Anthropology
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Item Beyond Consultation: Rethinking the Indigenous Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent in Costa Rica(2024) Breitfeller, Jessica Ashley; Chernela, Janet M.; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is an international legal norm meant to ensure Indigenous Peoples’ right to be consulted about projects that affect their lands. Over the past decade, the small Central American country of Costa Rica has strived to develop and implement a series of new, ‘culturally appropriate’ consultation protocols to better uphold the right to FPIC. This dissertation investigates the concept of FPIC as it applies to the Indigenous Bribri in the context of Costa Rica's burgeoning national forestry and climate change strategy known as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program. Drawing on extended, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this dissertation addresses the issues of Indigenous agency and autonomy by considering the ways in which the country’s REDD+ consultations and emerging FPIC processes serve to both strengthen and weaken communities’ rights to participation and self-determination. Weaving together a conceptual framework from political ecology, critical development theory, and political and legal anthropology, this study reveals that the country’s current FPIC protocols perpetuate historical state-Indigenous relations while simultaneously creating new opportunities for negotiation, compromise, and resistance. I demonstrate that FPIC consultations are all at once sites of ontological conflict, a legal instrument for the ontological defense of territoriality, and participatory spaces of (re)negotiation and resistance wherein ontological differences are arbitrated in an effort to shape policy and transform age-old power relations. Ultimately, this research deepens our understanding of how Western mechanisms designed to protect human rights and natural resources intersect with Indigenous ways of knowing and being to inform broader debates on Indigenous self-determination and climate justice. In doing so, it asks us to consider how we—as scholars, advocates, and practitioners—may go about collaboratively reimagining and rethinking FPIC in the future.Item The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and Faunal Repatriation(2024) Touchin, Jewel Miriam; Palus, Matthew M; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted in 1990 for the repatriation and disposition of certain Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. Although it has been 34 years since the law was enacted, tribal nations have experienced hurdles associated with repatriating faunal remains from institutions. This thesis uses data from the Federal Register, published sources documenting oral histories, and the National NAGPRA website to address two research questions. In addition, a survey questionnaire provided additional information from bioarchaeologists and faunal analysts, and tribal cultural resources professionals regarding their general thoughts on NAGPRA. These sources of information were analyzed to address two questions:• How have dog remains been repatriated through NAGPRA? • Are there any trends in the data that show progression and integration of tribal voices or tribal input regarding faunal repatriation during the NAGPRA process? This is an important issue for tribal communities who have different ways of defining faunal remains based on their concepts of personhood and based on their oral traditions. This thesis focuses on dog remains and attempts to demonstrate how dog remains have been repatriated in the past and to identify any trends that show tribal input during the repatriation process.Item THE EMBODIED EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES OF BLACK MEN PARTICIPATING IN A HOSPITAL-BASED VIOLENCE INTERVENTION PROGRAM(2024) Wical, William Grant; Richardson, Joseph; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Gun violence is a public health and racial justice issue which requires significant societal change to effectively decrease its impact on the lives of Black men and their communities. While hospital-based violence intervention programs have been identified as a promising mode of prevention, they have largely overlooked the ways Black men who survive gunshot wounds feel, determine what constitutes effective violence prevention, and subjectively experience trauma. This dissertation explores how those who received psychosocial support from an intervention program interpret their emotional experiences related to trauma, healing, and loss to make claims about society, themselves, and justice. Their affective experiences contrast significantly with dominant discourses of violence, race, and emotionality. Attention to these emotional experiences can provide a foundation for a fundamentally different ethics of caring. This redefinition of what it means to provide care challenges the current usage of trauma as the primary analytic to evaluate Black men’s experiences related to violence and underscores the need to shift prevention efforts away from individualistic models toward those geared at creating structural change.Item Future-making in the City of Gastronomy: Food Heritage and the Narrative Commons(2023) Platts, Ellen Jane; Lafrenz Samuels, Kathryn; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In December 2015, Tucson, Arizona was designated a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy. It joined the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Creative Cities Network, a program that helps cities use cultural heritage for economic development. This dissertation undertakes an ethnography of Tucson as a City of Gastronomy, examining how this designation has inflamed tensions around the kinds of stories that are told about Tucson, to whom, and to what end. Drawing on extended fieldwork in Tucson, ethnographic methods of interviewing and participant-observation, and archival research, this dissertation explores the dissonance that emerges when stories of the past, present, and future are tapped for use by new actors to new ends. Welding together theoretical approaches based in commons scholarship and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital, this study presents the concept of the food heritage narrative commons, a socio-political space within which overarching narratives built upon food heritage objects, practices, and stories are contested, reconciled, subordinated, or come into co-existence. I argue that caring for the narrative commons is important for encouraging polyvocality, challenging received thought, imagining different ways of being, and maintaining space for productive dialogue. This dissertation examines an enclosure of the narrative commons in the wake of and facilitated by the UNESCO designation. I argue that the UNESCO designation introduced a specific form of symbolic capital as elaborated by Bourdieu that I call gastronomic capital, the value of being associated with the designation. This gastronomic capital empowered ‘Tucson’s Food Story,’ one particular narrative associated with the designation, to drown out others, enclosing the narrative commons, and facilitating economic gain for those able to wield gastronomic capital. Pushback against this process from communities (re)producing alternative narratives, however, points towards models for better governance of the narrative commons, structured by what I call an ethic of careful difference. In examining the interactions between ideas of heritage, narratives, and commons, this dissertation demonstrates the role that fostering a diversity of narratives, each building upon the past, plays in engaging multiple, diverse experiences and ways of being in the world in productive tension towards building different, transformative futures.Item CHRONIC SUFFERING: CHRONIC ILLNESS, DISABILITY, AND VIOLENCE AMONG MEXICAN MIGRANT WOMEN(2022) Guevara, Emilia Mercedes; Getrich, Christina M; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation seeks to better understand how Mexican migrant women who work in the Maryland crab industry make sense of chronic illnesses such as diabetes, asthma, and musculoskeletal pain while at the same time living spatially and temporally complicated lives as circular temporary migrant laborers. I explore how immigration and labor policies and practices, constrained and conditional access to resources and care, and exposure to multiple forms of violence structure their chronic illness experiences and entanglements of biological and social processes that intersect. Together, these embodied biological and social processes coalesce into what I describe as problemas crónica-gendered “chronic problems” – and other disruptions that migrant women endure across time and transnational space. I describe how problemas crónicas manifest themselves throughout the lives and migratory careers of Mexican migrant women and how they grapple with obstacles as they seek care, renegotiate their identities, and re/build their lives.Item PERSISTENCE OF FORM: A MATERIAL ETHNOGRAPHY THROUGH THE ARCHITECTURE OF ANAHEIM’S 20TH CENTURY LANDSCAPE(2022) Reed, Dean Joseph; Palus, Matthew M.; Samuels, Kathryn L.; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the mid-20th century, Anaheim was one of many small unincorporated communities within southern California that would undergo a transition from a rural agricultural community into an industrial and commercial suburban sprawl. Previous works in cultural heritage resource management and local historical research within the City have been primarily centered around their local historic districts or larger commercial areas. However, the areas within proximity to these culturally defining areas have been largely undocumented. Those that have been documented have been studied under the regulatory lens of the National Historic Preservation Act or the California Environmental Quality Act. As a result, they are interpreted as just a product general growth of the City in the post-World War II era and determined ineligible for treatment or protection as historic resources. However, properties of this type are often examined as material culture that is independent of its surroundings. They have not been thoroughly examined for their data potential outside of the regulatory lens, nor has their connection to each other and the greater Anaheim landscape been considered fully. The analysis of architecture is useful in helping us understand production and use of space within the built environment. A further analysis, with the application of theory based in social production, space and place, and landscape may elaborate further on the broader social structures, allow a fuller understanding of the past, and help unpack the notion of material culture as a product. An approximately one-mile segment of East Lincoln Avenue, located near the center of Anaheim, exhibits a variety of the City’s vernacular architecture. In what ways did the City’s development allow these buildings to persist, and what processes were at play in their reconfiguration? Material culture, as a social product, requires a broader theoretical lens, a need to understand cultural resources as a part of a landscape, and a more in depth look into the individual. As the mid-20th century landscape emerges in the historical record, the importance of understanding the social factors that were at play are relevant to their preservation, especially as each phase of construction becomes overshadowed by the next, even to this day.Item Ałhił nda’ jilnishgo, Naa’nish ła eti’ Working Together, Gets Work Done THE NAVAJO APPROACH TO CULTURAL RESOURCES AND HERITAGE MANAGEMENT ON THE NAVAJO-GALLUP WATER SUPPLY PIPELINE(2021) Billie, Tamara; Lafrenz Samuels, Katheryn; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the mid-1800s, non-Navajo and Non-Indigenous archaeologists and researchers dictated the Navajo people's history a Western scientific lens. The Indigenous Archaeology movement of the 1970s and 1980s gave Indigenous people a voice not present before in modern archaeology. The campaign incorporated values important to Native people like oral traditions, landscapes, and sacred places. The revitalization effort has impelled the Navajo Nation's Heritage and Historic Preservation Department to reclaim its heritage. The Navajo THPO is unique in that it decides what is significant to Navajo history, archaeology, and culture. This Navajo approach to heritage is apparent in the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Pipeline project. As the waterline weaves a path through a culturally rich landscape, the Navajo THPO uses its tribal laws and Federal legislation to manage and protect its cultural resources.Item Metonymies of Color: The Material Discourses of Race in the Irish and Mexican American Experience(2021) Rivera, Patrick Sean; Brighton, Stephen; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Objects and artifacts are potent signs of cultural values, and in popular media they are often used as external signs of racial identity. This dissertation investigates how certain objects and settings come to be identified as characteristic of particular racial groups, and how stereotypes about material culture are then exploited to justify discriminatory political policy. I conduct an analysis of the visual representation of Mexicans and the Irish in U.S. media, beginning in 1840 and continuing to the present era. I identify when and why certain artifacts, like potatoes or sombreros, began to be used as stereotypical signs of each group. In each case, I examine how these metonymies were employed as weapons in contemporary political struggles over land, jobs, and representation. Drawing on the records of Mexican and Irish representation, I develop a theoretical model I term "the material discourses of race” to identify the three ways that objects are turned into signs of racial identity, and to explain why certain objects are repeatedly employed to construct an idealized image of whiteness in U.S. visual culture.Item WALKING THE MIGRANT TRAIL: MOBILIZING CULTURAL HERITAGE AND COMMEMORATING CLANDESTINE MIGRATION IN THE ARIZONA-SONORA BORDERLANDS(2021) Mankel, Magda E.; Shackel, Paul A; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since 2004, a group of allies sympathetic to the plight of unauthorized migrants crossing the US-Mexico border have organized the Migrant Trail—a seven-day, memorial walk that takes place between Sasabe, Sonora and Tucson, Arizona and commemorates migrants who have died in the Sonoran Desert. Taking an ethnoheritage perspective this study explores the ways in which the Migrant Trail and its participants have mobilized cultural heritage resources to advocate for the rights of migrants, forge a community of allies, and encourage collective introspection through acts of remembrance that condemn state violence, humanize migrants, and present migrants as individuals who are deserving of human rights. In tracing this process, this study demonstrates the role that mobilized heritage may play in creating spaces and communities that are capable of remembering injustices, advocating for social change, and opening up the possibility for the afflicted to pursue justice in the present and future.Item Shellfisheries and Cultural Ecosystem Services: Understanding the Benefits Enabled through Work in Farmed and Wild Shellfisheries(2020) Michaelis, Adriane Kristen; Shaffer, L. Jen; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As commercial shellfish aquaculture continues to expand in the United States (US), industry supporters promote the ability of bivalve shellfish to provide ecosystem services, suggesting aquaculture’s potential to ecologically and economically supplement wild shellfisheries (Beck et al., 2011; van der Schatte Olivier et al., 2018). Within this discussion of bivalve-related benefits, sociocultural benefits are largely absent (Alleway et al., 2018). This oversight hinders industry growth as it: 1) ignores evidence suggesting sociocultural benefits are more salient to individuals than other types of ecological benefits (Daniel et al., 2012) and 2) does not acknowledge the high level of job satisfaction associated with fisheries-based livelihoods precisely because of their many linked sociocultural benefits (Pollnac & Poggie, 2006; Smith & Clay, 2010). It is reasonable to assume that shellfish aquaculture might provide similar benefits, but this has not been considered in aquaculture’s promotion and development. To address this lapse, this dissertation detailed sociocultural benefits related to aquaculture and wild shellfisheries using an ethnographic approach framed by ecosystem services. Three complementary studies blending semi-structured interviews, photovoice interviews, participant observation, and Q methodology were conducted, targeting US shellfisheries at three scales: 1) within the state of Maryland, 2) within seven total states in the Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, and New England regions and 3) throughout the US. Results illustrated that cultural ecosystem services are important to individuals working with shellfish and were used to create the first comprehensive list detailing the benefits enabled through work with shellfish. Project participants perceived the value of these benefits differently, and views were most strongly linked to participant role in the industry rather than other attributes. Results showed that, for the most part, shellfish aquaculture was able to provide similar benefits to a wild shellfishery. Findings from this study are relevant to both shellfisheries promotion and management as results highlight not only the range of benefits enabled through shellfisheries, but also the diversity of views and values held by industry members. Additionally, this project provided an excellent case study with which to investigate the complexity of linked and changing ecosystem services.