Browsing School of Anthropology by Title
Now showing items 20-39 of 124
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Central Americans in Tucson, ArizonaCitizens of El Salvador and Guatemala have experienced life-threatening situations in their native lands that have forced them to make choices in order to survive. Those choices include coming to the United States in search of political asylum. Travelling through Mexico and arriving and settling in the United States require the use of a variety of adaptive strategies. By employing kinship and friendship networks, using community services, organizing voluntary associations, learning English, and compartmentalizing their own culture while being absorbed into the larger Mexican and Anglo cultures, they are able to meet their needs. Of those who come to Tucson, many leave due to difficulties in finding jobs and the lack of affordable legal aid. Those who stay do so because they are awaiting court dates, desire to remain close to their families or have been successful in finding work.
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Ceramics and social dynamics: Technological style and corrugated ceramics during the Pueblo III to Pueblo IV transition, Silver Creek, ArizonaPrehistoric social networks reveal paths of behavior that are vital to the understanding of past life. Utilitarian ceramics that were a part of everyday life and regular household activities, and the elements of technological style they possess, are accurate indicators of local social dynamics. Corrugated ceramic vessels in particular contain subtleties in their decoration that may distinguish learning frameworks within and between groups on a small, perhaps household-level scale. My study uses these premises to examine corrugated sherds, and the social patterns they reflect, from several sites in the Silver Creek area of east-central Arizona.
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The concept of center as a cultural manifestation of Islamic ideals as translated into architectureArchitectural historians have always seen the Islamic city and Islamic house as unsystematic in design and layout. In this work I show that there is a basic spatial symbolism predating, and then adopted by, Islam, based on three major concepts. The first is that there is a residual notion of center as something sacred; secondly that instead of dichotomies or binary oppositions space in Islamic architecture is a continuum and lastly that the center of the center, whether or not it has any visible symbolism, (fountain for example) is an axis mundi, or vertical axis to the heavens. These features are seen not just in urban and housing designs, but also in mosques, madrassas, and garden layouts.
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Conserving cultural heritage with microcredit: A case study of the Dogon Culture Bank in Fombori, MaliThis thesis presents a case study of the Dogon CultureBank in Fombori, Mali, a local initiative started in 1997 to conserve cultural heritage through the provision of microcredit loans. Participants obtain credit to support small enterprise by using cultural objects as collateral; the objects are conserved and exhibited in a community museum collection. This innovative approach to microfinance has provided financial incentive for cultural conservation in a rural Dogon community, increased social capital among participants, and heightened community awareness of the importance of cultural heritage as a resource for development. Results of quantitative analysis demonstrate a significant increase in overall income generation patterns among participants; however, male borrowers have consistently benefited from both higher loans and greater increases in income generation than female borrowers who are targeted as the primary beneficiaries. The study concludes by highlighting the contributions of the model to the broader field of microfinance in developing countries.
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"Cooking the body" in a changing world: Post-partumpractices in the MixtecaFor women in the Lower Mixtec region of Oaxaca, Mexico, the post partum period is traditionally a vulnerable time, when, for forty days, women feel that their bodies are "open" to coldness entering and causing immediate or future illness. Women take protective measures to remove coldness from their "raw" bodies and restore heat by following special diets, dressing warmly, and "cooking the body"---taking hot herbal water baths (banos de cocimiento) or steam baths (banos de temazcal). Based on the narrated experiences of eighteen women in the Mixteca, this thesis explores how several generations of women experience shifts in post partum practices and ideas as their society changes. Women believed that post partum vulnerability varied from woman to woman, depending on where she lived, her habits and customs, and her generation.
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Counseling battered women: Recommendations for a new approachThis paper shows how the battered women's shelter where I work has become, like many other battered women's shelters in the US, enmeshed in a bureaucratic web of procedures and requirements. The shelter uses a therapeutic, self-help model in its approach to counseling residents, partly as a result of its bureaucratization. This paper provides a forum to discuss the advantages and disadvantages to the shelter's use of the self-help model, and proposes the adoption of a different counseling model by the shelter, that of resistance. Data from interviews conducted individually with thirteen shelter residents over a period of six months buttress the recommendation.
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Cultivating Community: Social Networks, Gardening, and Community Resilience in the Sonoran DesertThis research seeks to identify, describe, and understand community as it is expressed in the local and urban gardening sphere of Tucson, Arizona. Underlying this effort is the ethnographic intent to qualitatively document and explore whether, and ultimately how, members or components of the social network interact. The relevance of this research lies not only in better understanding how people experience community in specific contexts, but also in its aim to demonstrate that both physical and virtual relationships - virtual referring to a conceptualized essence or effect not manifest in concrete appearance or form - contribute to the development, manifestation, and common ownership of communities. Gardening-related and support-oriented resources and spaces in Tucson - namely the Seed Library of the Pima County Public Library and Las Milpitas de Cottonwood Community Farm - served as field sites for this research and represent vertices which link subgroups physically and virtually within the social network itself. Importantly, examining the synergy characterizing relations between members and components of the network aids efforts to qualitative describe the community’s resilience.
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Dating construction events at Grasshopper Pueblo: New techniques for architectural analysisThe analysis of architecture as a separate but important class of material culture has seen a resurgence of interest in archaeology in recent years. However, a body of analytical techniques equivalent to those used for the analysis of other types of material culture is still lacking in architectural analysis. Computer aided drafting programs offer one means of facilitating architectural analyses by providing both an analytical tool as well as a means of organizing spatial information. Computer techniques are used to combine a construction phase model with tree-ring dates at Grasshopper Pueblo. In the course of the analysis, principles for assigning temporal information to undated construction units are discussed and applied. Finally, the results of the combination of these two sets of information are discussed and a slightly revised site chronology is offered.
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Design structure variation in cibola white ware vessels from Grasshopper and Chodistaas Pueblos, ArizonaThis study reviews previous research on ceramic design styles in archaeology and suggests that techniques for identifying the analytical individual in prehistory and using these data to reconstruct past behavioral patterns represents an untapped direction for further archaeological investigation. A new method for stylistic analysis is outlined and tested on a preliminary basis with a collection of prehistoric decorated ceramics. These data provide a foundation for reconstructing aspects of Southwest prehistory as well as providing a potential new direction for stylistic analyses in general.
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Ecological and consumer group variation in expedient chipped stone technology of the Pueblo period: An exploratory study in the Silver Creek drainage, ArizonaLithic raw material variety and abundance reveals the technological utility of different source materials from 20 chipped stone surface collections in the Silver Creek area of east-central Arizona, from sites dating between the 9th and 14th centuries. A rich raw material environment obviates distance-from-source constraints, freeing debitage analysis from traditional spatial interpretations regarding the intensity of reduction. Rather the intensity of reduction and the frequency of distinct material types in each assemblage reflects the impact of social organization, community size, exchange and subsistence variation on the organization of chipped stone technology.
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Educational travel for societal change: An exploration of popular education along the Mexico-United States borderDuring the past few decades, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in how different cultural frameworks come together. One opportunity to view such interactions is presented by travel seminars based on a transformative education model, which aim to educate middle-class people about conditions in economically depressed areas through travel. The task of this thesis is to examine the experiences of U.S. participant groups in one transformative education program, paying particular attention to interpersonal contact, both within groups and between them and local people, and to how participants experience the location of poverty. I argue that multiple factors play a role in terms of whether, how, and why trip participants appear to form new meanings based on their experiences. These factors include the individual's ability to empathize with the 'Other' (i.e. local people) met on the trip and previous experience in and knowledge of economically depressed areas, especially the Third World.
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ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS IN RUSSIA (AN EXAMPLE FROM THE BAIKAL REGION)This thesis presents the analysis of environmental movements in Russia.Through a collective memory and discourse framework, this study reviews the overlap and disparity in perceptions of environmental movements in the Soviet Union and Russia.The portrait that emerges from the analysis of the environmental movements suggests that the impact of environmental movements in Russia may be limited in part because it has developed in contravention to existing discourses. More importantly, the context and underlying assumptions of environmental movements are not formulated in ways that are compatible with existing collective identities in Russian society.
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Ethnohistoric evidence for the economic role of cotton in the protohistoric SouthwestThis study examines the Spanish ethnohistoric evidence for the economic role of cotton in the Southwest at the time of contact, doing so within an integrated framework for economic behavior. Critical evaluation of the text and the organization of individual references to cotton by production, distribution, and consumption reveal the limited nature of this line of evidence; however, systematic comparison of the information it does yield shows that the Spanish documentary record does not support archaeological inferences of complex economic behavior with regard to cotton. Rather, the text suggests patterns that are more characteristic of a trading partner system. A comparison of this evidence with the archaeological record would shed additional light on this question.
