This study was conducted to analyze the funeral rituals of young African-American male homicide victims from lower-income neighborhoods. It focuses on the rituals practiced at the funeral of a 17-year-old trumpeter who was murdered. A growing large number of young African-American males from poor communities are being killed. They have created extraordinary funeral rituals in their subculture. The rhetoric that is used at these youngsters' funerals are also presented in this thesis. Furthermore, background information on memorial Rest in Peace (R.I.P.) T-shirts, which are usually worn at the funeral of slain victims, are also introduced in this study This paper also contains what African-Americans general believe about death, and it explains the African-American funeral services from the beginning of slavery. In addition, it elaborates on the history of traditional jazz funerals, and shows the origin of Benevolent Societies / acase@tulane.edu

Romanian subjectivities are the product of historical and cultural forces that go further back in time than the communist regime and farther out in space than the former Iron Wall, and are the locus of alternate but no less applicable forms of civility and self-determination, distinct from the Western or Eurocentric model of civil personhood. In my fieldwork, which I carried out in postsocialist Romania between 1997 and 1998, I experienced and observed the centrality of Orthodox Christian symbolism (particularly the Trinity) and formulations of personhood in various alternative-healing contexts. The healing movements discussed in the dissertation---the ELTA movement, Radiant Technique, and Hesychasm---draw amply on Eastern Orthodox Christian symbols and traditions, in both language and practice. They also test the boundaries, distinctions, and authority of Orthodoxy with varying degrees of cosmopolitanism, pragmatism, and religious syncretism. These alternative or complementary healing methods and their discursive universes situate themselves culturally as narratives of Romanian selfhood that are richly informed by Orthodox ontology and epistemology. These practices can also be viewed as creative and thoughtful engagements with dominant discourses of modernity and as experiential reworkings of embodied orientations of past and present. I argue that these struggles are representative of the creative, interpretive, and self-constructing efforts of postsocialist Romanian persons, and that they are both acts of freedom and political acts. The techniques and narratives encountered in my research of healing pose explicit and implicit challenges to the value systems of socialism/communism and capitalism/modernity, in a series of complex and intersubjective negotiations of meaning, agency, and identity / acase@tulane.edu

An intellectual and cultural history which examines the process of national identity formation in a foreign environment, this dissertation argues that Great Britain provided more than just military backing, commercial opportunities and financial support to Spanish American independence leaders, it also offered a powerful social and cultural model for the construction of post-independent nationhood. Francisco de Miranda and Andres Bello emerge as the central figures of London's Spanish American community. Through their house on Grafton Street passed virtually all the major military and intellectual figures of the three creole movements for independence: Bernardo O'Higgins, Simon de Bolivar, Jose de San Martin, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Bernardino Rivadavia, Antonio Jose de Irisarri, Vicente Rocafuerte, Juan Garcia del Rio, Agustin de Iturbide, Jose Joaquin de Olmedo, Miguel Garcia Granados and many others. London was the nexus at which members of Spanish America's regional independence movements first met each other; it was there that they discovered their common interests and began to work together on projects that concerned them all. Furthermore, these Spanish Americans sought advice and assistance from important British reformers including Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce and Joseph Lancaster whose ideas all contributed to the intellectual and cultural milieu that produced a particular type of creole Americanism It is important that Spanish America's independence leaders began to imagine their future societies while residing in dynamic, Anglican, industrial Britain during the Napoleonic era. Besides its overwhelming material culture, England's historical position as the enemy of both Spain and revolutionary France allowed Spanish Americans of the era to reject both their colonial heritage and Jacobin-style social revolution by providing them with a positive alternative model. Education, constitutions, laws, a free press, public opinion, History, language, patriotic civic culture and the idea of usefulness to the nation emerge as the central themes of interest to this generation. This dissertation is the first to examine Latin American national identity as a product of foreign residence and treats this group as a coherent, unified intellectual generation / acase@tulane.edu

Although the phenomenon of emigration is not unknown to the Spanish experience, the recent increase of immigration in Spain over the last decades has facilitated the development of a discourse that seeks to vindicate the public space, identity and voice of the immigrant subject and his/her culture in relationship to the hegemonic discourse. This new discourse opens the door and legitimizes, in one way, the study and analysis of a perduring migratory phenomenon: the Andalusian and Murcian migration to the Catalan region. The Catalan image, identity and culture have been constructed on the basis of the presence of these supposedly foreign elements: the Xarnegos, that is, these immigrants from the South, and their so-called popular culture The narrative of the Catalan writer Juan Marse, born in 1933, recaptures, with extraordinary literary force and beauty, the dynamic that occurs when the encounter between the Catalan national subject and the Xarnego Other takes place. His novels, particularly Ultimas tardes con Teresa (1966), La oscura historia de la prima Montse (1970) and El amante bilingue (1990) are literary spaces in which we are told, by means of different stories, one single story: the history of an unequal exchange which forces us to rethink the hegemonic story Chapter I of the dissertation sets forth and, at the same time, questions the presence-absence of Juan Marse and his work, and the presence-absence of popular culture, in academia and the world of literary criticism. Chapter II analyzes the presence and the role of religious discourse in the construction of the popular as the national other. Chapter III focuses on the issue of the role of language and its complexity in the formulation of national identity. At the same time it analyzes the role of the Andalusian immigrant in this process. Chapter IV studies the presence of popular songs and music which, in the novel, El amante bilingue, become a literary narrative voice. It is through this music and song that the national Other successfully vindicates his/her subjectivity and affirms a national identity that is hybrid, mestizo and different from the hegemonic national identity discourse / acase@tulane.edu

Presented herein is an ethnographic description of the Makushi Amerindians of Guyana and study of the biomedical efficacy of traditional remedies employed by the Makushi. One of the primary controversies in the field of ethnomedicine is whether a therapeutic intervention using a traditional remedy owes its success in controlling or alleviating symptoms of illness to its biomedical efficaciousness or, alternatively, to the placebo effect. Some researchers in ethnomedicine are inclined to believe that traditional remedies always work because indigenous pharmacopoeias are hoped to be the panacea for the world's incurable diseases. Other researchers, however, take the other extreme and tend to argue that herbal concoctions only serve psychosocial needs of the patient and act as placebos without addressing the biomedical needs of the individual This dissertation takes a pathway between these polarities. I first provide geographical, ethnohistorical, and contemporary ethnographic data on the Makush Amerindians. Then I discuss the sociocultural system of illness causation, classification of illness, sick-role, the decision-making process towards treatment and treatments administered to the patient, including the psychosocial support the patient receives during the duration of the illness bout, as seen from the Makushi vantage point. Following a 'universal methodology' proposed by several medical anthropologists, I present data on the preparation and administration of traditional remedies, voucher specimens of plants utilized in these remedies, the botanical identifications of these plants, and the relevant pharmacological literature and pharmacological databases (i.e., NAPRALERT, Internet Grateful Med) that contain evidence of known bioactive properties in these species which are congruent with their uses (or reported uses) as remedies among my Makushi subjects In the conclusion, I evaluate both the biomedical efficacy of a relatively small section of the Makushi pharmacopoeia which I examined as well as the usefulness of this proposed universal methodology and other suggested methodologies, such as prospective and retrospective case reporting, in conducting this study under the field conditions I encountered in the Rupununi savannas of Guyana / acase@tulane.edu

Girls and women who entered the convent in New Spain and professed religious vows were said to become 'dead to the world.' This metaphorical death effectively made them the brides of Christ, and it was in this capacity that they were pictured in late colonial portraits painted at the time of their metamorphosis. Donning a religious habit, floral crown, and other accoutrements, these nuns were portrayed in the same manner that they appeared in death portraits. An inscription containing their biographical data usually appears within the composition. The portraits, therefore, are effectively divided into two parts: pictorial and textual Nun's images engaged in the colonial discourse regarding the nature of Spanish America and its Creole inhabitants. Specifically, they visually expressed the popular belief that Spanish America was the site of the new earthly paradise whose most precious flowers were its virgin nuns. In addition to being regarded as naturally predisposed to mystical contact with God by means of their sex, nuns generally came from the same classes that were most affected by anti-Creole sentiments and policies exacerbated by the Bourbon Reforms of the late eighteenth century. Furthermore, their steadfastness in the face of religious reforms instituted by Spanish church officials identified them as a bastion of Creole corporate identity and cause for Creole patriotism While the iconic quality of crowned nun portraits fulfilled Creole desires for Mexican religious images that expressed Creole excellence, the division of the portraits' signifying field into pictorial and textual components effectively created a tension between the timeless and historical qualities of the nuns portrayed. Namely, while the pictorial component denotes the sacredness of the sitter the textual component localizes her by interjecting her historical data. This tension fulfilled Creole aspirations to simultaneously equate themselves to, and distinguish themselves from, Iberian Spaniards. This was achieved graphically by infusing the Spanish tradition of picturing deceased crowned nun with Creole themes. Textually, the portraits' inscriptions bound their subjects to their homeland, claiming their excellence for Mexico. In sum, this dissertation examines the visual currency that these portraits had within the larger issues of identity formation and colonial discourse / acase@tulane.edu

This research focuses on the 'feasts of Moors and Christians' (fiestas de moros y cristianos) of Valor, a mountain community of the Alpujarra region, in the former Moorish kingdom of Granada. The tradition of 'Moors and Christians' performances is a stock item of the Spanish expressive culture and a model for local identity, which is so deeply rooted that it fully reflects the social, economic and even political life of the community. Each year in Valor, the 'Moors and Christians' reenact the Reconquest of Spain and the 'Morisco revolution' of 1568. The performance functions as a local myth of origin, a product of a literate bricolage, built with the odds and ends of effective history. It commemorates various events, widely distant in time, but all related to times of conflict. Following the local point of view and my own experience as a Christian performer in Valor, I look at the 'Moors and Christians' as the foremost manifestation of local culture. Focusing on the interplay between the way conflict is being represented in the performance and its real developments in the community and its region, I analyse the relation between history and its representation in folklore for the two key periods of societal crisis: the Spanish Civil War (1936) and the Morisco revolt (1568) / acase@tulane.edu

Jacques Nicolas Bussiere de Pouilly (1804-1875) was perhaps the best-trained and most imaginative architect practicing in mid-nineteenth century New Orleans. In addition to several notable buildings, his legacy includes a sketchbook now owned by the Historic New Orleans Collection. Within this design repository are 130 designs for funerary monuments dated between 1834 and 1874. This paper analyzes de Pouilly's drawings and remaining tombs and traces the influences which shaped his character as a designer De Pouilly left Paris for New Orleans in 1833, obviously having encountered the ideas of young rebels at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts whose rejection of academic Classicism opened French architecture to eclecticism, historical revivalism, and architectural coloration and eventually gave rise to the style known as Neo-Grec. De Pouilly was also inspired by the work of other French architects, as well as by monuments in the famous Parisian cemetery Pere La Chaise. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.) / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation provides an assessment of the effects of tourism development on rural women in Zanzibar through participant observation and interviews in the coastal village of Jambiani. The development of tourism is documented within the context of the ecology, history, and culture of the region. A survey of work available to women in this coastal village suggests that tourism is an undependable resource in comparison to other economic opportunities available. Further, through a look at both economic and religious systems, the difficulties women face in escaping poverty are illustrated through an integrated look at Swahili culture. Some tourism-created resources, such as changes in available transportation, do reach women in this rural community. However, the overall conclusions of this study suggest that standards of living are dropping for women in this community, in support of the hypothesis that globalization is contributing to the impoveritization of women in Africa / acase@tulane.edu

A pictorial annals history created in the relatively minor city-state of Tepechpan in the first century after the conquest of Mexico, the Tira de Tepechpan records Tepechpan's history on the upper register and the history of the Mexica capital, Tenochtitlan, on the lower register. Working at different times, a number of artists and scribes contributed to the Tira; thus, the Tira records multiple histories. In this examination of the painted history, I take a diachronic focus and place the Tira in its correct historical context(s) By identifying and correlating the work of the different artists and scribes, I reveal that Spanish colonial policies shaped this indigenous history. Indigenous communities wished to earn cabecera rank, and aware of Spanish criteria for such rank, the artists of the Tira present the history of Tepechpan adhering to these criteria. Furthermore, indigenous pictorials often were admitted into Spanish courts of law, and it has been proposed that the Tira was created for use in a lengthy lawsuit between Tepechpan and its subject Temascalapa. My comparison of the Tira with the lawsuit reveals that the manuscript was not made specifically for the suit nor was it submitted as evidence. Instead, I propose that the Tira was an all-purpose document that could be used in various circumstances to argue the autonomy and prestige of the community A final intriguing aspect of the Tira de Tepechpan is the fact that Tepechpan was once subject to Texcoco, yet that city is virtually absent in this history. Instead, the principal artist of the Tira paints a portrait of Tepechpan as a major ally of Tenochtitlan, the ruling power in the Aztec empire; by doing so, he hopes to establish the prestige of Tepechpan. After the conquest and with the emergence of the Spanish as the new imperial leaders, the artists of the Tira shift the focus of their histories to show Tepechpan as a principal ally of the Spanish. In Mesoamerica, alliance with the victors, regardless of ethnic affiliation, was paramount; by painting such a situation, the artists of the Tira hoped to make it true / acase@tulane.edu