Historical approaches to the civilization of India can provide a useful complement to the predominately synchronic ethnographic analyses of anthropology. In particular, a fully historical view illuminates the many conflicts and tensions within Indian society that have shaped its pervasive religious idiom. The relationship between Brahminism and Buddhism, in ancient times, reflects a deeper ethno-political alignment of Aryans versus aboriginals on the subcontinent, and each of these religious traditions developed in dialectical opposition to the other through the centuries. The ethnic conflict at the origin of these religions later became merged with issues of class conflict as sectors of society depressed under the Brahminic system allied themselves with the heterodox movements. Buddhism in particular attained great strength due to its monastic organization, and provide the most important challenge to the supremacy of the Brahminic priesthood. The failure of both legislation and persecution to contain this upheaval eventually resulted in the tactical assimilation of Buddhism into the new, syncretic religion of Hinduism, in which the Brahminic power center retained its controlling position. Hinduism and Buddhism must thus be redefined as sociopolitical, rather than purely 'religious' phenomena for our understanding of Indian society to be complete. The paradigm of rebellion in the name of religion and response in the form of assimilation can be applied to situations up to the present day in India. The dynamics of religious conflict also shed light on the relationship between power and symbol which has been the focus of much of contemporary anthropological theory / acase@tulane.edu

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The Middle American soul has long held the interest of Westerners. Ever since Europeans first came into contact with Middle Americans, the former have debated the qualities, and even the existence, of souls in the Americas. Scholarship concerning the soul has continued into the present-century and occupies an important place in the anthropological corpus on the Maya. The present study will explore a contemporary expression of the Maya soul, focusing on that of the Kaqchikel Maya of San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala. An exploration of the domains of soul-therapy, midwifery, and community dance in Comalapa reveals these to convey complex understandings of soul, ones that implicate specific bodily operations and conditions. This being the case, these domains of activity are analyzed with an eye to ascertaining the nature of the relationship between body and soul among local Maya. I propose that human and non-human bodies are closely implicated in the existence and manifestation of soul, and articulate this as an operation of spiritual embodiment. Spiritual embodiment can be considered a corporal model of the soul, one that looks to apprehensible qualities of physical media, such as of the body, to gauge and explain features of a non-physical reality, such as of the soul. This approach to Maya soul speaks to the grounding of experience requisite to being Comalapan Maya while helping to contextualize local soul qualities of animation, mobility, and multiplicity / acase@tulane.edu

Various aspects of the culture of North American blacks have been overlooked by anthropologists. Health as it relates to culture is an example of one topic that has been ignored. Yet, an analysis of the health status of blacks and their health- care behavior can provide significant information for the social scientist and can assist those who are involved in making improvements in systems of health-care delivery From the earliest records of colonial Louisiana, high rates of morbidity and mortality have plagued the black population in the area. As a result of these factors, as well as certain attitudes and behaviors of the local white population, blacks in New Orleans since the Emancipation have skillfully devised neighborhood level strategies within the Western medical tradition to attend to their own health needs. The changes that have occurred in these health-care strategies have paralleled changes in the social structure of New Orleans as it shifted from a Reconstruction social structure to the social structure of the New South and have been associated with changes that occurred in the area's pattern of black mortality The health-care strategy which best characterizes the Reconstruction social structure is that of voluntary associations, the benevolent societies. These organizations provided their members with physicians' services, medicines, pensions during illness, burial assistance, and death benefits. In addition to performing these functions, they provided their members with skills in organization, promoted a religious sentiment, perpetuated elements of Creole culture, encouraged thrift and saving, provided an ideology which helped to strengthen and unify the black community, and added to the social life of New Orleans The health-care strategy which best characterizes the social structure of the New South is one in which blacks utilized new power options to take advantage of national social policy of the late 1960's and early 1970's to form neighborhood health clinics. In addition to providing health-care, in a fashion not unlike the benevolent societies, these clinics have provided blacks with new skills of organization, sponsored training in the health professions, served as one of the symbols of the black cultural revolution of the 1960's, allowed expression of black religious values, and strengthened the local black community While a new form of health-care delivery has emerged, the pattern of health-care behavior among blacks appears to be linked to the prior experiences of this population. A long history of limited access to the city's larger health-care facilities combined with antagonism from local whites has resulted in high levels of anxiety with respect to health among blacks and poor patterns of follow-up in the present clinics. This is demonstrated through examining medical records, responses to the Cornell Medical Index, and answers elicited through use of health related sentence frames. Therefore, the major challenge of the new form of neighborhood health-care delivery in the city appears to be related to changing the value orientation of blacks from one that considers health as an instrumental value to one than considers health as an intrinsic value An annotated list of black benevolent societies from the late eighteenth century to the present is included, as well as financial information of several associations. Rates of black mortality and statistics on morbidity from 1880 to the present are provided / acase@tulane.edu

Kaufman (1973) has suggested that Mesoamerica may be a linguistic area, as well as a culture area, but that its status as such has not been systematically investigated. The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the seventh of his 20 questions concerning the linguistic area status of Mesoamerica. Specifically, the structures of Mesoamerican numeral systems are investigated in order to determine similarities and differences in those systems as opposed to the structures of other numeral systems, especially those in the Western Hemisphere I provide a definition of what numerals and numeral systems are and develop a terminology and methodology in order to consider the structure of numeral systems. These analyses are based principally on the cardinal numeral series for a variety of languages. Certain ancillary numeral series such as the ordinals and numeral classifiers are summarized where such information is available A wide variety of sources has been utilized in order to generate numeral lists for Mesoamerican languages. Although the lists are restricted to languages on which I found information, they reflect the linguistic and geographical variability of Mesoamerica. In separate sections, a variety of non-Mesoamerican Western Hemisphere and Asian numeral systems are presented in order to establish the similarities and differences between them and the Mesoamerican systems. Each list is analyzed in terms of its extent, provenience, level of European influence, and structure A variety of groupings are suggested for Mesoamerican languages based on the structure of each numeral system. A major division is proposed between a Central Mexican System and an Eastern Mexican System, with the former represented mainly by non-Mayan languages, while the latter is restricted to Mayan languages. Subdivisions of each of these two major divisions are proposed, and a preliminary chronology and development of these subdivisions is sketched. Some special subsystems in the Mayan languages, such as the cacao count and the differential use of terms for 20, are also discussed. An attempt is also made to determine if the structures of Mesoamerican numeral systems are reflected in indigenous graphic representations of numerals / acase@tulane.edu