English-language texts associated with fiddle and banjo in the southern United States are described and then indexed for comparative reference. The fiddle songs are typically humorous, very brief, highly variable and disunified. The same is true of many banjo songs associated with the banjo. Ballads in the fiddle and the banjo repertory are not indexed if previously catalogued by Child or Laws. Fiddle and banjo songs are defined as texts associated with fiddle or banjo playing, either through instrumental accompaniment or because informants mentally associate them with the fiddle or banjo. Various ways of performing the songs are enumerated, with particular attention to instrumental accompaniment and the square-dance context. The texts are often improvised, and they tend to be formulaic. The nature of formula is discussed, with analysis of certain formulaic structures in fiddle and banjo verses. The disunity and variability of most fiddle and banjo songs has made them difficult to compare. They are therefore indexed, not as integral texts, but as stanzas which are taken as self-contained entities. The Index of Stanzas is compiled from printed collections and from fieldwork in West Virginia. Stanzas are arranged according to subject matter, with cross references and an open-ended numbering system to allow for expansion. Anglo-American and Afro-American texts are indexed together, and some useful information pertaining to the provenience and the context of each stanza is included.

The purpose of this research project is to understand how local environmental destruction in Tampa Bay, Florida, including changes in water resources and development activities, affects local Tampa Bay residents mentally and emotionally. The study also examines residents' personal connections with their landscape and documents the degree of stress that may be caused by experiencing environmental destruction through the use of interviews, freelists, and two psychometric stress scales (Hopkins Symptom Checklist-10 and the Environmental Distress Scale). The topic of emotional distress and environmental change has rarely been studied in social science research, particularly in the United States and with regards to changing water ecosystems. The residents sampled for the study are members of five different environmental organizations in the Tampa Bay area, purposively sampled in order to better understand the unexplored topic of environmental change and emotional distress. The 21 research participants completed a semi-structured interview, freelist, and stress scales. The qualitative results show that the residents sampled have longstanding and cherished relationships with their natural environment, stemming from childhood. Participants also report experiencing emotional/mental distress due to local environmental change, particularly from habitat destruction, development, and changing water resources. Also, the stress scale results, particularly the results from the Environmental Distress Scale, complement the qualitative interview results by quantitatively highlighting areas of high distress, including distress experienced due to unwelcomed development, sprawl, and stress associated with changing wetlands and lakes. Many of the research participants cope with the environmental stressors they experience by participating in environmental activities and groups. Although focusing on these participants limits the extent to which the results can be generalized to the general public, the results signal that the unexplored topic of emotional and mental distress tied to local environmental change is an important one that needs to be explored further by anthropologists and other social scientists. The results from this exploratory study show that residents are in fact being emotionally affected by environmental change in their local environment. The results presented here may help to create a much-needed dialogue between residents and policy makers over planning for development. These exploratory findings, especially if demonstrated on a larger scale through further research, should be taken into consideration by policy makers when making decisions about development and water management activities that may harm ecosystems in Tampa Bay, Florida, and affect residents mentally and emotionally.

<p>This dissertation examines the recent influx of Pentecostal-charismatic churches into the Northern Region of Ghana, a rural, underdeveloped region whose predominantly Muslim population has increasingly become the target of evangelistic efforts undertaken by Christians from the south. Based on ethnographic and archival research, my study considers the locus of this incursion as a densely layered zone of anxieties and emergences, desires and contestations, in which the elaboration of novel horizons of sensibility and experience is refracted through the vicissitudes of the region's social, economic, religious, and political history. I argue that the churches' impassioned campaign to "take back the north for the Lord" - a campaign whose exemplary medium is the evangelistic crusade in which "signs and wonders" are mobilized as particularly potent technologies of conversion - demarcates a complex field of intervention animated by a plurality of forces irreducible to those of strictly religious provenance. An ethos of progress and success fostered by the country's development apparatus; the longstanding prejudices surrounding northerners and "the north" in the Ghanaian national imaginary; the specter of a Muslim threat that surfaces in a post-9/11 world and perpetuates amidst a global war on terror - these are among the contingencies that have come together to render this encounter possible. Yet, far from simply overlaying these historical-political logics with the veneer of Christian discourse, my work charts the dissemination of a faith whereby, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, converts are anointed with a power to conceive themselves and, by extension, the world as nothing less than a totally "new creation." I contend that such practices of salvation, so characteristic of Pentecostalism's proliferation across the continent as a whole, are being recast in ways both subtle and sensational by their transposition into the allegedly pathological space of northern Ghana - as are, I suggest, the lives of the men and women who inhabit it.</p> / Dissertation

Menstruation is a biological process, but it is also laden with cultrual meanings that produce society's understandings of both the body and "womanhood." The experiences of those who menstruate both reveal and inform the ways that culture mediates the relationships between biology, the body, sex, and gender. This study examines the ways that students at Scripps College, a women's college in Claremont, CA, understand and experience menstruation as part of living in an environment where the majority of students identify as female. Through ethnographic interviews, I demonstrate the ways that students use menstruation to re-envision distinctions between public and private spheres, to evaluate their relationships with other people, to gain knowledge about the body, and to question what it means to claim a female identity. The discourses of menstruation at Scripps reveal that although there is a dominant construction of the women's college as an "ideal women's space," in practice students continue to adhere to sociocultural restrictions placed on the menstruating female body, even as they attempt to create a more positive discourse.

Much of the curatorial and anthropological literature on museology has oversimplified museum spaces as monolithic colonial entities. However, recent developments in museum practice as a process of collaborative and public cross-cultural exchange are changing the way these spaces are interpreted and used. In this thesis, I examine contemporary curatorial endeavors at a number of museums and galleries in Vancouver, British Columbia, that attempt to revitalize the ways in which the cultural expressions of Indigenous artists and their communities are represented. The artists whose works are examined in this thesis locate their traditional territories along the coastline of B.C. As both separate and similar institutions, museums and art galleries are useful venues from which one may examine and chart ongoing processes of cross-cultural exchange. A curatorial exhibition project of my own: Understanding Place in Culture: Serigraphs and the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge will explore some of the obstacles and benefits of engaging in cross-cultural conversations of cultural representation. The exhibit looks at a selection of prints by Indigenous artists from the Smyth and Rickard Collections of Northwest Coast Prints from the University of Victoria Art Collections (UVAC) chosen specifically because they concern the artists’ perspectives of place as it relates to physical locations, identity, and cultural practice. The relationship between the organization of knowledge and culturally specific attachments to space and place are central to understanding how we think about, and engage with, the world around us. The relationship between places and local knowledge connects the content of the images with the space in which they are to be exhibited: the Maltwood Prints and Drawings Gallery in the McPherson Library at the university. Through interviews with artists and curators, and a review of the literature surrounding these issues, I have attempted to create an argument for the importance of space and place in support of an agentive curatorial practice. As an attempt to decolonize the museum/gallery space, this thesis argues that diverging perspectives of place are essential to the way we understand the world and our position within it. / Graduate

This dissertation examines the intersection of gender and culture in the process of identity formation among Kanaka 'Oiwi Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) men in the Hale Mua 0 Maui. Throughout the neocolonial Pacific, indigenous Oceanic men have engaged in gender practices that historically have had widely different consequences for their positions of power or marginality; the cases of Hawai'i and Aotearoa/New Zealand offer important insights into the gendered dynamics of colonialism, decolonization, and reclamation. Focusing in on a deeper history of colonization and revitalization at Pu'ukohola heiau (Kawaihae, Hawai'i), I highlight the ways in which the birth of a newly gendered tradition of bravery and warriorhood in Na Koa (The Courageous Ones) led to a reconsideration of men's roles in different sectors of the Hawaiian community. One outcome was the formation of the Hale Mua, or the "Men's House," on the island of Maui. Against the legacy of American colonialism and its concomitant discourses of death, disappearance, feminization, and domestication, the Hale Mua has endeavored to build strong, culturally grounded men that will take up their kuleana (rights and responsibilities) as members of their 'ohana (families) and the larger lahui (nation). In particular, I examine the role of discursive and embodied practices of ritual, performance, and narrative in the transformation, (re)definition, and enactment of their subjectivities as Hawaiian men. The processes through which the members of the group come to define, know, and perform these kuleana articulate with the larger projects of cultural revitalization, moral regeneration, spiritual/bodily healing, national reclamation, and the uncertain and ambiguous project of mental and political decolonization. Likewise, the very writing of this dissertation has fore-grounded both the possibilities and problematics of conducting indigenous anthropology and research at home.

Understandings of the Marshall Islands require attention to the interplay of multiple discourses of tradition, modernity, chiefs, development, and democracy from multiple sources that critically interact and mutually construct the Marshall Islands. This multi-sited, multi-vocal ethnography explores the reproduction and transformation of historic power relationships between Marshallese chiefs and commoners who incorporate and "indigenize" foreign discourses and resources into culturally informed models and practices of authority. In relationships of unequal power, such as that defined by the Compact of Free Association between the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, dominant global discourses about culture and progress enable both local and transnational hegemonies. These discourses are contextually analyzed as they are invoked and challenged in Nitijela [parliament] debates, in evaluations of the Compact of Free Association, in elites' autobiographical reflections on Marshallese-American relationships, and in foreign media representations. Historical shifts in the political and economic powers of Marshallese chiefs through three colonial administrations, and the growth of a commoner elite class since World War II further highlight the ways foreign resources are appropriated for specific local purposes that transform understandings of power and authority. With discourse as both object and method of analysis, the agency of local actors is both foregrounded and contextualized. Simplistic characterizations of chiefs, elites, commoners, and foreigners' are complicated through close attention to the ways local loyalties, colonial histories, political rivalries, and global discourses inform and frame expressions of Marshallese identities.

In most texts about Hawaiian history, the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893. Hawai'i, as a result, was then governed first by a Provisional Government, then by the Republic of Hawai'i. Such texts further note that in 1898, Hawai'i was annexed to the United States and, subsequently, became the State of Hawai'i through a vote of the people in 1959. This dissertation examines Hawaiian history from a different perspective, one based on the issue of 'legality', and on documentation that surfaced in the 1990s that challenges the United States' claim to annexation of Hawai'i. The illegality of the takeover by haole businessmen, the resistance of Queen Lili'uokalani and her loyal subjects to the takeover, statements by then-President Grover Cleveland referencing the overthrow as an "Act of War," in many ways set the tone for the present-day sovereignty movement. Highlighted are some of the activities within the Hawaiian sovereignty movement during the 1990s and the first few years of this century that are turning points in the struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty. Identified spokespersons for the movement are extensively cited, as well as individuals with strong but thoughtful opinions. Many of the citations used were gathered and saved from emails or from relevant websites. Prophecy, and the acknowledgement of spirituality as a grounding force in a unified movement, is a significant element, and serves to remind activists, and especially Hawaiian activists, that the work to re-establish the nation can only succeed if it is based in Hawaiian cultural concepts that are pono (correct or in proper relationship). Maintaining 'right relationships' between the people, the heavens and the earth is necessary to successfully carry forward the reclaimed Hawaiian nation and the identity of the people as Hawaiian nationals, as the Queen directed a century ago. Most importantly, it allows those involved in the struggle to see themselves, not as victims, but as masters of their own fate.

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