acase@tulane.edu

CiTonga speakers in Malawi describe dominant use of the left hand as distasteful and offensive in face-to-face multimodal interactions, communicative exchanges involving both oral-auditory and visual-gestural actions. They observe a left hand taboo on religious and social grounds, linking the right hand to "good" and the left hand to "bad". Despite this widespread perception, ciTonga speakers were often observed using their left hand and eschewing the taboo even in serious situations where politeness is a social imperative. In this study, I aim to resolve this paradox by arguing that the significance of left hand taboo is domain specific. To do this, I collected 101 multimodal interactions--over 50 hours of recording--through participant observation in Cifila and Kavuzi, where ciTonga is spoken as a native language. I analyzed the gestures in two domains of interaction: everyday rituals and ordinary talks. For both domains, flexibility of handedness is determined by a ranking of four different contextual constraints. I proposed a decision matrix to describe how the type and scale of a constraint can explain the permissiveness of left hand use. CiTonga kinesic signs can elevate to taboo status when they violate the handedness convention for interlocutors with distant social relationships, but over-producing deferential signs can create a social imbalance between close affiliates. Selecting an interaction-appropriate hand preference is therefore an integral part of ciTonga communicative competence. A study on taboo in multimodality shows the ways in which domain structure and purpose shape the application of large sociocultural ideologies to spontaneous interactions in daily life. / acase@tulane.edu

The connection between the visual arts and revolutionary social change is the inspiration for this dissertation. In a 1953 interview, Aurora Reyes, Mexico's first female muralist, declared, 'Art is the medium with the greatest potential to penetrate human emotions, and therefore functions as a powerful weapon in the fight for the rights of the common man.' In the following chapters, I identify the ways in which the officially sanctioned visual narrative of Mexican history evolved during the transition from the Porfirian to the Revolutionary State. By tracing the artistic precursors of the revolution, I attempt to illuminate the role of cultural mestizaje and material culture in achieving sustainable social change in early twentieth century Mexico. The transition from Porfirian to revolutionary Mexico did not happen overnight. It required the committed efforts of several generations of artists and intellectuals. This creative cohort worked diligently to construct an alternative form of cultural nationalism that valued the nation's indigenous legacy. By simultaneously tracing the artistic and familial provenance of revolutionary artist Aurora Reyes, I provide a glimpse of the social balancing that defines revolutionary change. In addition to traditional archival sources, this interdisciplinary investigation required an analysis of 'alternative documents.' I consulted photographs, works of art, song lyrics, and poetry in an attempt to describe and explain the effects of cultural mestizaje as a formative influence on Reyes and her cohort. Their attraction to indigenous culture was not cultivated via written communications; therefore, my analysis of the process required a broad range of sources. I hope this work will inspire more historians to look to visual elements of the historic record to help explain social change. / acase@tulane.edu

When I was a young boy I played war with my friends. It was fun and exciting. We would pretend that we were out to fight the bad guys and ultimately win. Looking back at those childhood games after serving in the United States Army for three and a half years, including deployments to Iraq and Kosovo, I had no idea what I was really playing. Playing! It is anything but playing in real war. The things veterans have seen, have done and gone through in war is something that words cannot describe. How do those who have served express what they have experienced while millions back home go on with their normal day activities oblivious to those veteran’s sacrifices? This is the driving question behind my recent works and the impetus for the thesis exhibition title “Thank You.†With this body of work I am attempting to bring attention to the sacrifices of the men and women who have served in order to provide us with our basic freedoms every day. These freedoms are too often taken for granted. We need to have a better understanding of those individuals who have enabled us to enjoy our everyday lives. I want to encourage a better understanding between those who have served and those who have not. I hope to raise awareness about what these brave volunteers sacrifice for us every day. / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

Armed conflicts have heavily impacted Latin American societies for centuries. Yet the numerous studies that have examined these armed conflicts have devoted little attention to the primary instrument of this violence: the firearm. This dissertation fills this gap by providing the first in-depth study of representations of weaponry in songs and literary texts from various armed conflicts, including the Mexican Revolution, the Sandinista Revolution, and postwar Central America. It examines the function of firearms in songs, photos and texts about revolutionaries, guerrilla fighters and demobilized soldiers. Taking the firearm as an artifact and trope, this dissertation analyzes the relationship between direct violence, politics and different projects of modernity. The first chapter examines corridos and literary texts about the Mexican Revolution such as El águila y la serpiente by Martín Luis Guzmán and Cartucho by Nellie Campobello. The second chapter analyzes a key but understudied expression of the Sandinista Revolution: the music of Carlos and Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy, in particular the albums Guitarra Armada, Amando en tiempos de guerra and Canto épico al FSLN. The last chapter deals with the figure of the demobilized combatant in Central American postwar literature: in the novel El arma en el hombre by Horacio Castellanos Moya and the short stories “La noche de los escritores asesinos” by Jacinta Escudos and De fronteras by Claudia Hernández. Incorporating theories about modernity, weapons technology, object-subject relations, affect, militarization and gender, this research shows that: 1) intellectuals are drawn to violence but try to position themselves outside of it; 2) often a female element is used to legitimize armed struggle and to soften its implications; 3) the use of a firearm can be deeply democratic in nature but lead to a profound militarization and traumatization of politics and society; and 4) precariousness lies at the core of many insurgent acts, since it is often precarité that leads to rising up in arms, which is itself a precarious political gesture. This examination of the relation between war technology and society testifies to the deep interconnectedness of modernity and violence and to the need for a more radical democracy

This dissertation examines the history of gold mining among the Wanyamongo people of Tarime District from the 1930s to 2009. It argues that the establishment of gold mines in Nyamongo in the early 1930s created intra-community conflicts among the Wanyamongo people. These conflicts divided the community, turning young men against elders and wives against their husbands. This tension rarely reached overt levels during the colonial period, although violent confrontations were not totally absent. However, the conflicts are discernible in the narratives about gold mining. The dissertation argues that these conflictual discourses about gold mining continued into the post-colonial era, although their content changed over time. From the turn of this century these conflicts increasingly became violent. Often characterized as evidence of local communities' opposition to the intrusion of foreign companies I draw on oral sources and Tanzanian archives to argue that such turbulence is best understood by examining the social and economic relations of the residents of such communities. In Nyamongo this violence often pitted unemployed young men against fellow Kuria-speaking men who were employed by the mine as guards and in the Community Relations Department. I also argue that the young men who invaded the mine did not want the mine to close because their very survival was dependent upon the presence of a large company that can bring deeper ore to the surface. The dissertation also argues that, contrary to common wisdom that recognizes the Second World War as the beginning of the decline of the gold mining sector, in the Lake Province gold production actually continued to increase until the late 1950s. I also argue that when these mines closed in the 1960s and early 1970s it was not because of Julius Nyerere's economic policy, as is commonly believed. When Nyerere's government nationalized the industry in 1973, all of Tanzania's big gold mines had already closed. In the 1970s and 1980s Tanzania experienced an economic crisis marked by high inflation and a shortage of basic commodities. I argue that the miners of Nyamongo escaped this crisis because gold allowed them to engage in a lucrative trade that revolved around the smuggling of gold to Kenya. The dissertation also shows that when the Tanzanian government adopted neo-liberal economic reforms in the mid-1980s, the residents of Nyamongo embraced large-scale foreign investment in the form of an Australian-owned mining company. This embrace challenges the conventional view that depicts foreign mining companies as unwanted intruders in Tanzania's mining communities and the local small-scale miners as victims of neo-liberal economic policies.