The purpose of this investigation was to examine the evolution of Muisca chiefdoms from the viewpoint of household dynamics at the scale of a particular polity. The Bogotá polity, located near the modern town of Funza, was the core of one of the most powerful Muisca chiefdoms encountered by the Spanish. The investigation focused on the evolution of the Bogotá polity through the Herrera (800 B.C. - A.D. 800), Early Muisca (A.D. 800-1200), and Late Muisca (A.D. 1200-1600) periods. Artifacts were recovered through shovel probes and surface collections at 40 sites in order to identify discrete residential areas and recover samples of artifacts for inter-household comparison. Artifact distribution maps were used to delimit individual houselots from each of the three periods. Evidence for wealth and status differences among households was apparent as early as the Herrera period. The evidence from the Early Muisca and Late Muisca periods indicated increasing restrictions on access to wealth and status within the Bogotá polity over time. Feasting activities as a means of elite competition seem to have been more important early in the development of the Bogotá chiefdom. Evidence for craft production and regional exchange were scarce, indicating that these activities were not particularly intensive. Furthermore, such evidence was not exclusively associated with elite households. Some elite households may have had a slight advantage in access to better quality soils, although the soils in the area are generally quite good for agriculture. The examination of the relationship between households and raised fields within the Bogotá polity produced mixed results. From the perspective of top-down elite control, there was little evidence of elite association with the construction and maintenance of raised fields. However, the contrasting bottom-up perspective of intensive agriculture as a commoner initiative was also not supported, as there were no indications of any economic advantage for the households located nearby raised fields. Overall, the results of the investigation are somewhat puzzling given the ethnohistoric accounts of powerful chiefs, social complexity, and intensive economic activities. Based on the evidence presented here, economic factors do not appear to be central to the development of Muisca chiefdoms.

This is an ethnographic study of womens activism in Bosniac (Muslim) areas of post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. I examine the activities and representational strategies of activists in womens non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and political parties as they engage local nationalist and religious discourses, established notions of gender, and the discourses and policies of foreign donors and international bodies. The work is based on over two years (1999-2000) of ethnographic research among women activists, who take a range of approaches to gender and ethno-national/religious identity. I show how womens attempts to influence the direction of post-war reconstruction often rely on what I term, following Richard G. Fox, affirmative essentialisms over-simplified but positive characterizations of women. These attempts are embedded in a moral universe in which gendered wartime experiences shape much of the possibilities and obstacles to public action. As women attempt to forge new identities, then, they do so within morally coded hierarchies of gender and ethnicity established during the war. I show that while affirmative essentialisms in a sense constrain women from becoming actors of consequence in political processes, in the context of Bosnia they are an effective strategy for overcoming resistence to womens political participation. I also examine the relationship between womens activism and foreign intervention, showing how donors both enable and limit women as significant political actors through a similar use of affirmative essentialisms of women. Donor policies influence the direction of feminist and women-centered discourses through their emphasis on multi-ethnic state building and on liberal feminism. Debates over difference with men and among women thus form the core of women activists discourses on gender roles and relations. I relate this analysis to theories of gender and ethno-national identities; strategies of womens activism in relation to essentialisms of gender and cultural systems (Orientalism, Occidentalism, and balkanism). In contrast to social science literature on nationalism that sees women as symbols of nation, and in further contrast to images of Bosnian women as passive victims of war and nationalist politics, I argue for and provide a case study of womens active gendered roles in post-war nation building.

The dissertation looks at the struggle for hegemonic control over the meaning of reproduction and sexuality in Serbia, 1986-1997, in the context of the ideological and socio-economical changes created by the collapse of socialism. The dissertation focuses on changing meanings of reproduction and reproduction's intersection with the concepts of gender, sexuality and nation. Such a focus is determined by two considerations: 1) gender organization in patriarchal societies is based primarily on different roles that men and women are believed to play in reproduction; and 2) in almost all post-socialist societies, discourses and policies have been produced aimed at changing reproductive practices of specific targeted populations: not simply women, but women belonging to particular groups (ethnic, religious, class). During the fieldwork in Serbia, multiple methods for data collection were used: archival research, participant observation, semi-structured interviews and life histories. All material was subjected to discourse/textual analysis, while the interpretation combines economic, political and symbolic approaches. The population discourses and closely related abortion debates are at the center of the analysis. I argue that for the Serbian nationalism in the 1980s and 1990 demographic issues were associated with the concerns related to continuity of the nation in its temporal and special dimension. Demographic discourses also projected a specific vision of modernity recreating gendered images of the state and nation, of "self" and the "other". Finally, they contributed to the processes of the radical social change by redefining the meaning of reproduction and by reshaping gender roles. This research has also unrevealed common epistemological properties shared by population discourses; the dominant discourses on gender and gender relations; and nationalist discourses (about origin and development of nations, and about survival of and threat to the national 'stock'). Consequently, these discourses emerge as not only mutually dependent, but actually, mutually constitutive. Modernist bias that allowed demography to embrace 'scientific objectivity' in representation of population trends also allowed nationalist discourses to embrace images of 'backwardness' and 'progress'. An inherent gender dimension of this bias allowed both demographic and nationalist discourses to employ the same hegemonic images of masculinity and femininity.

This thesis analyzes how the Cuban Revolutions transnational discourse on blackness positively affected social attitudes, allowing color identity to be negotiated using color classification terms previously devalued. In the Caribbean and Latin America, most systems of social stratification based on color privilege whiteness both socially and culturally; therefore, individuals negotiate their identities with whiteness as the core element to be expressed. This dissertation examines how this paradigm has been overturned in Cuba so that blackness is now the featured aspect of identity. This is due in part to the popular response to the governments rhetoric which engages in an international political discourse of national identity designed to situate Cuba contextually in opposition to the United States in the global politics of color. This shift has occurred in a dialectic environment of continued negative essentialized images of Blacks although blackness itself is now en vogue. The dialogue that exists between state and popular forms of racial categorization serves to recontextualize the meanings of blackness and the values attached to it so that color classification terms which indicate blackness are assumed with facility in identity negotiation. In the past, the concepts of whitening and mestizaje (race mixture) were employed by the state with the goal of whitening the Cuban population so that Cuba would be perceived as a majority white country. Since the 1959 Revolution, however, the state has publicly claimed that Cuba is an Afro-Latin nation. This pronouncement has resulted in brown/mestizo/mulatto and not white as being the national ideal. The symbolic use of mestizaje in Cuban society and the fluidity inherent in the color classification system leaves space for manipulation from both ends of the color spectrum and permits Cubans from disparate groups to come together under a shared sense of identity. The ideology of the state and the popular perceptions of the symbolism that the mulatto represents were mediated by a color continuum, which in turn was used both by the state and the populace to construct, negotiate, maintain, and manipulate color identities. This study demonstrates that although color classification was not targeted by the government as an agent to convey blackness, it nevertheless does, and the shift in how identity is negotiated using racial categories can be viewed as the response of the populace to the states otherwise silent dialogue on race and identity.

The concept of an unmarried Japanese woman carries a variety of changing meanings for both women and men. In the past unmarried Japanese women were viewed as a conceptual anomaly vis-à-vis the dominant rhetoric of universal marriage. In contemporary Japan women are marrying later or even choosing not to marry at all. Demographers view the personal actions by unmarried women as cumulatively accounting for a large component of the declining birthrate. Such analysis of vital records has instilled panic among government officials already fearful of the rapidly aging population and its effect on Japans future as a nation. In this dissertation I explore how unmarried Japanese women create and sustain their identities despite a public rhetoric that marginalizes, degrades, or even denies their existence as a social category. I argue that unmarried Japanese women are not parasite singles, the homogenous entity that the Japanese government and media have portrayed them to be. Nor are they a part of an explicit, organized feminist revolution. Drawing upon social theories which examine the tensions between practice and ideology, agency and structure I argue that unmarried Japanese are responding to a specific set of economic, political, and social conditions in which they find themselves. The cultural dialogue associated with being unmarried exposes how the government naturalizes and rationalizes the marital union to support its interests in maintaining productivity of the core (male) workforce, and the reproduction of future Japanese citizens. Based on ethnographic data collected in a city in rural Japan, I discuss how linguistic expressions and metaphors create images of being married, how normative rhetoric about productivity in relation to womens life course defines appropriate employment and leisure activities, and how unmarried womens bodies are a site of state control through contraceptive regulations and other government policies. A focus on the discourse surrounding unmarried women exposes how they are positioned as key players in the maintenance of latent cultural logics regarding the family, work, nation, and reproduction. Even so, through their everyday enactments of being unmarried, through resistance and compromise, unmarried women in this local city force and enforce change in the social landscape of contemporary Japan.

Traditionally, scholars investigating prehispanic Andean polities and sociopolitical organization have worked from cross-cultural models of complex societies underlain by concepts of political hierarchy and centralized control. Recently, however, some archaeologists, drawing from ethnohistorical and ethnographic sources, have argued that late prehispanic polities in various parts of the Andes were organized around principles very different from those that underlie traditional constructs of complex societies. This ethnohistoric evidence raises the possibility that the models of political organization often used by archaeologists are not adequate to account for the development and dynamics of all prehispanic Andean polities. Ethnohistoric sources portray the structure and dynamics of the ethnic kingdoms as rooted in still poorly understood indigenous principles of organization featuring nested, dual socio-territorial units (ayllus), decentralized political leadership, and confederation as the basis of hierarchy. To date, there has been very little study of what these polities would look like archeologically, or how the supposedly different principles of organization would manifest themselves in a regional settlement structure, wealth and status differentiation, or production and exchange patterns. Ethnohistoric documentation for the existence of ayllu polities in the Cinti region, southern Bolivia, made this area a prime setting for exploration of the archaeological ramifications of traditional and ayllu-based models. Full-scale regional survey and excavation generated data on the long-term evolution of sociopolitical structure and economic processes in the Cinti Valley. The investigation was organized around identifying strategies (economic and social) associated with political leadership, and their role in politico-economic centralization and social differentiation. The research revealed the emergence, by AD 800, of a strongly integrated, regional polity, characterized by a traditional settlement hierarchy, and elite residence at a dominant center. Catchment zone analysis indicated that increasing agricultural production was most closely linked to strategies of political leadership and status differentiation. The Cinti Valley investigation served to refine our understanding of the ayllu polity both as an archaeological model, and as a form of prehispanic political organization. Highlighting the convergence and divergence between emic constructs and empirical regional patterns should contribute to a better understanding of the nature and variability of southern Bolivian prehispanic societies, and how they should be archaeologically approached.

Having contributed to early definitions of chiefdoms, the pre-Columbian societies that developed in the Central Region of Panama during the last millennium before Spanish contact in A.D. 1515 have been considered by many specialists in cultural evolution to be archetypes of ranked societies. This investigation was designed to examine the emergence of chiefly societies and evaluate current models used for interpreting the development of social complexity in Panama. It was necessary, first, to determine when social ranking emerged and then to explore how specific sociopolitical and economic factors influenced the development and operation of pre-Columbian chiefly societies up to the time of European contact. The strategy adopted in this study focused on a regional settlement survey, documenting 1700 years of social change in a 104 km2 area of the Río Parita Valley of central Panama. At no time during the pre-Columbian occupation in the valley did population levels come even close to carrying capacity, so demographic stress on subsistence resources, or leading to conflict, does not appear to have been an important factor in chiefly emergence. Although the presence of warfare could not be substantiated from the survey data, status rivalry and warfare is mentioned with some regularity in the ethnohistoric accounts and was most likely present during the pre-Columbian period. The location of the main chiefly center 14 km from the coast in low fertility land does not support the idea that controlling subsistence production was crucial to elite power. On the other hand, ethnohistoric accounts describe chiefly larders full of subsistence goods, suggesting that mobilizing these goods was important to the development of social ranking. By A.D. 550, the standardization of craft goods and their wide distribution throughout the Central Region implies the existence of macro-regional exchange networks. Settlement changes in the Río Parita Valley at the same time suggest that local, regional, and macro-regional exchange was most likely involved in the emergence of chiefly societies; however, the lack of long-distance trade goods found in the Río Parita and other valleys in the Central Region does not indicate that long-distance trading was a foundation of elite power.

The emergence and development of complex societies in the Amazonian lowlands has been historically debated as a function of the relationships between human populations and the natural environment. Culture ecology on one hand, and historical ecology, on the other hand, have offered different views on cultural development, without providing compelling archaeological testing. The present study proposes an ecological-economic model to account for the emergence of social complexity on Marajó Island. This model predicts that in areas of abundant aquatic resources, communal cooperation for the construction of river dams and ponds allowed for the development of a highly productive fishing economy with low labor investment. The production of surpluses created opportunities for kin group leaders to compete for the administration of the water-management systems, leading to control over resources and surplus flow. The differential access to resources created social stratification, and the development of a complex religious-ideological system in order to legitimize the political economy. Focusing on one of the Marajoara chiefdoms, a group of 34 mounds located along the Camutins River, the study demonstrates that the location of ceremonial mounds in highly productive areas was related to control over aquaculture systems. The study suggests that the existence of similar ecological conditions in several other locations on the Island led to the multiplication of small chiefdoms, which, once in place, competed for labor, prestige, and power. Based also on data provided by other researchers, this study proposes a chronology for the emergence and demise of complex societies on Marajó Island, as well as defining the main periods within Marajoara phase.

The present studies focus on the two components of female attractiveness, fluctuating asymmetry (FA) and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), which are alleged to represent genetic quality and fertility, respectively. Male mating strategies may be characterized by individual differences in sociosexuality, a personality dimension that is predicted to correlate with differential valuation of these two components of female mate value. Three predictions were made: Prediction 1. Measures of waist-to-hip ratio and symmetry in women are dissociable physical traits. Prediction 2. Mens individual differences in sociosexuality will differentially affect their valuations of two aspects of womens physical attractiveness, WHR and FA. Prediction 3. Sociosexuality and parental investment as two opposing components of mating strategy are inversely related to each other. The relationships among sociosexuality and parental investment, as measured by three indices, (Sociosexuality, Parental Investment, Caditude) and male preferences for two components of female physical attractiveness, symmetry and waist-to-hip ratio, were examined in several studies. A sociosexuality questionnaire pilot study, a correlational study of FA and WHR, and three empirical studies were done. The questionnaire pilot study analyzed by factor analysis was done to develop indices of the three predictor variables: sociosexuality, parental investment and caditude. A correlational study examined the relationship between WHR and FA in a sample of womens images (Prediction 1). Using the sociosexuality questionnaire and visual stimuli of women who varied in WHR and FA, empirical studies of three groups of participants (total n = 273) tested the relationships between sociosexuality and female phenotype (Prediction 2). Finally, another correlational study utilized questionnaire data to examine the relationship between indices of sociosexuality and parental investment (Prediction 3). Support was found for Predictions 1 and 3, but not for Prediction 2. Results and critique of the methodology are discussed along with future implications.

In most species with parental care, offspring disperse from the natal territory either at sexual maturity or when they are competent to survive independently. In humans and numerous avian species, dispersal from the natal family may not coincide with these developmental markers. This presents an adaptive puzzle, since delaying dispersal typically delays reproduction. Various ecological explanations for delayed dispersal in birds have been proposed and tested. Emlen (1995) suggested parallels between humans and birds with regard to the circumstances that influence family formation and dispersal timing. Work by other authors has applied Emlens model to humans using proxy measures of Natal Territory Quality (NTQ). Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal survey of U.S. families, I extract direct measures of NTQ to more rigorously test Emlens prediction that higher NTQ leads to later dispersal. I use two age-based cohorts (born in 1957 and 1967). Focusing on three dispersal events (residential dispersal, first marriage, and first reproduction), I test whether economic variables describing family of origin (NTQ) and local conditions influence dispersal age. Multiple linear regression analysis is employed to elucidate the relationships between dispersal and NTQ. The independent variables appear to have different influences on the three dispersal events, suggesting differential salience of the independent variables for each dispersal type. Results also point to discrepancies across the two cohorts. For the older cohort, family income, fathers employment status, and local unemployment rate appear to influence the timing of residential dispersal. Age at first reproduction and age at first marriage are both influenced by parents education and household density; marriage timing is also affected by fathers employment status also affecting marriage timing. For the younger cohort, fathers employment status and household density affect residential dispersal timing, fathers employment status, mothers education, and family income affect reproductive timing, and fathers occupational prestige affects marriage timing. Females experience all dispersal events earlier than males. All results above reflect significant regression coefficients. However, according to criteria of acceptance for the models tested, the hypothesis was supported only for reproductive dispersal timing in the 1957 cohort.