Anthropology Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2742

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Creating Anthracite Women: The Roles of Architecture and Material Culture in Identity Formation in Pennsylvania Anthracite Company Towns, 1854-1940.
(2019) Westmont, Victoria Camille; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Coal company towns are defined by the experiences of the men who owned and the men who worked in the mines, broadly ignoring the women and families who also inhabited and toiled in these spaces. In the Northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite region, women undertook a variety of methods to change their social positions through the renegotiation of their gender, ethnic, and class identities. Performing ‘proper’ middle class American gender expressions, including through the adoption of culturally-coded objects, provided working class women with greater social power and cultural autonomy within the context of systemic worker deprivation and ubiquitous corporate domination. Drawing on identity performance theories, material culture theories related to gender, class, and migration, and theories of the built environment, I examine how women established identities based in and reinforced by material culture and spatial organization Drawing on archaeologically recovered material culture, oral histories, archival research, and architectural data, I demonstrate the ways in which working class women used cultural norms to elevate themselves and their status within their communities. Women were able to balance their needs with ubiquitous gender oppression within working class industrial society by mastering the tasks assigned to women – responsibilities as mothers, familial ministers, household managers, and feminine matrons – and using those positions to pursue what they needed for their own survival. These identities were further negotiated and enforced by the built environment. By examining household decorations, house floorplans, house lot spatial organization, and company town layouts as a whole, I discuss how workers and company town architects used the built environment to exert and subvert ideas of power, control, and self-determination. This research reveals that the process of identity formation amongst working class women in the anthracite region was a careful and complicated conversation between national level cultural influencers, industrial directors, and company town social trends. As women sought out and exploited new ways of exercising discretion over their otherwise structurally circumscribed situations, they gained social leverage and influence that has been consistently ignored in modern retellings of their lives.
“THE REAL DISTANCE WAS GREAT ENOUGH”: REMAPPING A MULTIVALENT PLANTATION LANDSCAPE USING HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (HGIS)
(2019) Skolnik, Benjamin Adam; Leone, Mark P.; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation uses the tools of historical Geographic Information Systems (hGIS) to locate and describe mid-nineteenth-century plantation landscapes in Talbot County, Maryland. The methodology described here combines historic maps, historic and modern aerial photography, LiDAR-derived elevation data, historic census data, and textual descriptions. It also uses them in conjunction with an ongoing archaeological research project at Wye House, the ancestral seat of the Lloyd family and site of enslavement of Frederick Douglass, near Easton, Maryland in order to further develop ways for archaeologists, historians, and other researchers to work with cartographic and spatial data in a digital framework. This methodology can be used across multiple scales to survey remotely individual sites or even entire counties for potential archaeological resources. Furthermore, it examines the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, not only because he was a witness to these landscapes, but also because he can be read as a social theorist who addresses issues of race and racialized landscapes throughout his writings. Lastly, it uses these sources of data to consider Dell Upton’s spatial hypothesis regarding racialized plantation landscapes. Taken together, this study of mid-nineteenth-century Talbot County, Maryland represents one way to identify and recover lost sites of African American heritage that would otherwise remain lost.
Cultural Heritage and Climate Change Adaptation Pathways
(2018) Van Dolah, Elizabeth Rebecca; Paolisso, Michael; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation seeks to ethnographically understand the role of cultural heritage in climate change adaptation decision-making, and the mechanisms by which heritage is used to shape adaptation pathways for responding to climate-induced socio-ecological changes. Cultural heritage can broadly be understood as the practice of engaging with change through an ongoing social processing of the past. Research on cultural heritage to date has demonstrated the ways that heritage is closely linked to issues of identity, power, and sociocultural processes of change (Lafrenz Samuels 2018). In the context of climate change adaptation, heritage research has much to offer to a growing body of literature that points to the need to better understand the underlying sociocultural factors that affect social resilience and human adaptation (Cote and Nightingale 2012). This dissertation speaks to these calls in approaching heritage as a mechanism for carving climate change adaptation pathways. I explore the role of heritage as an adaptation pathway in the context of a collaborative adaptation planning project called the Integrated Coastal Resiliency Assessment (ICRA), which was carried out on the Deal Island Peninsula, a rural, low-lying area on the Maryland eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. I utilize qualitative methods in semi-structured interviewing, participant observation, and text analysis to ethnographically elucidate a range of heritage threads and to analyze how these threads shape collaborative adaptation decision-making through the ICRA process. Findings from this research identify three overarching heritage themes that are embedded in local Methodist traditions, traditional watermen livelihood practices, and histories of isolation and independence. I demonstrate how these threads are used to frame local understandings of socio-ecological change and climate change vulnerabilities on the Deal Island Peninsula. I also demonstrate how broader heritage deployments in the Chesapeake Bay shape local experiences of vulnerability through processes of disempowerment. I conclude with a discussion of how heritage is integrated into the ICRA process to facilitate a bottom-up decision-making process that re-empowers local actors in governing their own vulnerabilities. The main conclusion from this research points to the importance of considering heritage mobilization in climate change adaptation planning.
LANDSCAPES OF TENSION: EXPLORING NERVOUSNESS AND ANXIETY ON A MARYLAND PLANTATION
(2018) BAILEY, MEGAN; Shackel, Paul A; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century plantation site, L’Hermitage, which is located in Frederick, Maryland, on what is now Monocacy National Battlefield. It considers how the interactions among and between the plantation owners, the Vincendière family, and their enslaved workers, in order to investigate how negotiations of power and supremacy can be read through spatial organization, material culture, and interpersonal relations. I refer to Denis Byrne’s (2003) use of the phrase “nervous landscape” to explore how a landscape and its occupants can be literally and figuratively nervous when absolute power fails and a heterogeneity and multiplicity of power and identities are introduced. That is, the disruption of homogeneity and hegemony breeds nervousness. Byrne uses this concept to explore racial tension; however, this project recognizes that anxiety can emerge from uneasiness around other structural factors. This research relies on multiple sources, including historical documents, artifacts, and archaeological features in order to explore how race, gender, class, religion, and nationality interacted on the plantation landscape. This work applies particular attention to how the power dynamics around these hierarchies played out within the nervous frame, mitigating or contributing to a nervous landscape. The dissertation also uses this framework to explore nervousness in the literal sense; how anxiety was a fundamental element of the colonial experience, and more broadly how emotion is an important aspect of the human experience that should be considered in archaeological interpretations of the past. This research is intended to contribute to the National Park Service’s goal of enhancing its interpretation of the larger context of the Civil War. Monocacy National Battlefield (MNB) is primarily valued for the battle that took place in 1864, and this is reflected in much of its current interpretation. However, MNB is committed to expanding this interpretation to situate the Civil War battle in its historical, social, political, economic, and geographical context. Research on plantation life, including topics such as agriculture, slavery, and racism, will contribute toward this goal. Furthermore, the results of my study can be useful in framing the way Monocacy discusses power dynamics and identity in the context of L’Hermitage.
MOTHERING AFTER INCARCERATION: REENTRY AND RENEGOTIATING MOTHERHOOD
(2017) Hall, Casey Lauren; Freidenberg, Judith Noemi; Butler, Mary Odell; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In the wake of mass incarceration, there has been an unprecedented increase in the incarceration of women in the United States. The majority of incarcerated women are mothers, whose absence causes a significant disruption in family life. While research has demonstrated the negative impact of maternal incarceration on women and their children, much remains to be learned about women’s return to the community and in to family life upon reentry. The purpose of the research, conducted in the District of Columbia (2015-2016), was to explore the lived experience of mothering after incarceration, the role of motherhood on women’s experiences of prison to community reentry, and the impact of incarceration and reentry on women’s roles as mothers. Sources of data for this study include life history interviews with formerly incarcerate mothers, interviews with community stakeholders such as community service providers and criminal justice professionals, participant observation at relevant service organizations and community events, and archival data. This research design allowed for an examination of the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated mothers, as well as the social and structural context within which they mother their children, and in which they attempt to gain access to resources to rebuild their lives after incarceration. The research produced case studies that highlight the structural, institutional, and social factors that shape the lives of incarcerated women, including their sense of motherhood and how these factors affect the practice of mothering for women who become involved in the criminal justice system. The findings reveal the ways women attempt to mother their children as they struggle within and against difficult social positions, and how kinship ties are challenged, made, and remade as a result of a mother’s incarceration. The findings contribute to the anthropology of mothering, and underscore emergent roles of kinship, both biological and fictive, in the practice of mothering and experiences of prison and reentry for women who become involved in the criminal justice system. The experiences of formerly incarcerated mothers has implications for broader understandings of motherhood and mothering as dynamic, contextual processes, structured by the conditions in which women mother their children.
Respectable Holidays: The Archaeology of Capitalism and Identities at the Crosbyside Hotel (c. 1870-1902) and Wiawaka Holiday House (mid-1910s-1929), Lake George, New York
(2017) Springate, Megan; Shackel, Paul A; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The nineteenth century industrialization of America, the development of the middle class, anxiety about social belonging, and industrial capitalism are deeply intertwined. As America industrialized, people moved from rural communities, where people were known and support systems ran deep, to the cities to find work. Managers, who acted as proxies for owners, became so prevalent that they formed a new class. Middle class identity, rooted in a particular performance of respectability, whiteness, gender, distinguished its members from untrustworthy capitalist business owners and from the rough lives of the working classes. Middle class values became synonymous with American values. This essentialization of middle class respectability is a manifestation of capitalist ideology wielded to create new markets under consumer capitalism. Archaeological excavations at Wiawaka on Lake George, New York provided a material window on these processes. From 1857 to 1902, the Crosbyside Hotel served as a middle-class, mixed gender resort on the grounds of what is now Wiawaka. Vacationers performed middle class respectability and belonging while enjoying the benefits of nature. In 1903, Wiawaka moved in to the former Crosbyside, a single-gender, mixed-class moral reform vacation house for respectable working women and their middle-class benefactors. These women also performed middle class respectability and belonging while enjoying the benefits of nature. In both cases, people worked to make these vacations possible. This dissertation is one of a very few archaeological investigations of late nineteenth century hotels, and the first to examine women’s holiday houses. Using Third Space and performativity, artifacts from the Crosbyside and from the mid-1910s to 1929 associated with Wiawaka were used to explore interrelated facets of identity including gender, class, race, and respectability. Differences between how people negotiated identity in the era of industrial capitalism (Crosbyside) and consumer capitalism (Wiawaka) were identified, as were the ways that identities were shaped and confined by capitalism through powerful ideas of respectability. Also identified were material examples of the labor of leisure – of those who did the work that made vacations possible. Artifacts recovered make clear that it is, indeed, possible to see the labor of leisure in the archaeological record.
An Environmental Anthropology of Modeling and Management on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed
(2017) Trombley, Jeremy M.; Paolisso, Michael; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In the last few decades, computational models have become an essential component of our understanding of complex environmental processes. In addition, they are increasingly used as tools for the management of large-scale environmental problems like climate change. As a result, understanding the role that these models play in the socioecological process of environmental management is an important area of inquiry for an environmental anthropology concerned with understanding human-environment interactions. In this dissertation, I examine these roles through an ethnographic study of computational environmental modeling in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Chesapeake Bay region is an excellent place to investigate modeling and management because, for over thirty years, it has been the site of a watershed-scale effort to reduce nutrient pollution (nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment) to the Chesapeake Bay. In order to carry out this management process, the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) was created as a partnership between the federal government and seven watershed jurisdictions. In addition, modelers at the CBP have been developing a complex computational model of the watershed known as the Chesapeake Bay Modeling System (CBMS) in order to identify and track the sources and effects of nutrient pollution on the estuary. In this dissertation, I explore the role of the CBMS and other models in our understanding and management of nutrient pollution in the region through three articles written for publication in peer-reviewed journals, each of which addresses the question in a different way. The first discusses the ways that the process of building and implementing a computational model is affected by its inclusion in a management institution. The second describes the ways that the computational models themselves are affected by the management contexts in which they are developed and deployed. The third examines the various roles that they play in building and maintaining the relationships that underlie the management process. Together, these articles shed light on the ways that computational models mediate human-environment interactions by way of environmental management, and will help to plan more inclusive and effective modeling and management approaches in the future.
JOINT CULTURE IN THE U.S. MILITARY: ACCOMPLISHING THE MISSION BY ADAPTING TO ORGANIZATOINAL DIVERSITY
(2017) Krizan, Martin; Paolisso, Michael; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation develops the concept of joint culture by analyzing the experiences of military service personnel who served in joint assignments through the perspectives of organizational and cognitive anthropology and the application of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and schema analysis grounded in interviewee narratives. This dissertation uses a logical framework to organize and conduct interviews and guide the analysis of interviewee narratives. Concepts and themes from interviews are systematically examined following the logical framework to posit a set of cognitive structures associated with joint culture. At least two joint cultural schemas are present in the accounts of joint service that interrelate to form a cultural model of jointness that prepares personnel to function in a joint cultural environment. First, a schema of joint culture, the tacit cognitive structures focused on the priority of mission accomplishment that motivates personnel to work through the inter-organizational differences encountered in the joint environment. Second, a schema for joint culture, the more procedural or process focused explicit cognitive structure that informs how service personnel figure out the steps before, during and after a joint assignment. These schemas dynamically interrelate and are intersubjectively shared in adaptive ways as service personnel navigate their joint assignments. This dissertation finds that while military service personnel may not understand formal joint concepts or benefit from formal joint credit for each of their joint assignments, they believe joint service is valuable as an opportunity to learn from the other services and because of the organizational diversity that brings complimentary capabilities together to accomplish the mission. This dissertation adds to the growing body of literature that deals with anthropology of the military and may represent the first cognitive anthropological research into an important cultural context for many military personnel and illustrates how anthropological methods can be applied to military cultural contexts.
Resilience to Climate Change: An Ethnographic Approach
(2016) Johnson, Katherine Joanne; Paolisso, Michael J; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Global projections for climate change impacts produce a startling picture of the future for low-lying coastal communities. The United States’ Chesapeake Bay region and especially marginalized and rural communities will be severely impacted by sea level rise and other changes over the next one hundred years. The concept of resilience has been theorized as a measure of social-ecological system health and as a unifying framework under which people can work together towards climate change adaptation. But it has also been critiqued for the way in which it does not adequately take into account local perspective and experiences, bringing into question the value of this concept as a tool for local communities. We must be sure that the concerns, weaknesses, and strengths of particular local communities are part of the climate change adaptation, decision-making, and planning process in which communities participate. An example of this type of planning process is the Deal Island Marsh and Community Project (DIMCP), a grant funded initiative to build resilience within marsh ecosystems and communities of the Deal Island Peninsula area of Maryland (USA) to environmental and social impacts from climate change. I argue it is important to have well-developed understandings of vulnerabilities and resiliencies identified by local residents and others to accomplish this type of work. This dissertation explores vulnerability and resilience to climate change using an engaged and ethnographic anthropological perspective. Utilizing participant observation, semi-structured and structured interviews, text analysis, and cultural domain analysis I produce an in-depth perspective of what vulnerability and resilience means to the DIMCP stakeholder network. Findings highlight significant vulnerabilities and resiliencies inherent in the local area and how these interface with additional vulnerabilities and resiliencies seen from a nonlocal perspective. I conclude that vulnerability and resilience are highly dynamic and context-specific for the local community. Vulnerabilities relate to climate change and other social and environmental changes. Resilience is a long-standing way of life, not a new concept related specifically to climate change. This ethnographic insight into vulnerability and resilience provides a basis for stronger engagement in collaboration and planning for the future.
Integrating Environmental Justice and Social-Ecological Resilience for Successful Adaptation to Climate Change: Lessons from African American Communities on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay
(2016) Hesed, Christine Danielle Miller; Paolisso, Michael; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This research concerns the conceptual and empirical relationship between environmental justice and social-ecological resilience as it relates to climate change vulnerability and adaptation. Two primary questions guided this work. First, what is the level of resilience and adaptive capacity for social-ecological systems that are characterized by environmental injustice in the face of climate change? And second, what is the role of an environmental justice approach in developing adaptation policies that will promote social-ecological resilience? These questions were investigated in three African American communities that are particularly vulnerable to flooding from sea-level rise on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I found that in all three communities, religious faith and the church, rootedness in the landscape, and race relations were highly salient to community experience. The degree to which these common aspects of the communities have imparted adaptive capacity has changed over time. Importantly, a given social-ecological factor does not have the same effect on vulnerability in all communities; however, in all communities political isolation decreases adaptive capacity and increases vulnerability. This political isolation is at least partly due to procedural injustice, which occurs for a number of interrelated reasons. This research further revealed that while all stakeholders (policymakers, environmentalists, and African American community members) generally agree that justice needs to be increased on the Eastern Shore, stakeholder groups disagree about what a justice approach to adaptation would look like. When brought together at a workshop, however, these stakeholders were able to identify numerous challenges and opportunities for increasing justice. Resilience was assessed by the presence of four resilience factors: living with uncertainty, nurturing diversity, combining different types of knowledge, and creating opportunities for self-organization. Overall, these communities seem to have low resilience; however, there is potential for resilience to increase. Finally, I argue that the use of resilience theory for environmental justice communities is limited by the great breadth and depth of knowledge required to evaluate the state of the social-ecological system, the complexities of simultaneously promoting resilience at both the regional and local scale, and the lack of attention to issues of justice.

Anthropology Theses and Dissertations

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