Archaeology belongs in the schools. Students and teachers both find it interesting, and it has been shown to be an effective vehicle for teaching a wide array of topics and skills. However, there are at least two serious reasons why it is important for students to understand what archaeologists do and why: (1) an informed public is a potential ally in identifying, protecting and managing endangered archaeological resources; and (2) archaeology as a mode of inquiry can help students understand the social construction of the world in which they live. Archaeologists and educators have been working together to develop materials to help teachers use archaeology in their teaching. Some excellent materials are now available for middle and junior high school teachers. But if students are to take archaeology seriously as a tool for social analysis, they need to be exposed to a more mature understanding of it in high school. Interviews exploring the ways in which archaeology is currently understood and used in all aspects of the curriculum in one high school indicate that teachers use it to capture students' interest, or to reward them for learning some other subject. Teachers do not use archaeology to teach analysis and interpretation of evidence, or critical thinking skills, or the role of human beings in the creation of social systems. Since very few teachers have received formal education in archaeology, they do not associate these goals with archaeology as a discipline. Teachers' sources of information about archaeology are television, newspapers and general circulation magazines. These popular sources do not provide them with the understanding they need to recognize archaeology as a tool for intellectual and social analysis. Archaeologists should take advantage of more professional channels for reaching teachers with serious material linking archaeology to the various disciplines traditionally taught in high schools. To reach high school students with a more sophisticated understanding of archaeology, we need first to present that knowledge to their teachers as fellow professionals.

This dissertation examines the achievements of Spanish prose fiction in the last two decades and focuses mainly in the works of Luis Mateo Diez, Luis Landero and Antonio Munoz Molina. These authors, as well as many others, reapproach the Civil War and the Post War period with a different technique than their predecessors. Instead of employing social realism or experimentalism, they adopt new styles incorporating elements which have been absent from Peninsular literature for a long time, such as myth and fantasy. The study argues that the passage from realism to fantasy is part of the evolution of prose fiction as a genre. However, this development is triggered by social, cultural and historical events. Therefore, the analysis covers a historical review of the origins of the genre giving special attention to the mythical and chivalric aspects which contemporary novels borrow from the early works. The socio-cultural elements of the context are considered at the time the action takes place and also during the era in which the books were written. By combining these approaches one can bring out the literary truth of the texts which as claimed by Stephen Greenblatt is embedded in a text since its moment of conception. The literary truth of these fictions is that Spaniards have surpassed the historical division of the two Spains, and their efforts are now targeted at the search of new identities more according with individual subjectivity. This comprehensive analysis also enlightens the peculiar relationship between prose fiction and history.

How is place communicated? Places of significance are often contested areas. How do communities talk about these places? Can they talk about them in ways that make their meanings understood to others? In this dissertation, hearings from the Kaho'olawe Island Conveyance Commission hearings are analyzed in an effort to understand the many layers of meaning imbedded in a particular place; the island of Kaho'olawe in the State of Hawai'i. These hearings are unique in many ways, because they are the culmination of a twenty year effort to get the United States government to recognize Native Hawaiian claims to the island. This dissertation looks at metaphors of the land, the social drama which covers the 20 years since the first trespassers landed on the island, and at the stories told by two witnesses about their connection to the land. Each way of looking at what people are saying about the island highlights the differences in the way Hawaiians and the military construct place. In part, these differences are emphasized by their use of the same symbols. Both the military and Hawaiians emphasize the uniqueness of the island and its importance in the maintenance of their culture. Analysis of the testimonies also foregrounds deep tensions in the relationship between the military and Hawaiians that stem, in part, from differing definitions of who are Hawaiians. The conclusion is that the island is a place of cultural significance to both Native Hawaiians and the military. However, each side frames the symbols that they use very differently, and thus, the two sides have difficulty communicating in meaningful ways with each other.

My dissertation focuses on a major problem found in Cree language retention efforts and in Cree education across the Cree Nation of Canada: the lack of a standard Cree orthography. My arguments for standardization are broad-based due to factors of cultural, religious, sociopolitical and educational biases that vie for their regional voice on Cree language matters. Meanwhile, Cree language and culture continue to ebb with each passing generation. This sets the parameters of my study. Information has been gathered from literature review, as well as from interviews, observations and other miscellaneous field sources. To help resolve the predicament of multiple versions of written Cree as practiced today, the thrust of this study proposes a standard phonemicization of Cree in Roman that is compatible to the current needs of the five main Cree dialect populations. I view Cree language and Cree culture as almost synonymous, being that Cree culture is keeper of the Cree language. This interdependency of Cree language and Cree culture is the key to Cree identity. The native language and cultural survival efforts of circumpolar indigenous cultures are increasingly threatened by external pressures. This I illustrate by presenting parallels in the geography, material culture, livelihood, traditions, sociopolitics, education, etc. of the Crees, Samis, and northwestern Siberian aboriginal groups. All the above arctic indigenous groups have common problems in areas listed. All arctic native peoples are a shrinking minority in an expanding global population. The Crees, as other circumpolar native peoples, have no alternative but to move ever more expeditiously in their efforts at Cree language and culture preservation that adapts to changing times, if expectations are that Cree is to survive and function as a working language well into the first century of the third millennium. Perhaps, this study may help persuade the Crees toward cooperative interaction with circumpolar groups striving to save their threatened native languages and lifeways. Interaction between the Crees, Samis and the Siberian Ob-Ugrians and Samoyeds could be a step in the right direction for all concerned.

The dissertation investigates the embodied experience of fatness in spaces between subjectivity and subjection on one Internet newsgroup and one listserve. Literature on identity politics, computer-mediated communication, and the social construction of the body is reviewed as it relates to the possibility of individuals with shared characteristics and/or interests utilizing technology to transform meanings for their corporeal experience. Using the methods of critical ethnography, I provide an interpretation of the ways in which site participants fluidly invoke and reject dominant meanings for the fat body within their project of resignifying fat bodies. Emergent themes include narratives of personal fat experience, comparisons of fit within cyberspace and "real" space, discussions of the pleasures and pains of fat bodies, attempts at guarding borders of identity and community, explorations of the mutual constitution of identities and oppressions, and finally, strategies for reconceptualizing fat.

This dissertation, a study of one strand of French exoticism, discusses the representation and reception of the Black African and Caribbean Other, both of whom the French called the “nègre,” from the Great War until 1930. Using a wide array of sources (novels, travelogues, advertisements, and photographs), I argue that representations of the nègre, from French West Africa and the Antilles were constructed ambivalently in the French social imagination to define boundaries of the French self and to mediate cultural changes and social anxieties that World War I had furthered. In Part I, I demonstrate how the Black African came to be represented as a grand enfant in popular culture during and after the Great War. This representation set the stage for the emergence of négrophilisme in the 1920s and for some romantic mixed-race relationships. But the grand enfant was a contested representation, and this dissertation shows that a battle to define the post-war “Black soul” broke out after René Maran, a Black Frenchman, published his novel, Batouala (1921). In Part II, I analyze how the French depicted the Black African as the Other in “ethnographic” exhibitions, photographs, and advertisements. In the 1920s, the French represented the Black African as an exotic, primitive “type” in efforts to define post-war moral and social identities. In Part III, I examine three French travelers to Africa. Writers Lucie Cousturier and André Gide demonstrate a limited French conception of extending fraternity to the Other and a reluctance to embrace the “oceanic” in Africa. Popular response to La Croisière noire, an automobile expedition through Africa, serves as the basis of my analysis of heroic exoticism. Last, I examine French exoticist desires at the Bal nègre, a dance hall where ethno-eroticism and carnivalesque mixing of races flourished. Some contemporary observers, like writer Paul Morand, feared fluidity across the color line. Morand's exoticism is invoked to demonstrate how négrophilisme and négrophobisme became intertwined in the French social imagination in the 1920s. Thus this dissertation offers a complex account of French history that problematizes the myth of a non-racist France.

This study is a social history of the rural mulattoes/ladinos of the District of Mita in eastern Guatemala who rebelled against the Liberal government headed by Mariano Gálvez in Guatemala City in June of 1837. Known as the Carrera movement or the War of the Mountain, this popular uprising began with scattered revolts precipitated by an outbreak of cholera, but soon became a full-scale rebellion that articulated a set of demands and eventually spread across the state of Guatemala and beyond. While the importance of this rebellion in the political history of Central America is widely recognized, this is the first attempt to focus on the ethnicity and social position of the protagonists, to relate rural social structure and the patron-client system to the rebellion, and to link the everyday concerns of this rural population with their political actions. The methodology combines anthropological techniques with chronological history. The early chapters provide a structural analysis of the geography of the area, settlement patterns, households, the economy, and affective life to create a picture of a society that differed in important ways from that of the urban Liberals. The last chapter shows how liberal policies designed to create a new polity based on Enlightenment principles and a free-trade economy antagonized the local population and exacerbated long-standing differences between the urban power structure and rural groups. The Liberals' decision to end banditry on the Camino Real and the methods they pursued to accomplish this goal emerge as the definitive step in the polarization process. The rebels' first engagement with government troops took place in Santa Rosa and was led by local cattle ranchers Teodoro and Benito Mexia. This study finds that a peasant elite, typified by the “mulatto” Teodoro Mexia, played the critical role in catalyzing the rebellion by forging alienated sectors of the local population into a strong regional alliance and by drawing on their substantial resources to fund the war.

This dissertation examines the cultural and political forces that shape and direct AIDS policy in the United States. Through a multi-sited, ethnographic research project in Springfield, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city with the 11th highest per capita AIDS rate in the nation, this project investigates the political culture that informs and directs needle exchange legislation. With a move toward a more politically engaged ethnography, this research blends political activism, participant observation, open-ended interviews and political analysis to provide an “insider” study of the policymaking process as it unfolded on the ground –from the Massachusetts State House and Springfield City Hall to an illegal needle exchange program operated by local AIDS activists. The political antagonism at the center of my investigation is a conflict between, on the one hand, the scientific consensus on the efficacy of needle exchange, and on the other, the moralizing discourse associated with injection drug use. Here, the often-contradictory forces of science and morality form a paradox within the policymaking process: although there is scientific consensus on the efficacy of needle exchange, needle exchange legislation is continuously defeated on moral grounds. Locating this paradox in the propensity of the American state - beginning with the Reagan administration in the early 1980s - to calibrate social policy through a juridical combination of an enhanced liberal individualism with neoliberal economic reforms, this dissertation interrogates the means by which policymakers harness a particular worldview of human nature–individual will, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, economic man–to make sense of the AIDS epidemic. To what extent can we locate the present role of moralism in American social policy as indicative of our contemporary political culture? Do social policies operate as forms of moral regulation to govern people in alignment with “the common sense of our age?” If so, can we then argue that social policies are an essential feature of liberal statecraft, a system of moral governance that is reconfiguring the contemporary relationship between individual and society? The immediate concern for democratic politics is the prospect that social policies directed at the needs of politically marginalized groups may not motivated by social concerns alone but based on the cultural stigma associated with their practices.

Studies of identity in anthropology have recently sought to articulate a growing awareness of the multiplicity and fluidity of human identification and affiliation. This discourse addresses static frameworks that historically mire the concept of identity within an “imagined community” of uniformity, positioning group after group within a model of un-altering, ‘sameness’. Frequently lost in the re-conceptualization is the consistent archetype of the “normative” against which “groups of color” or alterity are compared/contrasted. In this project I develop a theoretical direction from which one may examine notions of identity applied to Deaf populations through ethnographic engagement with Deaf populations in the U.S. and Britain. This theoretical development is ethnographically applied to a study of Black Deaf identity and a new theory of identity that emerges. This theory specifically allows us to identify: (1) current constructions of Deaf identity predicated on White normativity. (2) the importance of Deaf institutions and organizations as collectivities of embodied agency integral in developing models of identity that reflect multiplicity or a static/hegemonic identity within which alterity is marginalized. (3) the utility of an alternate transcultural model which effectively addresses the concept of identity and its embodied complexity.

This dissertation is a narrative self-representation of my professional experiences working as an outsider within two immigrant and refugee communities in Massachusetts. This study represents and illustrates my experience within the world of education and the personal transformation that took place during my encounters. The narrative focuses upon the interactions among the cultural liaisons, project participants and myself, and the profound effect that these experiences had upon my personal and professional research and practice. This study shows how diligent researcher praxis allowed for the alterations in my practice and research through acknowledging and deciphering fine points of the insider/outsider dimension and cultural differences. A variety of themes and issues are articulated after careful analysis of the narrative. Assertions regarding the application of the emic and etic theory are woven throughout the narrative reconstruction of events. The learning contexts are community development projects that I participated in and built relationships with those from other cultures. I use the story telling component to relay messages of importance regarding the cultural assumptions and judgments that possibly cloud or brighten the development of good interpersonal and business relationships with people from cultures other than one's own. The research ascertained a variety of themes and issues were present in my project experiences. These are: personal challenges, insider/outsider dimension, cultural issues, and relational trust building. From these themes I concluded that three main characteristics existed in relation to culture and insider/outsider theory. They are: (1) Insider/outsider relations are vigorous. (2) Insider/outsider relations are versatile. (3) Insider/outsider relations are rooted in context and influenced by politics and economics. Insider/outsider characteristics were identified for research consideration, and to provide more efficient organization. These elements can be considered to be sensitizing concepts, which allow for a bridge of understanding to be created. By identifying these characteristics, people can see clearly where they are in relation to the other(s). Clearly identifying these characteristics allows for multiple levels of understanding to occur both for the insider and the outsider. This appreciation provided me with the preparation necessary to work among others from different cultures, with different beliefs and different practices.