Anthropology Department Dissertations Collection

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/319

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“Prime Harvest”: The Bioarchaeology of Body Acquisition for Iceland's Early Medical Training
(2025-02) Netzer Zimmer, Adam
Dissection of the human body has long been a key part of Western medical education. To acquire bodies, anatomists often resorted to exploitative methods, including grave robbing and trading bodies through colonial networks targeting marginalized populations. Bioarchaeological research, particularly by scholars of color, has shown how such practices were central to colonial European nations’ constructions of race, identity, and difference. However, less attention has been paid to cadaver acquisition and medical teaching in marginal European nations. This dissertation examines the history of Icelandic cadaver collection through the Læknagarður Anatomical Skeletal Collection at the University of Iceland. Using queer archaeology and Black feminist theory, I explore how Iceland navigated its dual position as both a colonial dependency and part of European racial hierarchies. By analyzing the collection alongside historical and ethnographic records, I investigate the intersections of colonialism, medical education, and race in Icelandic history. The collection includes human remains retained after surgeries, excavated from local archaeological sites, purchased through international trade networks, and donated by physicians. These findings reveal how Icelandic medical education relied on global networks while reflecting local constraints. I argue that the creation of the Læknagarður Collection was not merely a medical teaching tool but also a nationalist project, reflecting global trends in using anatomical knowledge to construct identity. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s critique of human hierarchies and queer archaeology’s focus on marginalized narratives, I show how the collection embodies broader colonial histories and power dynamics in the circulation of human remains. Ultimately, this research seeks to make legible the forgotten histories of the individuals whose remains are now housed in Læknagarður and reveals how both local and global dynamics shaped Iceland’s early anatomical practices.
Gold Hands and Green Thumbs: Conspicuous Production, Food Activism & Gendered Labor in Postsocialist Czechia
(2025-02) Speck, Cary
This dissertation explores how feminized, socially reproductive labor is channeled into and molded by non-governmental food activism in Czechia. This patchwork ethnography of three Czech food projects—Prazelenina, Kokoza, and Jako Doma—traces the gender politics of non-governmental organizations in postsocialist Central Europe as well as the ways in which ostalgia, social entrepreneurship, and nativist populism have structured women’s participation in the labor market and the public sphere. In doing so, it illustrates how the subjects within these food-focused NGOs understand themselves vis-à-vis each other, the state, and the socialist past and how these institutions utilize the labor of different categories of women to diverging, sometimes contradictory ends. I argue that these organizations rely on the flexible labor of under-employed mothers, migrants, and/or formerly unhoused women to sustain themselves in an increasingly neoliberal political landscape. Concurrently, the resurgence of Czech nationalism, anti-migrant populism, and the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed these social enterprises to channel the labor of variably-marginalized women into under-compensated carework evoking traditionally feminized forms of domestic labor—including cooking, gardening, and early childhood education. In all cases, I argue these NGOs strategically deploy women’s labor in different modes of what I term ‘conspicuous production’. That is: these organizations manage and valorize women’s nonprofit participation in thrifty, traditional, and/or domestic foodways circumventing strictly capitalist modes of consumption in an attempt to garner cultural and political capital. In doing so, these NGO's leverage the perceived social and cultural value of women's self-regulating, not-for-profit carework to legitimize their enterprises to various stakeholders and to contest industrial food systems deemed unsustainable, exploitative, or politically suspect. However, while some organizations frame this socially beneficial labor as an entrepreneurial means of integrating marginalized groups into Czech society and providing them a foothold in the market economy, others frame this employment as a way to raise awareness about the intrinsic inequality of capitalism itself. This divergence points to the ambiguous legacies of postsocialist transformation in Czechia and ongoing contestations regarding the normative reproduction of the nation and the broader purpose of civil society in a moment of acute austerity, precarity, and reinvigorated nativism.
Removal on the Mainstream Musical Frontier: Indigenous Production and the Politics of Silence in Popular Music Industries
(2024-05) Hill, Jonathan G
Using theoretical perspectives that see identity as arising out of a mixture of musical contexts, this dissertation asks how Indigenous musicians have contributed to the origins and expression of American mainstream music across different sites of production with an emphasis on Indigenous musicians from Northeast Oklahoma. Musical contributions in the mainstream are traced in this dissertation by examining cultures of expression, viewing performances and production of music as material acts, and unpacking how apprehensions of sounds emerging from these cultures are reframed and often (mis)interpreted in the mainstream. These Indigenous contributions are mapped through social networks that showcase the creative histories of Indigenous musicians and their intersections with mainstream ideologies, expectations, and norms in music industries.
Primate Bone Histomorphology and its Relationship to Biomechanical Forces
(1994) Paine, Robert R.
Observations of nonhuman primate long bone microanatomy were undertaken with the explicit goal of recording intra- and interspecific variation in the percentage of osteonal bone. One-hundred and eight specimens with age, sex, body size, and positional behavior data representing 7 species (Galago seneqalensis, Otolemur crassicaudatus, Macaca fascicularis, Macaca mulatta, Macaca arctoides, Erythrocebus patas, and Cercopithecus aethiops) were examined. Humeral and femoral shafts were examined histologically at the proximal, midshaft, and distal cross sections. Furthermore, the humeral and femoral midshaft sections were histologically examined at the anterior, posterior, medial, and lateral quadrants. Each cross section and quadrant were read specifically for percentages of osteonal bone. Data on cortical bone area and cortical thickness were also recorded for each section. Descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, and Model II regression (maximum likelihood estimation) were used to test for intra- and interspecific variation in osteonal bone for this population of primates. In general, several points concerning primate skeletal microanatomy have been revealed: 1) humeral and femoral microanatomy do not mirror each other in osteonal pattern, suggesting that different factors affect the bone microstructure of these limb bones, 2) primate species with different positional behavior express different distributions of osteonal bone and these differences reflect body size and mechanical usage, 3) after sexual maturation age does not affect intraspecific variations in the percentage of osteonal bone, 4) osteon area scales positively allometrically on body size (cortical area) suggesting that the rate of osteon area increases faster than the rate of increase in body size among primate species. Other conclusions have been drawn from this study, the most important point of which is that mechanical loading plays a large role in stimulating secondary osteon formation and that osteonal bone distribution reflects positional behavior and body size. This has profound implications for how future primate histological research can be conducted. The results of this study also have implications for the application of histological analysis to extinct primate specimens. Overall, this information will give primatologists additional important tools to be used in examining skeletal form as it relates to function in both living and extant primate species.
Contested Subjects: Biopolitics & the Moral Stakes of Social Cohesion in Post-Welfare Italy
(2013-09) Marchesi, Milena
The requirements of European Unification, along with broader processes of globalization, including immigration, are reshaping economic and welfare priorities and reconfiguring the relationship between citizens and the state in Italy. The reorganization of the Italian welfare state around the principle of subsidiarity combines neoliberal restructuring with a commitment to social solidarity and cohesion and privileges the family as the social formation best suited to mediate between state, market, and citizens. As the state retreats from some of its former social welfare responsibilities, it simultaneously extends its reach into matters of reproduction and family-making. Biopolitics in the time of subsidiarity encompasses concerns over birth rates, the population, the rights of the unborn, and the proper composition of the family. This dissertation examines the terms of social cohesion in post-welfare Italy and the central role that matters of reproduction and the family play in its reformulation as a moral and cultural problem. I focus on three discursive sites: the politics of life; the assertion of the heteronormative family as an urgent and legitimate site of political intervention; and the parameters for the "appropriate" integration of migrants into Italian society. I draw on ethnographic inquiry with associations and individuals engaged in reproductive and migrant health and politics in Milan. Tracing the policies, practices, and discourses that seek to govern in the name of social cohesion sheds light on new citizenship projects and logics of inclusion/exclusion in the post-welfare moment and underscores the continued salience of gender, sexuality, and reproduction to processes of state building.
Politics by Other Means: Rhizomes of Power in Argentina's Social Movements
(2011-05) Monteagudo, Graciela G
The focus of my research has been the reverberations of the 2001 Argentine economic crisis, as they affected and were responded to by women in social movements. This dissertation contributes to studies of globalization by highlighting the unintended consequences of neoliberalism in Argentina in the form of the collective empowerment of women in egalitarian social movements. The negative consequences of neoliberalism are well known, but I found that these policies produced more than misery. They also helped to stimulate a new kind of politics —a set of autonomous movements aimed at democratizing society as well as the state. In response to rapidly deteriorating living conditions, contemporary Argentine social movements organized their constituencies in what I have defined as the field of politics by other means. In the context of failed governmental programs and discourse designed to create docile, mobile subjects (governmentality), egalitarian social movements engaged in the creation of social movements whose democratic structures contrasted with the dispossessing nature of the neoliberal global power they confronted. In Argentina, this new political culture and methodology fostered, through street theater and pageants, 'other means' of making politics, including a concern for internal gender democracy in what has been called the “solidarity economy.” My research suggests that struggles against gender inequities have a synergistic relationship to democratic political structures. I found that receptivity to feminist discourses and opportunities for women’s participation were greater in antihierarchical opposition movements than in those with a more traditional leftist orientation. In these autonomous movements, women were able to challenge gender inequities, democratizing both the movements and their family relationships. Their struggle for democracy and freedom contrasts with the role of neoliberal policies and practices responsible for the weakening of democratic institutions in Argentina. In this way, my research not only broadens understanding of Argentina’s crisis and recovery, but it raises questions about the implications of the present worldwide economic and social crisis on struggles to transform gender relations.
New England Terrestrial Settlement in a Submerged Context: Moving Pre-Contact Archaeology into the Twenty First Century
(2010-05) Lynch, Kerry J.
Human occupation of the New England region of North America during the early Holocene has long been established archaeologically. However, the data exists almost solely from terrestrial sites. Vast portions of aerial land once available to early occupants of the area for resource procurement and living surfaces are now submerged. Underwater pre-Contact resources embedded in these submerged landforms will undeniably contribute to a holistic understanding of New England's cultural history. Examination of current archaeological procedures reveal that the archaeological standards, practices, and theories commonly employed in terrestrial archaeology are largely not being extended past the coastline into the underwater environment. This is due, in part, to the past history of professional skepticism regarding the preservation and accessibility of terrestrial archaeological deposits post-Holocene sea level rise. A report of global, submerged, terrestrial archaeology projects that show submerged, intact resources challenge this skepticism. A detailed review of an underwater survey in Boston Harbor, designed to predict, locate, and investigate submerged pre-Contact sites, is used as a case study to argue that these resources deserve the same rigorous study as terrestrial archaeological resources. Post-glacial deposition may act as an agent of preservation in New England waters, and past concerns of transgressive erosion are discussed in light of current geophysical research. Recommendations of how and why submerged pre-Contact archaeological resources should become commonplace within archaeological inquiry are supported by advances in technology, increased geophysical survey of the marine environment and knowledge of the prevailing laws governing archaeological resources underwater.
Cold Spring, Hot Foundry: An Archaeological Exploration of the West Point Foundry’s Paternal Influence Upon the Village of Cold Spring and its Residents
(2009-09) Norris, Elizabeth M.
This dissertation explores the nineteenth century paternal relationship between industrialists and their predominantly skilled workers in a small northern community. As an archaeological analysis, artifacts such as houses and ceramics demonstrate the economic and consumption patterns observable throughout the United States during its industrialization. Discussion centers around the West Point Foundry, which operated in the Village of Cold Spring from 1818 to 1911 and originally owned half of the village’s property and employed half of its workers. Privately owned, it manufactured a variety of iron products including heavy ordnance for both the country’s Navy and Army. Methodological analysis paired documentary research, landscape and spatial analysis, and a reanalysis of several related archaeological collections from different social and economic classes of workers and owners. The Foundry and village is placed within a broader context of religious tolerance, paternalistic control, community planning and architecture, market accessibility, and worker turnover. It shows that the industrial paternalism of West Point Foundry owners was evident in Cold Spring’s development and generally decreased over the course of the nineteenth century. Among other signs, paternalism was visible in company housing built in half the area and the provision of land for a majority of local churches. Unlike other industrial communities where ceramic patterns can be explained by paternalism, consumption patterns better explain the ceramics archaeologically recovered from several Foundry related households. West Point Foundry worker ceramic assemblages display an abundance of tea wares and predominantly more bowls than plates, suggesting a diet that favored less expensive cuts of meat and investment in limited types of ceramics. An electronically attached Excel file details the original state of assemblages examined (WPFceramicsOriginal.xls) and a second one details the final analysis of assemblages including vessel lists (WPFceramicsEN.xls). Economic indexes and capital consumption patterns in this industrial community as well as others explored were lower than their urban counterparts. Based on existing research by archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, architects, and urban designers, this research suggests different cultural practices within a single manufacturer industrial community from those in rural or urban contexts.
On the Landscape for a Very, Very Long Time: African American Resistance and Resilience in 19th and Early 20th Century Massachusetts
(2017-02) Martin, Anthony
Massachusetts is an ideal place to study Africans in New England during the 19th and early 20th century because the state abolished slavery in 1783, while surrounding states and the federal government did not. Although Massachusetts Blacks had certain rights and freedoms and the state became a haven for escaped captive Africans from surrounding states, it remained segregated White space and had racialized social, political, and economic structures to regulate and control the Black population. Yet, within adversity, the African Americans established their own communities and agitated for full citizenship, equality, and the end to African captivity. Their daily life has been elucidated with the documentary record and archaeology. The study takes as its entry point the materiality of African American lives as manifested in archaeological assemblages and their material spatial relations. This dissertation uses census data and other documents to explore facets of racialized space in the following Massachusetts cities and towns: Andover, Plymouth, Great Barrington, Pittsfield, Boston, and Nantucket. With these documents, forms of racialization also illuminate spatial separation and the intersection of education, occupation, race and gender. Through comparisons of thirteen archaeological assemblages spanning the eastern and western parts of the state, along with one of the islands, it is apparent that the material culture reflects the existence of moral uplift, racialization, consumerism, and the transition from African to African American. This study underscores the long period of time that Black people have lived in the state. Additionally, it explores historically documented Black communities, thereby expanding the imprint of the population on the landscape. While Massachusetts has numerous sites, those in the 19th century and 20th century are mostly homesites and are concentrated in certain areas. Only one major city, Boston, has excavated multiple African American sites. There is a significant need for future archaeological research, for instance, in the Massachusetts towns and cities that host African American heritage trails, to learn more about people who have traversed this landscape for a very, very long time.
A Conflict of Interest? Negotiating Agendas, Ethics, and Consequences Regarding the Heritage Value of Human Remains
(2016-05) Bauer-Clapp, Heidi J
Since the mid-twentieth century growing public fascination with a heritage of violence has spurred an increase in sites of conscience and dark tourism. While scholars have demonstrated how this heritage can draw attention to events that may have been marginalized or ignored, little attention has been paid to complex ethical dilemmas involved in the commodification of violence through tourism. Even less attention has been paid to ethical treatment of the remains of victims whose suffering is central to dark tourism. This dissertation demonstrates how heritage policies and codes of ethics can be strengthened to promote ethical treatment of the dead in heritage contexts, a critical need since the dead can no longer speak for themselves. The central case study involves heritage development on St. Helena island after archaeologists excavated the unmarked graves of individuals who died due to the traumatic conditions of the transatlantic slave trade. This ethnographic case study, set during a period of intense economic and tourism development in St. Helena, illustrates how community members and others decide the fate of the excavated remains and what meaning or value this history has in the present. Using content analysis of codes of ethics and heritage policies, this dissertation analyzes the efficacy of these resources in addressing on-the-ground issues related to ethical treatment of human remains in heritage contexts. These resources, while providing valuable guidance and insight, reflect problematic power dynamics or cultural assumptions, including privileging Western perspectives. Furthermore, they often fail to consider heritage as a dynamic, fluid, global process. The anthropological perspective presented here offers new thinking on the impacts of present needs and demands on heritage development, drawing out what had previously been relatively invisible forces of power and capital. I call on stakeholders to interrogate their own efforts in the heritage development process: Who is invited into decision-making processes, who is excluded, and why? In addition, decision-makers may need to look past their own cultural contexts to consider what constitutes ethical treatment of human remains; their knowledge, beliefs, and opinions should not be unquestioned substitutes for the once-living individuals who are the object of heritage projects.
Ts'msyen Revolution: The Poetics and Politics of Reclaiming
(2015-09) Gray, Robin R. R.
As a result of the settler colonial project in North America, Ts’msyen have been thrust into a state of reclamation. The purpose of this study was to examine the distinctiveness of what it means for Ts’msyen to reclaim given our particular history and experiences with settler colonialism. Utilizing the poetics and politics as a theoretical, methodological and practical framework, this dissertation synthesizes the motivations, possibilities and obstacles associated with Ts’msyen reclamation in the contemporary era. Further, as a contribution to the literature on decolonization, Indigenous nationhood, Indigenous subjectivity, Indigenous methodologies and repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, I report on two multi-sited, auto-ethnographic, and community-based research initiatives: (1) a repatriation case study focusing on the legal and ethical dimensions associated with reclaiming Ts’msyen songs from archives, and (2) a case study focusing on embodied sovereignty and heritage reclamation with an urban Ts’msyen dance group. To contextualize the information generated from my engagements with over 200 Ts’msyen, I also offer my own experiences as a Ts’msyen hana’ax (woman), and as a dancer and a singer. Primary data are derived from a series of listening gatherings, translation workshops and talking circles from the repatriation case study; and a Photovoice project, talking circle and dance ethnography from the dance group study. Secondary data are derived from Ts’msyen lived social realties in the third space; academic literature; current affairs and archival research. Key findings show (a) the ways in which Ts’msyen laws and systems of property ownership are enacted when Ts’msyen sing and dance, (b) how an Indigenous research paradigm develops organically based on an ethos of relational accountability, (c) how Indigenous standpoints alter ethnographic form and disrupt objectified knowledge production, (d) and where to put the theories of decolonization into praxis in settler colonial contexts. Ultimately, this dissertation is representative of a Ts’msyen manifesto. It is a call for a renunciation of contemporary ethics, policies, laws, discourses and practices that continue the work of structured dispossession and Indigenous elimination, while it is also an active assertion of Ts’msyen nationhood, sovereignty, precedent, laws and ways of knowing, being and doing.
From Green Economies to Community Economies: Economic Possibility in Massachusetts
(2015-05) Shear, Boone W
This dissertation both reflects and constitutes an attempt at theorizing, locating, analyzing, and helping to create non-capitalist possibility among community groups and social movements in Massachusetts from 2010-2013. I began my research working with green economy coalitions that brought together community groups, social justice organizations, and environmental non-profits in order to respond to economic and ecological crisis. As these groups moved forward and transformed, I participated in campaigns, internal discussions, and public representations. I wrote field notes when appropriate and conducted and recorded over 50 interviews. As I did the work, I came to understand economy as a heterogeneous field of economic ideology, practices, relations, dispositions, and desires. In this theoretical context, I ethnographically investigate the ways in which individuals and groups negotiate and contest dominant economic discourses, and create their own meanings of economy. I ask, how are community groups and activists imagining and desiring economy? How are non-capitalist projects being assembled? Under what conditions can people begin to imagine, desire, and create other worlds? To answer these questions, I mobilize economic anthropology, postructural theory, and Lacanian scholarship, extending and critically engaging with the diverse economies project of J.K. Gibson-Graham. In Chapter 2 I discuss two green economy coalitions whose campaigns brought anti-capitalist and non-capitalist politics into dialogue. I found that a reframing of economy towards economic difference leads to economic possibility for some, but is politically problematic and hinders economic possibility for others. In Chapter 3 I explore the nature of worker cooperatives, finding that social actors involved in non-capitalist development can understand and imagine it in radically different ways; non-capitalism is produced through these differences. In Chapters 4-7 I discuss a community organization that was building its own community economy. I show the effectiveness of performative, ontological politics in proliferating economic possibility. I also show the limitations of such a project when it neglects critical analysis of the forces constraining possibility. I point towards a reconciliation between performativity and critique. In the conclusion I theorize economic possibility in relation to and as part of a cultural-political struggle, a ‘war of position’, around the nature of economy.
An Ethnography of African Diasporic Affiliation and Disaffiliation in Carriacou: How Anglo-Caribbean Preadolescent Girls Express Attachments to Africa
(2015-05) Joseph, Valerie
This dissertation explores how the contending forces of powerful African memory and enduring ideologies of British colonialism meet in the young Afro-Caribbean girls of Carriacou, Grenada through their contemplations and performances of game songs and danceplay, resulting in multi-layered and seemingly contradictory affiliations and disaffiliations with their African heritage. For the most part, Carriacouans’ expressions of African affiliations and disaffiliations are below the level of consciousness. In the case of African disaffiliation, a striking finding is that many in the population – adults and children –respond with a deep fear when confronted with direct questions about Africa. Some children also respond with psychosocial dissonance – a profound conflicted state in which they are unable to make any commitments at all. In the case of African affiliation, boys and girls respond differently to the display of non-verbal African culture practices and depending on their understanding of their ancestry, African affiliation seems strongest among girls and what mitigates for that may be girls’ apparently greater familiarity with and connection to Africanist play and Big Drum Nations Dance.
On Belonging, Difference and Whiteness: Italy's Problem with Immigration
(2015) Stanley, Flavia
In the past thirty years, Italy has transitioned from a nation defined in part by a history of emigration, to a nation where immigration and attendant issues surrounding increased cultural and ethno-racial diversity dominates as a national concern. The research presented in this dissertation illustrates the ways in which, within this context, immigration is promoted and perceived unequivocally as a “problem” and a “threat.” However, rather than discussing Italy’s immigration problem, the issue here is recast as Italy’s problem with immigration. Despite deep regional differences and identities that continue to exist, increased immigration and the permanent settlement of non-Italians in Italy have reified Italian national identity. In this dissertation, based on 15 months of ethnographic research undertaken between 2001-2005, the perspective of Italians who interacted with immigrants on a regular basis is discussed and analyzed. The perspective of Italians, and their views on how their lives are affected by immigration, enables an understanding of the positioning of immigration as a threat and helps uncover which immigrant groups are most threatening and why. It also brings context to how Italians, through their ideas about the incorporation of culturally and physically racialized groups, perceive “otherness” in order to then define and more clearly recognize themselves. Ultimately I argue that not only has a particular version of Italianness emerged out of Italy’s problem with immigration, but that the category of “Italian” contains something relatively new: a racial privilege, indeed, a whiteness, that is connected to being Italian, and connected to being European.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF PROTOCOLS: PATHWAYS TO RELATIONAL KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN A SETTLER COLONIAL CONTEXT
(2024-02) Woods, Julie
This research investigates how and why protocols are developed in response to a variety of issues impacting culturally diverse groups in situations where laws and policies fall short. Although protocols have not been widely adopted in the United States, they are increasingly useful for negotiating cultural rights in Australia and across the globe in multiple contexts including biodiversity conservation, the arts, archives and collections, and heritage management. This study examines six protocols created by and with Indigenous peoples in Australia to address an array of issues involving access to, control of, and care for community and personal knowledges, culturally important plants and animals, and sacred landscapes. The protocols examined were created in different regions of Australia, each of which is continuing to experience significant impacts from settler colonial land dispossession and removal, development, and intense collecting practices. Using Indigenous Research Methods, community-based research methods, ethnography and other qualitative anthropological methods, this study illustrates how protocols facilitate two-ways knowledge sharing and increased cultural understanding resulting in behavior change and more equitable relationships. This study demonstrates how protocols can be deployed in different settler-colonial contexts to change the behavior of non-Indigenous people and organizations. As the research shows, protocols are a powerful tool for changing behavior through education. Multiple digital technologies are examined as potential options for mobilizing knowledge to train students on protocols and ethical research methods.
Behavior and Ecology of the Kinda baboon
(2024-02) Weyher, Anna H
The Kinda baboon (Papio kindae) has recently emerged as a distinct member of the baboon clade and the sixth widely recognized baboon species. Early observations of Kinda baboons suggested a distinct social system characterized by adult relationships that diverge from those in other savannah-living baboon species. In this dissertation, I present results from the Kasanka Baboon Project, which I founded to study the behavior and natural history of Kinda baboons living in Kasanka National Park, Zambia. I draw on nearly a decade of longitudinal data to explore three components of Kinda baboon biology. First, I explore how Kinda baboon activity patterns change in association with temperature, rainfall, and other bioclimatic variables. I find that Kinda baboons shift their activity patterns in response to temperature changes by increasing their feeding and traveling times. Seasonal- and climate-associated differences in activity, however, largely resemble corresponding differences reported for other baboon species. Second, I explore how two components of the baboon social environment, maternal dominance rank and the strength of female social bonds, are associated with infant survival, interbirth intervals, and infant development. I find that dominance rank and the strength of maternal social bonds do not predict infant survival or interbirth intervals. However, both maternal dominance rank and the strength of social bonds (particularly those with her top male partner) are associated with accelerated infant behavioral maturation. Finally, I use data collected on adult female and male Kinda baboons to characterize the nature of female-male relationships. I find that the frequency of female-male grooming is elevated in Kinda baboon social systems relative to those of all other baboon species. Moreover, female-male relationships are characterized by greater investment by males, who differentially approach females and perform a greater share of grooming. The degree of investment by males largely persists across female reproductive conditions. Female-male friendships last over multiple years and are skewed between sexes, with males having multiple female friends but females having only one male friend. Together, my findings contribute to our understanding of the basic biology of the Kinda baboon and set the stage for hypothesis-driven research in the newest-recognized baboon species.
Sociocultural and familial factors associated with symptom experience at midlife among women in Nagaland, India
(2023-09) Rulu, Peteneinuo
This cross-sectional study examines the sociocultural and familial factors that are associated with symptom experience at midlife among women in Nagaland. More specifically, the study examines the factors associated with symptoms at midlife, the relationship between symptoms at midlife, household stressors, ethnopolitical problems, and various measures of stress, and the buffering effects of social support against the negative effects of stress on symptoms at midlife. Data from 151 women aged 40-55 were collected from 4 regions in Nagaland, India. The most common symptoms reported during the past two weeks were headaches (72%), tiredness or lack of energy (67.5%), and hot flashes (58.3%). The study revealed a significant positive correlation between a composite measure of emotional instability (β=0.46, p
PUBLIC HEALTH, INDUSTRIALIZATION AND TUBERCULOSIS OUTCOMES AMONGST WOMEN IN 19th-20th CENTURY CLEVELAND
(2023-09) Mathena, Sarah
Tuberculosis has played a major role in the social history of human disease and the development of the human epidemiological models. The demographic and epidemiological shifts of TB mortality/morbidity rates are attributed to the rise of state-controlled improvements in hygiene legislation, early public health campaigns, nutrition, and improved air and water quality. Although these campaigns addressed diverse needs of the working class, few public health campaigns saw as considerable attention in public policy, institutionalization, and improved sanitation as TB. Research on the role of public health and TB have addressed these dynamics from a historical or biomedical perspective; consequently, direct evidence of the biological impacts of the management of women’s bodies through public health policy and TB remains understudied. This project addresses the relationships between the manifestations of TB and social identity, particularly race and gender, and its complex, synergistic relationship to social institutions, overall health, and mortality in the United States within the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This project seeks to examine these relationships with three lenses, the body, social identity, and public health institutions, in women in Cleveland, Ohio through a mixed methods approach utilizing archival records, vital statistics data, and osteological remains from the Hamman-Todd Osteological collection (HTC). Results from this study suggest early life health experiences may not play a role in increasing TB mortality; however, the women in the HTC were under high frequencies of physiological stress across their life course. Social identity in Cleveland increased risk of TB mortality, particularly for young adults (15-31) and those of lower socioeconomic status (SES). Finally, the archival and osteological data from this study suggest that public health improvements enacted in this era may have had only limited improvements in the general population due to decreased access for Black women.
The Abolition of Care: An Engaged Ethnography of the Progressive Jail Assemblage
(2023-02) Helepololei, Justin
This dissertation draws on ethnographic research conducted with prison abolitionists and criminal justice reform activists in Western Massachusetts - a context in which the sheriffs who operate county jails see themselves as reformers. I use the concept of a “progressive jail assemblage” to analyze the varied actors and logics that sustain incarceration locally, focusing especially on the use of care discourses and practices. I consider how progressive jailing puts prison abolitionists in the position of being against some forms of care. At the same time, abolitionists have put forth competing notions of care, ones they see as building a world in which prisons and jails would not exist. Informed by interviews with formerly incarcerated organizers who navigate this assemblage, I argue that both tendencies have the potential to reinforce the hierarchies that sustain incarceration, but they also have the potential to create openings for undoing the world as it exists.
The survivors of the train: disability, testimonio, and activism in migrants with disabilities
(2022-09) morales, claudia j
Abstract My dissertation centers the healing processes and praxes of migrants from Central America who have suffered injuries resulting in amputations on their way to the US through Mexico atop an old freight train known as "La Bestia" (The Beast). My scholar activism is based on fieldwork and research conducted with amputated migrants recovering at rehabilitation centers in central Mexico and alongside the activist group Migrant Disabilities Organization (MDO) based in California. My contributions place emphasis on converging dialogues between Afro-Indigenous conocimiento/knowledge and theory from medical and linguistic anthropology (specifically Aulino’s phenomenological approach to the praxis of care and Arnold’s communicative care approach in the context of migration) through critically-engaged ethnographic fieldwork. In doing so, I link to and build on holistic and decolonial approaches for better understanding the structural conditions and colonialist discourses which instensify the violence of migration. In the face of these realities, I illuminate the process of healing and recovery, highlighting individual and collective acts of communal care manifested by migrants against the backdrop of capitalist crimmigration regimes and humanitarian/missionary aesthetic care set-ups. I employ a language-based approach to mobility that centers embodiment and community to comprehend the hidden or silenced complexities of migration. I attempt to go beyond migration scholarship that has so well documented the structural apparatus of terror that enacts violence and places people in harm's way. Following Jasbir Puar and Jason De Leon, I argue that deliberate population debilitation and dismemberment are intentional colonial acts of violence to discourage migration. Nonetheless, against acts that seem all-powerful, I identify what I call “the corporal genre of migration testimonios” as a genre of communicative care ingrained in oral traditions of healing and communal care as a powerful tool for collective resistance. I trace a connection between migration testimonios and Indigenous America’s oral traditional storytelling that emerge from specific ontologies of the body and emotions. Thus the corporal genre of migration testimonios can be understood as a functionalization or adaptation of oral genres of storytelling that guide ways of healing in community. My contention is that there are indigenous ways of processing grief that are not written yet are creative and literary and maintained and renewed in the present day. Further, I suggest the corporal genre of migration testimonios engages listeners who, with mundane acts of care, resist the dehumanization of migrants. I focus on these mundane acts – such as medical staff opposing migrants' deportation, or women providing food for migrants from their own impoverished pockets – to explore how migrants build networks of care. While the scope of these acts of resistance is certainly limited, subtle everyday acts of care help us focus on the possibilities for decolonial forms of healing, grieving, and recovery.

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