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Costly Signaling and Changing Faunal Abundances at Five Finger Ridge, Utah
(None, 2010-10)
This research attempts to develop and test a series of predictions for identifying costly signaling forms of hunting in the prehistoric past. I predict that signaling hunters should place increasingly greater value in species that have become more rare on the landscape, while non-signaling hunters should respond by increasing ...
Signature Injury: An Ethnographic Study of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in the Post-9/11 VA Health Care System
This dissertation is an ethnography of a politically symbolic injury: mild traumatic brain injury. It explores the dynamics of institutional mandates, clinical uncertainty, and the ideology of rehabilitative fantasies as they intersect in encounters between military veterans and clinicians in the Department of Veterans Affairs ...
The Traditional Hammam Bathhouse from Morocco to France: The Body, Purity, and Perception
This dissertation explores what it means to be clean - spiritually, corporeally and psychologically, not only in the context of Moroccan traditional bathing practices, but also within the ethnographer’s experience and perception. It gives a detailed account of the ethnographer as a subjective research instrument and the role ...
Creating an Empire: Local Political Change at Angamuco, Michoacan, Mexico
Regime change is a critical social process that has occurred throughout human history and yet much is still unknown about how political developments shape local communities. This dissertation examines the impacts of the Late Postclassic (1350-1530 CE) Purepecha Empire on residents at Angamuco, an ancient city within the Lake ...
Understanding changes in mobility & subsistence from terminal Pleistocene to Late Holocene in the highlands of New Guinea through intensity of lithic reduction, changing site types, and paleoclimate
Why did people in the highlands of New Guinea move from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and subsistence pattern, and develop a subsistence pattern centered on root and tree crop agriculture? How did the ancient residents of the highlands actually move around the landscape in the late Pleistocene, and how did that change though ...
Being Latvian: Discourse and Identity Among Individuals of Black African Descent
(2013-04-17)
This dissertation examines the dynamics of skin color and identity among individuals of black African descent in Latvia. I contend that the politics of blackness is constituted differently in Latvia by individuals of black African descent, than in the dominant literature on blackness, which is primarily derived from an ...
Cultivating Subjectivities: The Class Politics of Convivial Labor in the Interstitial Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect
This dissertation explores home kitchen gardens and the role they play in the lives of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual community of diaspora and low-income residents in San José, CA. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork from 2012 through 2016, I develop three central arguments. First, I argue home kitchen gardeners produce garden ...
A Biocultural Examination of Student Learning Behaviors in Large Undergraduate Lectures
Humans rely on culturally acquired information. Survival and reproductive success often hinge on whether or not individuals are culturally adapted to the environment they live in. These cultural variants can include important local social norms, foraging or hunting techniques, how to construct boats, among countless other ...
The Impact of Global English in Xinjiang, China: Linguistic Capital and Identity Negotiation among the Ethnic Minority and Han Chinese Students
My dissertation is an ethnographic study of the language politics and practices of college-age English language learners in Xinjiang at the historical juncture of China’s capitalist development. In Xinjiang the international lingua franca English, the national official language Mandarin Chinese, and major Turkic languages ...
Walls of Indifference: Arizona and the Ecology of Militarization
(2013-11-14)
This ethnography documents and explores the social, political, and material consequences of militarization in the borderlands of Arizona. Basing my conclusions on two years of fieldwork in Phoenix, Tucson, and along the US-Mexico border, I identify militarization as a social and political phenomenon that gradually reconfigures ...