming by–and others did not.  This was a pretty important lesson, and both Veronica and I learned a lot from the whole experience.  The first thing we did was move the baseball games from a specific residence to a public place–we started playing in the plaza, next to the old stone church that’s hundreds of years old.  This worked out much better, and managed to help put the lid on some of the simmering kid politics (certain kids were less prone to little power plays once we were in public).  But what we also learned was that we have to pay close attention to the effects of the place where we actually end up living–and find ways to deal with issue that crop up.  Of course, there is probably no way to find a place that is completely apolitical or neutral in ANY community.  But it does help to recognize these kinds of things–whether they show up in kids games or elsewhere–and adjust accordingly.

Congratulations to AAA Member, Niko Besnier!

Prof. Niko Besnier has received an ERC Advanced Grant for his multi-sited comparative ethnographic project that will investigate the migratory dynamics at play between selected developing countries and selected countries in the industrial world in three different sports, soccer-football, rugby union, and cricket.

In the last few decades, the erosion of the social and economic structures that previously provided straightforward raison d’être to men have transformed, in all societies of the world, masculinity into a problematic category. In the Global South, deepening economic, political and social insecurities have further compounded the fragility of masculinity. Younger men in particular find it increasingly difficult to secure a productive role in local economies, and many in the world’s more destitute countries are investing their hopes in the possibility of becoming a successful professional athlete.

But athletic talent can only translate into economic productivity in the industrial North, and athletic migrations have become, for large number of boys, young men, families, villages, nations and states in the Global South, the solution for a masculinity under threat, the way out of economic precarity, and the embodiment of millenarian hope.

This multi-sited comparative ethnographic project seeks to investigate the migratory dynamics at play between selected developing countries and selected countries in the industrial world in three different sports, soccer-football, rugby union, and cricket. It explores ways in which these three sports represent for young talented hopeful in the Global South various embodiments of hope for the redemption of masculinity and of its productive potentials.

The research will open new theoretical avenues for an understanding of the constitution of masculinity in the context of globalisation, changes in the structure of nation-states and the meaning of citizenship, and the constitution of everyday lives in more destitute regions of the world.

http://www.fmg.uva.nl/sociology_anthropology/news.cfm/F87559B4-89DF-458F-9A0257D3AEDE648E

Filed under: Anthro in the Media, Career/Funding/Awards

By contributor Sean Carey

Mauritius is in the premier league of the world’s democracies, according to the newly released London-based Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. The Index, which monitors 167 nations ranks Mauritius, a small Indian Ocean island, with a population of 1.3 million, 24th out of 25 “full democracies,” just ahead of Spain.

Norway is in first place followed by three other Scandinavian countries—Iceland, Denmark and Sweden. Canada is eighth, Ireland is 12th, Germany is 14th, the U.K. is 18th, while the U.S. is ranked 19th.The remaining 90 countries which make it into the “democratic” category are divided into 53 “flawed democracies,” which includes France and Italy at 29th and 31st respectively. The next category consists of 37 “hybrid regimes” and includes Hong Kong (80th), Singapore (81st), Turkey (88th), Tanzania (90th) and Kenya (103rd). The remaining countries in the Index, including Bahrain, Chad, Fiji, Madagascar, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, are described as “authoritarian.”

The Index is based on five criteria: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. However, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that almost all of the “full democracies” belong to a group of the world’s advanced economies, whose populations are well-practiced in placing marks on ballot papers and tossing out unpopular or incompetent governments.

Little wonder, then, that Mauritius’s inclusion has caught the eye of some commentators. “In some ways, of the 25 ‘full democracies,’ Mauritius is now the most notable,” writes Neil Reynolds, economics correspondent for the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. Reynolds cities Mauritius’s endorsement by the World Bank as the best among African economies, and its top position in the Sudanese-born telecoms billionaire Mo Ibrahim’s Index of African Governance.

Reynolds also goes on to note Mauritius’s ascent in the Index of Economic Freedom jointly produced by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. In 2010, it was in 12th place at 179 countries. In 2012 it had moved up to eighth place. The piece finishes with a rousing cry: “Economic freedom is as much a prerequisite for democracy as voting. Let’s hear it for the prosperous little democracy with a dodo on its coat of arms.”

But free-market economists are not the only tribe to endorse Mauritius. Last year, for example, Joseph Stiglitz, after a brief visit, wrote an article for The Guardian, heaping praise on the country for the provision of free education, transport for schoolchildren and free healthcare, including heart surgery. The former chief economist at the World Bank, and a leading light in the neo-Keynesian “third way” movement, reckoned that North America and Europe could learn lessons from Mauritius in terms of how the country managed “social cohesion, welfare and economic growth.”

Despite the brevity of his stay, the Nobel prize-winning economist was observant enough to point to some of the island’s problems, especially the colonial legacy in inequality in ownership of land and other forms of capital which differentially affects the life chances of various segments of the polyethnic population.

Then there is the vexatious issue of the US base on Diego Garcia, which was illegally detached before independence from the UK in 1968 and now forms part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. “The US should now do right by this peaceful and democratic country: recognise Mauritius’s rightful ownership of Diego Garcia, renegotiate the lease and redeem past sins by paying a fair amount for land that it has illegally occupied for decades,” argued Stiglitz. He should have added that those 1500 or so islanders, who were forcibly removed from the Chagos Archipelago in the late 60s and early 70s by the British authorities to make way for the military base and dumped in Mauritius and the Seychelles, should be allowed to return to their homeland if they so wish.

Deaf people who use sign language are quicker at recognizing and interpreting body language than hearing non-signers, according to new research from investigators at UC Davis and UC Irvine. The work suggests that deaf people may be especially adept at picking up on subtle visual traits in the actions of others, an ability that could be useful for some sensitive jobs, such as airport screening. "There are a lot of anecdotes about deaf people being better able to pick up on body language, but this is the first evidence of that," said David Corina, professor in the UC Davis Department of Linguistics and Center for Mind and Brain. Corina and graduate student Michael Grosvald, now a postdoctoral researcher at UC Irvine, measured the response times of both deaf and hearing people to a series of video clips showing people making American Sign Language signs or "non-language" gestures, such as stroking the chin. Their work was published online Dec. 6 in the journal Cognition. "We expected that deaf people would recognize sign language faster than hearing people, as the deaf people know and use sign language daily, but the real surprise was that deaf people also were about 100 milliseconds faster at recognizing non-language gestures than were hearing people," Corina said. This work is important because it suggests that the human ability for communication is modifiable and is not limited to speech, Corina said. Deaf people show us that language can be expressed by the hands and be perceived through the visual system. When this happens, deaf signers get the added benefit of being able to recognize non-language actions better than hearing people who do not know a sign language, Corina said. The study supports the idea that sign language is based on a modification of the system that all humans use to recognize gestures and body language, rather than working through a completely different system, Corina said. ___________________ References: EurekAlert. 2012. "Deaf sign language users pick up faster on body language". EurekAlert. Posted: January 12, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uoc--dsl011212.php

Just a reminder – you, the membership at large, are invited to review the posted draft Code of Ethics, and submit your comments by January 30, 2012 to ethicsfeedback@aaanet.org for the subcommittee to consider.  Your input is crucial to this process, and we thank you for your dedication to our association.

In the event you missed it, here’s the background of this revision process:

At the 2011 AAA Annual Meeting recently held in Montréal, Quebec, Canada, the AAA Executive Board (EB) voted to receive a draft revision of the AAA’s Code of Ethics as revised by the Task Force for Comprehensive Ethics Review. The EB also passed a resolution thanking the task force and its chair, Dena Plemmons, for all of their hard work. Beginning in early 2009, the Task Force was commissioned to review the Code of Ethics and consult extensively with relevant AAA committees and commissions, the Section Assembly, the membership at large and other interested parties. The Task Force finished its review in October 2011.

After receiving the draft, the EB appointed a subcommittee to review the draft code which is currently available for review on the AAA website. The subcommittee is chaired by Vice President and President-Elect Monica Heller, and members include Hugh Gusterson, Jean Schensul, Ida Susser, Vilma Santiago, Deb Martin, Sandra Lopez Varela and AAA President Leith Mullings (ex-officio). The subcommittee will present its recommendation to the Executive Board at its May meeting.

Filed under: Association Business, Commentary, Ethics

Milan presentation notes, IULM University, 26 January 2012

Introduction

Many thanks to Alessandra Micalizzi for the kind invitation. First attempt for me at connecting practice theory with media and social change.

The story behind both – until now separate – interests: EASA Media Anthropology Network, first media and practice theory (Bräuchler and Postill 2010), more recently media and social change – Paris meeting 2012 to be co-convened with Tenhunen and Ardevol. See both websites.

Digital media and social change

All digital media scholars study social change- yet surprisingly undertheorised.

We tend to fall into vague present continuous (-ing) of how people and technologies are constantly chang-ing, what people are now do-ing with this or that digital tech, etc.

… in pursuit of next big technology, we often neglect historical and diachronic in favour of contemporary and synchronic.

Dubious idea that a technology now trending in global North will soon be trending worldwide (‘imminentism’).

In fact, different neighbourhoods, cities, countries, regions, are following their own digital paths. No sign yet that the digital cultures of South Korea, Brazil, Senegal, the Vatican and Finland are on the brink of merging into some ‘global’ sameness. If anything, they continue to diverge.

At the same time, we peddle vague postmodern ideas about timeless time, non-linear time, etc. Yet there is no fairyland where time goes round in circles, or chases its own tale, or swings back and forth like a pendulum (Gell). We all go by the modern clock and calendar (Postill 2002), as inescapable as money, gravity, ageing, or death.

But how do we go about theorising what we already study but take for granted?

One useful entry point:

Tenhunen (2008) social logistics and mobile phones in rural West Bengal, India. Inspired by Horst and Miller (2006) ethnography of mobiles in Jamaica, but finds that they overemphasize cultural continuity (linked-up) over change; like practice theorists (more later) they play down human ability to strive for, and attain, social change.

More discussion needed on this issue.

 …  a theory of practice approach

Practice theory: a body of work about the work of the body (Postill 2010)

Late 1970s-1980s search for approach that would avoid twin evils of structural/systemic holism and methodological individualism.

Practice theory cannot be panacea for media and comm studies.

Especially apt for three topics:

• Media in everyday life
• Media production
• Embodied media

Not so cool for processual analysis, e.g. of spread of digital epidemics (urban legends, rumours, etc.), for Arab Spring uprisings, or Spain’s indignados/15M movement (Postill 2010) – or is it?

One way of doing practice research: follow the media practitioner

As in qualitative, open-ended, ethnographic research.

We’re all media practitioners these days; various digital media woven into our practice as students, scholars, taxi drivers, activists, rock-climbers, journalists, acrobats, pensioners, etc.

If possible, during research try to learn that craft/occupation/practice too, ‘practitioner observation’

Non-media centric reflection (Couldry 2010, Hobart 2010) on what practitioners actually do with which specific media, with what results, but also what they did 5, 10, 20 years ago.

Follow them as they traverse different ‘stations’ (Giddens 1984) as well as conflict-ridden ‘arenas’ (Turner 1974) in their routine cycles of activities as well as non-routine events.

You will find that what’s appropriate in one station is not appropriate in another, e.g. a personal blog is a very different station from a Twitter hashtag thread which in turn is very different from a web forum; example of Malaysian blogger-cum-politician Jeff Ooi (Postill 2011).

Track biographical changes as well as continuities over time in digital media usage.

… but keep your methodological and conceptual toolboxes handy

 No dogmas please, we’re researchers: No need to adhere rigidly to a pre-set methodology or killer family of concepts (ANT, field theory, practice theory)…

‘Follow the practitioner’ is just one way in, by no means the only one!

In any case, broader organisational, cultural, historical context always necessary, e.g. social media activism in Barcelona cannot but refer to broader Catalonian and Spanish context.

It’s important to acquire a large conceptual and methodological vocab. The more the merrier.

Try out different concepts and methods during fieldwork, see if they work or not – you are under no obligation to honour Latour, Bourdieu, Foucault or any other French theorist whose name has an ‘ou’ in it.

If you can’t get it off the shelf, fashion your own concept or method, e.g. I had to come up with the concept ‘field of residential affairs’ to organise my internet localisation materials (Postill 2011).

Above all, no idols please – idolatry should be smashed, a la Taliban (well, maybe not a la Taliban). Only the better tools for the given job should be used, the rest can stay in the toolbox for future use.

Of particular relevance to digital media practitioners and social change:

• Before-and-after accounts, e.g. before you used Facebook/smartphone, how did you go about your business/leisure/housework?
• Recollections of disruptions to regular digital media use, e.g. when BlackBerry was down in 2011, or in some remote rural area
• Life histories of persons, both as practitioner and other areas of life; persons as (in)dividuals (LiPuma 19.., Helle-Valle 2010)
• Life histories of media artefacts (Kopytoff 1986, Postill 2006)
• Longitudinal studies
• Revisits to previous field sites

Recap

(Digital) media and social change is emerging interdisciplinary field of research and theorisation – first task is to take stock of existing research and theories and bring them under same umbrella. Very exciting area.

We should pay more attention to diachronic, clock-and-calendar time dimension of mediated practice, including our own research and theoretical practice. More dating, please!

Follow the practitioners across socio-technical settings (online, mobile, sedentary, remote, co-present…) and across biographical and historical time. Gauge the continuities as well as the changes.

Avoid conceptual or methodological fundamentalism (but without falling into anything-goes-eclecticism). See what works and what doesn’t.

Class exercise

In groups, how would you go about researching digital media and social change within a given organisation, collective, field of practice, neighbourhood, … Choose a familiar or exotic example and come up with a brief research plan.

References

Coming up shortly, watch this space.

Submissions seeking Executive Session Status, only, for the 2012 Annual Meeting are now being accepted at aaa.confex.comaaa2012portal.cgi

Submitters must be current members and registered to attend the Annual Meeting in San Francisco November 14-18, 2012.

AAA is only accepting submissions seeking Executive Program Status now, all other annual meeting submissions will begin on February 15, 2012.

Filed under: Annual Meeting

"If it bleeds, it leads," goes the cynical saying with television and newspaper editors. In other words, most news is bad news and the worst news gets the big story on the front page. So one might expect the New York Times to contain, on average, more negative and unhappy types of words — like "war," " funeral," "cancer," "murder" — than positive, happy ones — like "love," "peace" and "hero." Or take Twitter. A popular image of what people tweet about may contain a lot of complaints about bad days, worse coffee, busted relationships and lousy sitcoms. Again, it might be reasonable to guess that a giant bag containing all the words from the world's tweets — on average — would be more negative and unhappy than positive and happy. But new research shows just the opposite. "English, it turns out, is strongly biased toward being positive," said Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont. The UVM team's study "Positivity of the English Language," is presented in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal PLoS ONE. This new study complements another study the same Vermont scientists presented in the Dec. 7 issue of PLoS ONE, "Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network." That work attracted wide media attention showing that average global happiness, based on Twitter data, has been dropping for the past two years. Combined, the two studies show that short-term average happiness has dropped — against the backdrop of the long-term fundamental positivity of the English language. In the new study, Dodds and his colleagues gathered billions of words from four sources: twenty years of the New York Times, the Google Books Project (with millions of titles going back to 1520), Twitter and a half-century of music lyrics. "The big surprise is that in each of these four sources it's the same," says Dodds. "We looked at the top 5,000 words in each, in terms of frequency, and in all of those words you see a preponderance of happier words." Or, as they write in their study, "a positivity bias is universal," both for very common words and less common ones and across sources as diverse as tweets, lyrics and British literature. Why is this? "It's not to say that everything is fine and happy," Dodds says. "It's just that language is social." In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones. "If you want to remain in a social contract with other people, you can't be a…," well, Dodds here used a word that is rather too negative to be fit to print — which makes the point. This new work adds depth to the Twitter study that the Vermont scientists published in December that attracted attention from NPR, Time magazine and other media outlets. "After that mild downer story, we can say, 'But wait — there's still happiness in the bank," Dodds notes. "On average, there's always a net happiness to language." Both studies drew on a service from Amazon called Mechanical Turk. On this website, the UVM researchers paid a group of volunteers to rate, from one to nine, their sense of the "happiness" — the emotional temperature — of the 10,222 most common words gathered from the four sources. Averaging their scores, the volunteers rated, for example, "laughter" at 8.50, "food" 7.44, "truck" 5.48, "greed" 3.06 and "terrorist" 1.30. The Vermont team — including Dodds, Isabel Kloumann, Chris Danforth, Kameron Harris, and Catherine Bliss — then took these scores and applied them to the huge pools of words they collected. Unlike some other studies — with smaller samples or that elicited strong emotional words from volunteers — the new UVM study, based solely on frequency of use, found that "positive words strongly outnumber negative words overall." This seems to lend support to the so-called Pollyanna Principle, put forth in 1969, that argues for a universal human tendency to use positive words more often, easily and in more ways than negative words. Of course, most people would rank some words, like "the," with the same score: a neutral 5. Other words, like "pregnancy," have a wide spread, with some people ranking it high and others low. At the top of this list of words that elicited strongly divergent feelings: "profanities, alcohol and tobacco, religion, both capitalism and socialism, sex, marriage, fast foods, climate, and cultural phenomena such as the Beatles, the iPhone, and zombies," the researchers write. "A lot of these words — the neutral words or ones that have big standard deviations — get washed out when we use them as a measure," Dodds notes. Instead, the trends he and his team have observed are driven by the bulk of English words tending to be happy. If we think of words as atoms and sentences as molecules that combine to form a whole text, "we're looking at atoms," says Dodds. "A lot of news is bad," he says, and short-term happiness may rise and and fall like the cycles of the economy, "but the atoms of the story — of language — are, overall, on the positive side." ________________ References: EurekAlert. 2012. "We may be less happy, but our language isn't". EurekAlert. Posted: January 12, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uov-wmb011212.php

Looking  for new ideas and materials for spring term? Check out AAA’s new Teaching Materials Exchange. Run a search by course, syllabus, keyword or even instructor. Or browse through the database of more than 90 syllabi and teaching tools.

Don’t forget to submit your materials to share as well.

Filed under: Resources

The Material Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association is rekindling the exchange of course syllabi (outline of topics, readings, and schedule). The earlier initiative led 10 years ago to a collection representing courses in US universities and published by the Winterthur Museum.

It’s time for a new version, with an international outlook and a wider breadth. We encourage submissions of syllabi from any course a faculty member considers as falling within the field of material culture studies, broadly conceived, at whatever level, graduate or undergraduate. We're aiming for inclusiveness. The syllabi will be posted on the Web and thus publicly available. For that purpose, submissions should include a headnote with information that identifies the course for an outside audience, that is, the name of the department and institution in which the course is taught, the course’s full title, the date, and perhaps some background information about the students it serves. Send your file(s) in either a .doc or .pdf format, to Debby Andrews, convener of the Caucus, at

Debby Andrews Center for Material Culture Studies Professor of English University of Delaware

SIBERIA, a name that conjures up images of snow and ice, may have been an unlikely refuge from the bitter cold of the last ice age. Ancient DNA from the region paints a picture of remarkably stable animal and plant life in the teeth of plunging temperatures. The findings could help predict how ecosystems will adapt to future climate change. The permanently frozen soil of Siberia, Canada and Alaska preserves the DNA of prehistoric plants, fungi and animals. "It's a giant molecular freezer," says James Haile at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. Glacial ice can also contain ancient DNA but permafrost is much more abundant than ice and so should provide a more complete picture of the effects of prehistoric climate change, says Haile. Last month, at the International Barcode of Life Conference in Adelaide, South Australia, his colleague Eva Bellemain of the University of Oslo in Norway revealed the first fruits of their analysis of Siberian permafrost DNA. The samples were extracted from 15,000 to 25,000-year-old frozen sediment in southern Chukotka in north-eastern Siberia. Their age is significant: around 20,000 years ago temperatures plummeted and ice sheets blanketed much of the northern hemisphere - but parts of Siberia, Canada and Alaska apparently stayed ice-free (Quaternary Science Reviews, DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2011.07.020). Fossils and pollen found in these regions suggest they may have acted as a refuge for plants and animals during this time, but Bellemain turned to fungal DNA to get a complete picture of the environment. Many fungi consume plants, and so indicate the plant life around at the time. Using 23 permafrost cores, Bellemain identified around 40 fungal taxa that thrived during the last ice age. "We didn't expect to find so much," she says. The diversity of fungi found suggests that a brimming plant community thrived in northern Siberia to support them. This range of plants should also have sustained a diverse assembly of mammals - and the samples indeed contain DNA from woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) and moose (Alces alces) dating back to between 15,000 and 25,000 years ago (Molecular Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-294x.2011.05306.x). Meanwhile, Haile and Tina Jørgensen at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark have used ancient DNA together with pollen and fossil evidence to reconstruct the plant life surrounding Lake Taymyr, on the Taymyr peninsula in northern Siberia. Using 18 cores from five sites around the lake, the team identified 66 plant taxa that stuck around from 46,000 to 12,000 years ago, even though temperatures in the region fluctuated by some 20 °C during this period. "I was surprised that the [living] environment remained stable for so long," says Jørgensen (Molecular Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-294x.2011.05287.x). The result does not surprise Gregory Retallack at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who studies plant remains in ancient soils that have been fossilised. "A part of this stability is down to the inertia of ecosystems," he says. Haile and colleagues are now keen to analyse other samples to uncover how the prehistoric flora and fauna in Canada and Alaska were affected by climate change. Andrew Lowe at the University of Adelaide thinks the results could be used in climate models "to tell us how future communities will change". But Retallack thinks such predictions will not be possible until we know, for example, how the flora and fauna were affected by large pulses of warming 70,000 and 125,000 years ago. ____________ References: Zukerman, Wendy. 2012. "Siberia was a wildlife refuge in the last ice age ". New Scientist. Posted: January 10, 2012. Available online: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328464.900-siberia-was-a-wildlife-refuge-in-the-last-ice-age.html

Anthroworks presents its favorite 2011 North American dissertations in cultural anthropology. In compiling this list, I searched the “Dissertations International” electronic database that is available through my university library. The database includes mainly U.S. dissertations with a light sprinkling from Canada. I used the same search terms as I did in previous years.

True confession: these are my picks, and they reflect my preferences for topics — health, inequality, migration, gender, and human rights. Somebody else’s picks would look quite different. But this is the anthroworks list!

The 40 dissertations are arranged in alphabetical order according to the last name of the dissertation author. Apologies to the authors for my reduction of their published abstracts to a maximum of nine lines.

I would like to convey my congratulations to all 2011 anthropology Ph.D. recipients. I hope they go on to a successful career in — or related to — anthropology.

An Analysis of Cultural Competence, Cultural Difference, and Communication Strategies in Medical Care, by Marisa Abbe. Case Western Reserve University. Advisor: Atwood Gaines.

This research expands the knowledge of the role of language, culture, and cultural difference in medical encounters. Minority populations suffer disproportionately from the burden of disease in American society. A common reason cited for health inequalities is that the U.S. health care system, in its “one-size-fits-all” approach, is inadequate to meet the needs of minority patients. A proposed solution in biomedicine is cultural competence. This dissertation investigates how Anglo-American clinicians and Mexican immigrant patients communicate in a medical setting. It is based on ethnographic research at the People’s Clinic, a free clinic in a metropolitan area in Texas. I examine how patients communicate information and whether their narratives cause barriers to treatment. I propose ways to redefine cultural competence of medical practitioners.

We Are Phantasms: Female Same-Sex Desires, Violence, and Ideology in Salvador, Brazil, by Andrea Allen. Harvard University. Advisor: Michael Herzfeld.

In this dissertation, I explore the paradox of lesbian intimate partner violence in Salvador, Brazil. My ethnographic fieldwork allows me to examine how lesbians and other women with female lovers act against “state interests” through their involvement in romantic and sexual relationships with other women, but nonetheless reproduce dominant Brazilian cultural norms through their involvement in intimate partner violence and sexual power relations. I focus on four themes: social violence perpetrated against lesbians in Brazilian society; women’s same-sex desires and sexual practices; infidelity, jealousy, and intimate partner violence in lesbian relationships; and the government’s response to intimate partner violence within Brazil.

An Ambivalent Embrace: The Cultural Politics of Arabization and the Knowledge Economy in the Moroccan Public School, by Charis Boutieri. Princeton University. Advisors: Abdellah Hammoudi, Lawrence Rosen.

This dissertation is based on fieldwork in urban Moroccan high schools. I explore the relationship between Arabization (post-Independence nationalizing agenda) and public education. I argue that tensions traversing the public school relate to Morocco’s ambivalent cultural politics in the postcolonial period and to the social fragmentation this cultural politics has encouraged. Through classroom observations, discussions with students, teachers and parents and curricula analysis, I trace the Arabized school’s ambiguous bilingualism between French and Arabic and narrate how school participants encounter their colonial heritage as re-articulated in the discourse of development. These dynamics reconfigure the school from a mechanism of social and symbolic engineering to a space where the cultural politics of Morocco is debated.

Widening the Lens: Embodiments of Gender, Work and Migration with Market Women in Ghana, by Laurian Bowles. Temple University. Advisors: Jayasinhji Jhala, Paul Stoller, Gina Ulysse, Rickie Sanders.

Women in West Africa have legendary roles as traders who financially dominate the sale of various market goods. The north of Ghana is the agricultural breadbasket of the country, with strong Islamic influences that thrive in dispersed ethnic enclaves. This dissertation focuses on narratives of female head porters (kayayei) as the women confront the multi-ethnic, hierarchical social climates of Accra’s largest shopping venue, Makola Market. Theories in phenomenology, informed by feminist anthropology, allow consideration of how head porters’ lives are grounded with the history and spread of capitalism in Ghana. Using a methodology that includes collaborative photography with kayayei, I examine the politics of visibility and the skills the women develop in order to survive in and negotiate the hierarchies of urban space.

Botswana as a Living Experiment, by Betsey Brada. The University of Chicago. Advisors: Jean Comaroff, Judith Farquhar, Susan Gal, Joseph Masco.

Botswana is a celebrated model in southern Africa and beyond for managing its HIV/AIDS epidemic. This dissertation examines an American treatment program that, like the epidemic, extends beyond the boundaries of Botswana. Like the epidemic, too, the treatment program and partnerships that support it have set in motion more subtle transformations, both intended and unintended, that reach far beyond the clinic walls. The dissertation investigates the institutions, practices, and imaginaries glossed as “global health” in southeastern Botswana, illuminating the interrelations among treatment provision, knowledge production, subjectivity, expertise, value, and temporality. I reveal how bodily interventions are sites for the refashioning of subjects and the reordering of semiotic modalities.

Cultural Models of Genetic Screening & Perceptions of Sickle Cell Disease in High-Risk Guadeloupean French Communities, by Shan-Estelle Brown. University of Connecticut. Advisor: Pamela Erickson.

This dissertation critiques biomedical knowledge as the primary method to understand perceptions about a medical technology. I investigate how knowledge about sickle cell disease in an at-risk community is constructed and communicated between individuals and between institutions and individuals. I used a mixed-methods strategy to collect quantitative and qualitative data during a field study in Guadeloupe, an overseas region of France in the West Indies. One in eight citizens there is a carrier for sickle cell disease, yet less than one percent of the population annually seeks information and services. Findings uncover conflicting attitudes about difference, interpersonal relationships and experiential knowledge, and social motivations to protect information about oneself from the community.

Direct Sales in the Amazon: Gender, Work, and Consumption in Ponta de Pedras, Para, Brazil, by Jessica Chelekis. Indiana University Advisors: Richard Wilk, Catherine Tucker, Eduardo Brondizio, Lessie Jo Frazier.

Over the past 30 years, direct sales corporations have increasingly penetrated rural markets in the Third World, and an array of national and multinational direct sales companies exists in the Lower Amazon. This dissertation aims to understand what direct sales companies, like Avon, do for Amazonian residents, what women get out of working in direct sales, and why beauty and hygiene products are so popular among people who have limited incomes. Ethnographic research in the Amazonian municipality of Ponta de Pedras indicates that women who work in direct sales have greater say in how to spend and manage household money and their own money. Thus Avon and Natura’s beauty products offer a way for Amazon caboclo women to participate in Brazilian beauty ideals and create themselves as modern beings.

Ganga is ‘Disappearing’: Women, Development, and Contentious Practice on the Ganges River, by Georgina Drew. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Advisors: Dorothy Holland, Carole Crumley, Arturo Escobar, David Gilmartin, et al.

This dissertation explores conflict over development and ecological change along the upper stretch of the Ganga River in the Garhwal Himalayas, India. I focus on the circulation of competing discourses about change on the sacred Hindu river, the emergence of actors and movements that address the Ganga’s management, and the transformation of actor subjectivities. I emphasize the meanings that people produce about a river that some fear could “disappear” due to the projected effects of hydroelectric development and upstream glacial melt. Through the exploration of “river dialogues,” I demonstrate how the conflict is charged with varied understandings of the Ganga’s utility, the agency of its Hindu goddess, and the continuity of cultural-religious practices linked with its flow, especially among women.

Manufacturing Insecurity: Power, Water, Waste, and the Silences of Sustainability and Suffering in Northwest Alaska, by Laura Eichelberger. The University of Arizona. Advisors: Linda B. Green, Mark Nichter, Mark, Mimi Nichter, Susan Shaw, et al.

Approximately one third of households in remote Alaska Native villages lack in-home piped water and suffer the health consequences of poor sanitation and inadequate treated water. In response to increasing costs of living and the failure of development projects to foster the conditions under which they would be able to provide for their needs, many Iñupiat assert the importance of traditional values that constitute a path out of insecurity and into self-sufficiency. The Iñupiat point to modern technology as the source of what they call the spoiling of their communities. When the Iñupiat talk about being spoiled by technology, they are referring to the historical domination by the state over their social reproduction in ways that produce and exacerbate the insecurities of daily life in remote villages.

An Ethnography of the “Epidemic” of Schizophrenia among Individuals of African-Caribbean Heritage in England, by Johanne Eliacin. The University of Chicago. Advisors: Tanya Luhrmann, Richard P. Taub, Sydney L. Hans, Eugene Raikhel, et al.

This dissertation addresses the psychiatric epidemiological puzzle that African-Caribbbean people in England have significantly higher rates of schizophrenia than the general British population. Ethnographic fieldwork with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, their relatives, and community members in North London, reveals that specific social changes and historic forces interlink to create a toxic environment characterized by negative expressed emotions and social defeat which negatively affects African-Caribbeans’ mental health. The dissertation examines five key factors: social inequalities, social fragmentation, rapid social changes, isolation, and community expressed emotions.

La Violencia Adentro (Violence in the Interior): Gender Violence, Human Rights, and State-NGO-Community Relations in Coastal Ecuador, by Karin Friederic. The University of Arizona. Advisors; Linda B. Green, Mark Nichter, Laura Briggs, Martha Few, et al.

This dissertation explores how local understandings and manifestations of gender violence in coastal Ecuador are changing as women and men learn about human rights and gain access to state-based forms of justice. Wife abuse in the region is often explained as a result of machismo and an enduring culture of violence. This dissertation demonstrates, instead, how political, economic and social processes normalize gender violence and how transnational human rights discourses are reshaping gender relations and the visibility of particular forms of violence. Inhabitants in this historically marginalized region are using alliances with transnational NGOs to renegotiate their relationship to the state. While these alliances offer powerful openings for women and families, their potential is limited by growing social and economic vulnerability.

Small City Neighbors: Race, Space, and Class in Mansfield, Ohio, by Alison Goebel. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Advisors: Alejandro Lugo, Brenda Farnell, Ellen Moodie, David R. Roediger.

This dissertation investigates social relations in a small deindustrializing city in the United States to analyze the specificities of class, “race relations,” and small city “cityness.” I conducted ethnographic research in Mansfield, Ohio, a multiracial, class-stratified city of about 50,000 residents. My work contributes to studies of whiteness and U.S. race relations by examining how whiteness hierarchically structures social relationships among neighbors. In analyzing how middle class white dominance responds to pressures that seek to undermine its privileges, my dissertation offers a small city view of U.S. race relations. My findings capture particularities of the field site as well as the consequences of global neoliberal capitalism and white racial privilege common throughout the United States.

Looking Back, Seeing Forward: An Ethnography of Women and Violence in Post-war Guatemala City, by Paula Godoy-Paiz. McGill University. [no advisor listed]

Gender-based violence in Guatemala is embedded in enduring legacies of state violence and military power, socio-economic inequalities, and political and cultural ideologies that justify violence toward certain segments of the population including women. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Guatemala’s Metropolitan Area among indigenous and Latina women, I offer an ethnographic analysis of violence and women’s lives in post-war urban Guatemala. My dissertation examines how violence is experienced by women and how it shapes their everyday lives. Special attention is given to the gaps between national and international institutional responses for addressing violence against women, and women’s everyday experiences and agency in carving out spaces to resist distinct forms of violence in their lives.

Reconstructing Life: Environment, Expertise, and Political Power in Iraq’s Marshes 2003-2007, by Bridget Guarasci. University of Michigan. Advisor: Andrew J. Shryock.

The restoration of the southern marshes was one of the most celebrated projects of the post-2003 Iraq reconstruction era. Well before the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, Iraqi exiles met with the U.S. Department of State under the Future of Iraq Project to plan for the aftermath. This dissertation makes two arguments. First, although the marsh project concerned the environment, the most powerful effects of this project lay in the support for a new economy. Second, “post-conflict” Iraq established distance as a technology for foreign investment. Internationals worked from afar for their own safety, hiring Iraqi staff to carry out their mandates. GIS and remote sensing gave rise to virtual spaces of the marshes. Iraq came to be defined by a future-oriented politics of life that, in the case of marsh restoration, privileged the ecological over the human.

Unequal Partners: Sex, Money, Power, and HIV/AIDS in Southern Malawian Relationships, by Nicole Hayes Bennesch. Boston University. Advisor: Charles Lindholm.

Recent surveys in southern Malawi suggest that 20 percent of women and 15 percent of men are HIV positive. Despite a long history of matrilineal institutions that traditionally guaranteed considerable autonomy for women, contemporary relationships between men and women have become the site of gendered power imbalances that promote the spread of HIV/AIDS. This dissertation explores the transformation of heterosexual relationships in southern Malawi from relatively egalitarian unions to profoundly unequal partnerships. Fieldwork at three field sites focused on the complex interplay between colonialism, globalization, democratization, and heterosexual relationships. I contend that recent changes have altered male/female relationships in ways that promote the spread of HIV/AIDS. In the Meanwhile: Living Everyday in Anticipation of Violence in Lebanon, by Sami Hermez. Princeton University. Advisor: John Borneman.

This dissertation examines how a constant anticipation of political violence continues to affect the lives of former militia fighters and society at large in Lebanon. I argue that the constant anticipation of violence haunts everyday life with the spirit of past civil conflicts and the looming threat of future ones. I describe how people take up political action not simply as acts of resistance but also from within a framework of cynical reason. I tackle the notion of sacrifice in wartime, where I focus on what it means to dehumanize others and to lose one’s humanity, arguing that the notion of dehumanization is a rhetorical device with hegemonic influence in debates and conversations around war. My research relies on fieldwork with former militia fighters as well as with political activists, to show how different social processes are constructed.

Morality and Personhood in the Hmong Diaspora: A Person-centered Ethnography of Migration and Resettlement, by Jacob Hickman. The University of Chicago. Advisors: Richard A. Shweder, Don Kulick, Nicholas Tapp, Micere Keels.

This dissertation is concerned with understanding the cultural and psychological adaptations that result from migration. I employ a person-centered ethnographic approach to investigating a transnational group of Hmong families that migrated to Thailand and the United States. I document some important changes that are occurring in Hmong refugee communities including language shift, changing kinship and ritual networks, and the proliferation of several messianic movements. I argue that these changes can be attributed at least in part to how social dispersion in the Hmong diaspora has disrupted traditional religious practices and kin-based ritual networks. I describe a Hmong cultural model of “ancestral personhood” in which the life course includes post-mortal existence and regular interactions between living and deceased kin.

Finding Kinship in the Twenty-first Century: Matching Gay New Yorkers with Children through Adoption and Fostering, by Lynn Horridge. City University of New York. Advisors: Shirley Lindenbaum, Kate Crehan, Marc Edelman, Linda Seligmann.

This dissertation focuses on how gay New Yorkers build families and find kinship through adopting and fostering children. This research pays special attention to the history of “matching” in American adoption practices and how some gays and lesbians have emerged as suitable adopters despite continuing struggles to gain recognition on other gay rights issues such as marriage. I argue that gay and lesbian New Yorkers who adopt, like their heterosexual counterparts, benefit greatly from the neoliberalization of child welfare services in ways that both positively and negatively affect children in need of care. Matching practices, however, leave legacies of race, class, and gender inequalities intact. Fieldwork was conducted in New York City and Guatemala.

Being Closer: Children and Caregiving in the Time of TB and HIV in Lusaka, Zambia, by Jean Hunleth. Northwestern University. Advisors: Karen Tranberg Hansen, Helen Schwartzman, William Leonard, Rebecca Wurtz.

Children are not simply victims of the rise in HIV-related illnesses and premature deaths among adults in Zambia, they are actively engaged in social practices and productive activities that shape the care they give to and receive from adults. I focus on children’s roles in managing tuberculosis (TB) in Lusaka, Zambia. I show that children develop practices of care that hinge on proximity and interdependence which I call “being closer.” A phrase used often by children and adults when an adult relative is sick, being closer characterizes children’s efforts within illness to sustain social ties, give and receive care, and affirm their value and personhood. Being closer is a practice of care in which children actively direct their actions and sentiments toward particular relationships and people.

Making Moral Worlds: Individual and Social Processes of Meaning Making in a Somali Diaspora, by Anna Jacobsen. Washington University in St. Louis. Advisors: John R. Bowen, Rebecca J. Lester, Carolyn Sargent, Shanti Parikh, et al.

In this dissertation, I explore various aspects of Somali morality as it is constructed, debated, and reinforced by individual women living in the Eastleigh neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya. I examine how Somali women in Eastleigh identify morality and ethical behavior. I argue that this metaethical project is not an artifact of analysis, but is a useful way of capturing how Somalis in Kenya and elsewhere are undertaking a dialogue and exploration of what constitutes “the moral.” The contours of such projects vary depending on local context, and I look carefully at how variation unfolds in one specific place, at one specific time. Yet some of the processes of metaethical reflection that I identify are active in other contexts as well. This metaethical project serves not only social ends, but individual, spiritual and psychological ones as well.

Revolutions in Microcosm: Migration, Meaning, and Mothering by Iranian-Americans, by Whitney Kazemipour. University of California, Los Angeles. Advisor: Linda C. Garro.

How do the simultaneously cognitive and emotional tasks of mothering and the creation of meaning shape the host-country adaptation of immigrants? How does migration affect mothering? Through in-depth interviewing of Baha’i and Muslim Iranian-American immigrant mothers, interpreted within the context of extensive participant observation, this dissertation seeks to answer these questions. It reflects both psychocultural anthropology’s concern with cultural internalization and with the role of agency, and also migration scholarship’s concern with immigrant acculturation and adaptation. Building on a processual approach to meaning-making that places motivation as a key variable in the articulation of plans and thought, analysis of the interviews demonstrated three themes in their mothering.

The Senses and Suffering: Medical Knowledge, Spirit Possession, and Vaccination Programs in Aja, by James Kennell. Southern Methodist University. Advisors: Caroline Brettell, Carolyn Sargent, Carolyn Smith-Morris, Paul Stoller.

In an Aja community of southwest Benin, multiple domains of medical knowledge and practice compete for control of illness meaning and sensory experience. Global health initiatives (vaccination and education programs), national health care structures, and Aja medico-religious practice each incorporate and manipulate the knowledge and practice of the other in order to create legitimacy and shape therapeutic trajectories. Biomedical nosology and disease prevention efforts conflict with local understandings of individual and community health concerning diseases that affect the skin. Efforts at the “sensibilisation” of the community regarding vaccinations and other global health initiatives is met with local medico-religious knowledge emphasizing a sensual experience of illness and healing for the individual and the community.

Restructuring Birth: Neoliberal Shifts in Maternity Care, the Role of NGOs, and the Impact on Midwives and Birthparents in the Philadelphia Community, by Cecily Knauer. Temple University. Advisors: Sydney White, Susan Hyatt, Judith Goode, Rebecca Alpert.

Over the past twelve years, Philadelphia has undergone an unparalleled large scale shift in how maternity care is provided, accessed, and considered. Key aspects of the changes to the landscape of birth in Philadelphia include the closure of the majority of hospital-based maternity units, the activities of local women’s health non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the new set of pregnancy care and birth choices that parents navigate. One of the most striking results of the restructuring of Philadelphia’s maternity care system is a drastic reduction in the number of hospitals with maternity units. My ethnographic work focuses on the experiences of particular individuals as they navigate Philadelphia’s new system of maternity care. I find that the interests of parents and health care practitioners are increasingly devalued or disregarded.

Virtuous Citizens and Sentimental Society: Ethics and Politics in Neoliberal South Korea, by EuyRyung Jun. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Advisors: Donald Nonini, Peter Redfield, Arturo Escobar, Nancy Abelmann.

This dissertation focuses on the new social and ethical landscape created by foreign workers, marriage immigrants, and “multicultural families” in South Korea. I examine the problem of the human rights of the foreign worker, which essentially relied on the advocacy work by civil society groups such as migrant centers in the absence of the state’s interest in protecting them. Second, I locate the state programs for immigrants and their multicultural families within its efforts to cope with the country’s recent demographic changes that are characterized by low fertility and rapid aging. I show that the state’s multicultural programs have emerged as part of its governance of the given crisis and of the emergent populations that potentially disrupt existing social integrity.

Merchant Moralities: Indigenous Economy and Ethical Work in Otavalo, Ecuador, by Kristine Latta. Princeton University. Advisor: Joao Biehl.

Over the last four decades, the indigenous communities of Otavalo, Ecuador have taken part in a remarkable transformation, utilizing a combination of incremental savings, hired and family labor, investment, migration, capital risk, and cultural creativity to carefully recalibrate a venerable and centuries-long history of textile production to the appetites of a 21st century ethnic craft export and tourism economy. In the process, Otavalo’s most prosperous indigenous entrepreneurs have become the antagonists of everyday moral dilemmas about the relationship between merchant capital and indigenous values. This dissertation poses the question of how indigenous merchants work to reconcile their intense engagements in a global market economy.

After SARS: The Rebirth of Public Health in China’s “City of Immigrants,” by Katherine Mason. Harvard University. Advisor: Arthur Kleinman.

This dissertation examines the professionalization of public health in the Chinese city of Shenzhen in the wake of the 2003 SARS epidemic, with a focus on the development of new forms of professional responsibility. I argue that SARS launched a series of reforms that profoundly shaped the goals, methods, institutions, and training associated with public health in China, while greatly increasing the status, expertise, and reach of local Chinese public health institutions. The effects of these reforms were most dramatic in the Pearl River Delta region of China, where Shenzhen is located and where SARS originated. I explore how my research participants attempted to resolve the tensions among multiple responsibilities and moralities as they built a new public health profession in Shenzhen after SARS.

Struggles over Belonging: Insecurity, Inequality and the Cultural Politics of Property at Enoosupukia, Kenya, by Scott Matter. McGill University. [no advisor listed]

In the formerly forested highlands overlooking Kenya’s Rift Valley, rights in land are highly contested. Disputes revolve around a central question: who belongs and to whom does Enoosupukia belong? For a core community who call this place their ancestral home, uncertainty about the answer translates to a pervasive sense of insecurity and hardship. Faced with competing claims from non-local members of several ethnic and sub-ethnic collectivities as well as local and central branches of the Kenyan state, residents of Enoosupukia deploy a variety of strategies to claim their rights. These strategies have resulted in limited success thus far and their continued presence in the highlands is subject to frequent challenges and contingent upon constant negotiation.

Socializing Landscapes, Naturalizing Conflict: Environmental Discourses and Land Conflict in the Negev Region of Israel, by Emily McKee. University of Michigan. Advisor: Stuart A. Kirsch.

This dissertation analyzes how historical narratives, state policies, and the everyday practices of residents shape contemporary land conflict in the Negev/Naqab region of Israel. Jewish and Bedouin-Arab citizens and governmental bodies vie over access to land for farming and homes and over the status of unrecognized Bedouin villages. Combining fieldwork in the Negev with historical analysis, my investigation traces environmental discourses across the typically separated domains of planned towns for Jews and Bedouin Arabs, unrecognized villages and single-family farmsteads, Knesset hearings, news media, and activist projects. The first study of environment and land conflict in this region to look at Jewish and Arab settings, this dissertation offers insight into the hardening of these oppositional group boundaries and social conflict.

Life on the Border: Korean-Chinese Negotiating National Belonging in Transnational Space, by Gowoon Noh. University of California, Davis. Advisors: Li Zhang, Carol Smith, Alan Klima, James Smith.

This study focuses on how the Korean-Chinese population of Yanbian Korean-Chinese Ethnic Autonomous Prefecture (Yanbian) conducts transnational business and engages in labor migration between South Korea and the Yanbian Prefecture, China. I look at how Korean-Chinese are situated in a unique context of national belonging between China and South Korea as an ethnic minority of the postsocialist Chinese state and the largest Korean overseas population believed to share national ancestry with South Korea. My study elaborates the analysis of neoliberalism to the extent that the emphasis on neoliberal ethics of self-governance and self-responsibility in postsocialist China often engenders political and economic insecurity for the ethnic population by challenging their national belonging and identity.

Health in Black and White: Debates on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities in Brazil, by Anna Pagano. University of California, San Diego. Advisors: James Holston, Nancy Postero, Thomas, Csordas, Ivan Evans.

In 2006, the Brazilian Health Council approved a National Health Policy for the black population. The policy is striking because it promotes the image of a biologically and culturally discrete black population by collapsing “brown” (pardo) and “black” (preto) Brazilian Census categories into a single “black population” (população negra) to be considered a special-needs group by the public health apparatus. In this dissertation, I explore the political and social implications of treating racial and ethnic groups differently within Brazilian health care. I examine how the re-definition and medicalization of racial and cultural identities unfolds in public clinics, temples of Afro-Brazilian religion, and social movements based in São Luís and São Paulo.

Landscapes of Power: An Ethnography of Energy Development on the Navajo Nation, by Dana Powell. University of North Carolina. Advisors: Dorothy Holland, Arturo Escobar, Orin Starn, Peter Redfield.

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of energy development on the Navajo (Diné) Nation in the Southwestern United States (Arizona and New Mexico) through an ethnographic study of Desert Rock, a coal-fired power plant proposed by the Navajo Nation government. Since its initial proposal in 2003, the proposed plant has spawned widespread controversy both among tribal members and in the greater region, despite its unbuilt, emergent status. This dissertation follows the actors engaged in this debate, showing how Desert Rock became a fulcrum for negotiations of Navajo identity and indigeneity, sustainable development, tribal sovereignty, and expert knowledge. I argue that these dynamics constitute landscapes of power.

Adoring Our Wounds: Suicide, Prevention, and the Maya in Yucatan, Mexico, by Beatriz Reyes-Cortes. University of California, Berkeley. Advisors: Stanley Brandes, William F. Hanks, Lawrence Cohen, William B. Lawrence.

The first decade of the 21st century has seen transformations in national and regional Mexican politics and society. In the state of Yucatán, a newfound interest in indigenous Maya culture is coupled with increasing involvement by the state in public health efforts. Suicide, which in Yucatán more than doubles the national average, has captured the attention of local newspaper media, public health authorities, and the general public. My dissertation, based on ethnographic and archival research in Valladolid and Mérida, Yucatán, is a study of both suicide and suicide prevention efforts. The first half of my dissertation focuses on how suicide is produced in public and state discourse. The second half considers how foreign mental health treatment models are applied in local clinical settings as part of state suicide prevention efforts.

Schooling and Life Chances: Explaining the Effects of Mothers’ Schooling on Child Health in Ethiopia, by Edward Stevenson. Emory University. Advisors: Craig Hadley, Peter J. Brown, Bradd J. Shore, Carol J. Worthman.

The expansion of women’s schooling is often asserted to be one of the largest influences on the global fall in child mortality of the past century. While consensus exists that the benefits of maternal schooling for child survival are due to improved health behaviors on the part of mothers, the factors that connect girls’ school experience to these behaviors in later life are unclear. This dissertation tested four hypothetical connections between schooling and child health in Ethiopia: knowledge of treatments for diarrhea and malaria, literacy skills, aspirations that could motivate greater parental investment, and greater wealth and access to medical services among mothers with more education. Findings indicate that community-level factors such as access to clean water and medical services may be most significant.

Stand up for Singapore? Gay Men and the Cultural Politics of National Belonging in the Lion City, by Kok Tan. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Advisors: Martin Manalansan IV. F. K. Lehman, Janet D. Keller, Alejandro Lugo.

This dissertation examines how Chinese-Singaporean gay men articulate their aspirations for national belonging within a recalcitrant state and its nation-building programs. These men expose the artificiality of the nation and its categories of belonging. Even as the state compels them to submit to its call for economic and biological (re)productivity, it also chastises them for their allegedly excessive individualism. In everyday life, they navigate a social landscape structured by the very real practices of an authoritarian state that criminalizes their sexuality. I argue that the illiberal state achieves its political legitimacy by convincing citizens that only it can secure Singapore’s continuous economic growth.

The Moral Dilemmas of Nighttime Breastfeeding: Crafting Kinship, Personhood and Capitalism in the U.S., by Cecilia Tomori. University of Michigan. Advisors: Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Thomas E. Fricke.

This dissertation addresses the cultural construction and negotiation of moral dilemmas that arise from the embodied practices of breastfeeding and sleep in the U.S. I argue that the debates that surround both breastfeeding and infant sleep arrangements originate from the intertwined social histories of biomedicine and capitalism that have led to a valuation of the properties of breast milk for health and the stigmatization of breastfeeding’s intercorporeal praxis. I investigate the consequences of these cultural trends through an ethnographic study of middle class parents committed to breastfeeding. I focus on the moral dilemmas that stem from cultural concerns about personhood and the intercorporeal aspects of nighttime breastfeeding in parent-child kin relations that are amplified by medical guidelines for breastfeeding and infant sleep.

Life and Death Journeys: Medical Travel, Cancer, and Children in Argentina, by Padros Vindrola. University of South Florida. Advisors: Linda M. Whiteford, Heidi M. Castaneda, Rebecca K. Zarger, Eric Eisenberg.

Recent studies on the Argentine public health system have demonstrated that the lack of medical resources in different parts of the country force pediatric oncology patients and their family members to travel to Buenos Aires in order to access care. This dissertation documents the experiences of such traveling families in order to understand the barriers they face while attempting to access medical treatment and the strategies they use to surmount these obstacles. The interviews, visual timelines, drawings, and participant-observation carried out with families shed light on differences in the conceptualization of medical treatment and migration between children and their parents, the ways in which the process of parenting was affected by relocation, and the changes that need to be made in the current Argentine public health system.

Black Bogota: The Politics and Everyday Experience of Race in Post-constitutional Reform Colombia, by Fatimah Williams. Rutgers University. Advisors: Ana Ramos-Zayas, Deborah A. Thomas, Daniel M. Goldstein, Dorothy L. Hodgson.

This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of the lived experience of multicultural constitutional reform and juridical recognition among black populations in Colombia. The Constitutional Reform of 1991 and subsequent Law 70 of 1993 made Colombia one of the first countries in Latin America to recognize black people as a distinct cultural group and grant them rights to collective territories, political representation, and cultural protections. I explore blackness as a cultural and a legal phenomenon and show how race operates in daily life outside of sites of predominantly black populations, at the margins of state politics and law, and in conjunction with global discourses of rights and black identity. This research contributes to debates on the extent to which law can address social difference and inequality.

The Weight of the Body: Changing Ideals of Fatness, Nourishment, and Health in Guatemala, by Emily Yates-Doerr. New York University. Advisors: Emily Martin, Thomas A. Abercrombie, Rayna Rapp, Sally E. Merry.

Historically, Guatemalans have considered body fat a sign of health and prestige. In the past decade, connected to an increased availability of processed foods, the incidence of metabolic illness has grown rapidly and obesity has become an emerging medical concern. Local and international health organizations have responded with nutrition education programs that encourage dietary control and weight management through an emphasis on calories and nutrients. This dissertation analyzes how people in the urbanizing highland city of Xela, Guatemala, perceive obesity and dietary health and how the dissemination of information about nutrition shapes these perceptions. I show how epidemiological transformation in Guatemala also entails epistemological changes in ways of knowing and relating to bodies and food.

Internal Displacement in Colombia: Violence, Resettlement, and Resistance, by Juan Zea. Portland State University. Advisors: Michele R. Gamburd, Sharon A. Carsten, Jose Padin.

The majority of the estimated four million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Colombia who have fled from their lands and homes have migrated to urban centers. This study examines how IDPs cope with living in a new, urban environment after violent displacement. The research demonstrates how IDPs’ practices challenge state bureaucracy and refute the non-displaced public’s stereotypes. IDPs’ agency both reproduces and transforms social structures in the city of Bogotá. Collective IDP agency leads to actions of resistance through public marches and takeovers. This research highlights relations between power structures and individuals, examining how IDPs experience and resist symbolic violence, and it demonstrates how IDPs create new identities in situations of forced migration.

Carrying out Modernity: Migration, Work, and Masculinity in China, by Xia Zhang. University of Pittsburgh. Advisor: Nicole Constable.

This dissertation is an historically and politically grounded ethnography of bangbang, an estimated 200,000 to 1,000,000-strong crew of male porters, who serve the transportation sector of Chongqing in southwest China. Bangbang are mostly Chinese rural migrant men who work as informal day laborers. My research examines the labor and gender inequalities that bangbang experience within the context of post-reform China’s economic development and modernization. In Chongqing, rural men’s migrations are not just an important attempt to pursue economic advancement, but are also part of their quest for decency and masculine pride. This research finds that the fragmentation of employment contributes to the lack of large-scale, public, collective protests among bangbang against the government.