<p>Detta är en reflekterande uppsats som behandlar utvecklingen av stridssystemet ”Levande Strid” samt processen att utveckla en animerad film som illustrerar systemet.</p><p>Målet med verket har varit att genom animationer skapa en varierad visuell upplevelse i striderna i action- och rollspel.</p><p>Uppsatsen inleds med en beskrivning av bakgrunden, syftet och målet med verket. Därefter följer en redovisning av den teoretiska bakgrund som har använts som underlag för utvecklingen av ett stridssystem, skrivandet av ett designdokument  och arbetet med själva animationerna. Efter detta beskrivs hur jag har använt mig av teorin för att skapa system, dokument och animationer. Animationerna har varit fokus och tar således mest plats i uppsatsen.</p><p>Resultatet av arbetet har blivit ett system som framhäver variation i stridsmomenten i action- och rollspel, ett designdokument som beskriver detta system på en konceptuell nivå och en film som genom animationer illustrerar och demonstrerar systemet.</p>

Texte remanié de: Doctoral thesis--Polythechnical university of Valencia, 2003. / Bibliogr. p. 149-154.

This dissertation is an ethnographic work describing how foodways have become central to identity negotiation in a Maya village that has recently been impacted by evangelical conversion and tourism. This village is in the region of Quintana Roo, Mexico best known for its involvement in the Caste Wars of Yucatán and historic resistance to assimilation to Mexican identity. However, in recent years, the demand for inexpensive labor in the hotel zone of the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo has led to improved infrastructure and transportation to these villages. With this improved infrastructure has come increased outside interaction including the establishment of evangelical churches and day labor buses. These combined influences of religion and labor changes have led to new ways of negotiating identity that had not previously existed in village life here. Because life in this village had always centered on subsistence farming and its associated food getting and food making tasks, the option for wage labor and evangelical religion have provided a support system for those unable or unwilling to participate in traditional forms of subsistence. The new social structures are often negotiated using food and foodways as a declaration of belonging or resistance. My work provides vignettes describing these processes of identity negotiation at the national, regional and familial levels. / text

An important dimension of contemporary capitalism is the global spread of intellectual property rights law, drawing new attention by governments and media to the unauthorized copying of fashion brands. In this dissertation, I draw on sixteen months of ethnographic research with small-scale, indigenous Maya garment manufacturers to examine the cultural and moral context of brand piracy in Guatemala. I analyze what practices of copying and imitation, some of which qualify as piracy under national and international law, among Maya manufacturers reveal about two aspects of the social field: first, changing economic and cultural conditions following waves of neoliberal economic and legal reform, and, second, the nonlinear reproduction of forms of moral and legal reckoning at the margins of the global economy and amidst mounting insecurities that include rising violent crime rates and legal impunity for violent crime. I examine how practices of copying and imitation among manufacturers and competitive behavior more generally are evaluated locally in light of kin relations that promote the sharing of knowledge and resources within a somewhat loose property regime and given ideologies of race and nation that encourage class-based solidarity among Maya people. I find that the normative models and business practices evident among these manufacturers parochialize official portraits of progress, business ethics, and development promoted in neoliberal policy agendas and international law. In addition, I analyze significant gaps between what fashion and branding mean in Guatemalan Maya communities and how they are understood in international projects of legal harmonization that are also about re-branding and re-imagining the Guatemalan nation. Neoliberal statecraft following a long internal armed conflict in Guatemala involves policy approaches that amplify the presence of global brands while compounding conditions of social and economic inequality that limit Maya men and women’s access to authorized goods. Meanwhile, Maya people are invited to participate in a modernist vision of citizenship and social progress that encourages a privatized model of indigenous identity mediated by branded commodities and formal market transactions. The brand emerges as a powerful medium through which claims to legitimacy and authority and senses of belonging are negotiated at national and local levels. / Anthropology

The following report describes the excavation and preliminary analysis of Burial 5 at Group A of the Medicinal Trail archaeological site in northwest Belize. The excavation of Burial 5 occurred over the duration of the 2009 and 2010 field seasons, and this report focuses on the 2010 portion of this excavation, which was conducted within the field laboratory at the Programme for Belize Archaeology Project. In this report, I describe the methods utilized during the 2010 excavation and preliminary analysis processes. I also discuss some of the theory relevant to Maya mortuary practices as they relate to my interpretations of the findings from Burial 5. / text

No description available.

This dissertation research examines the political significance of plazas in ancient Maya society from the Late Preclassic period through the Terminal Classic period (ca. 150 B.C.- A.D. 900). I consider plazas not as by-products of temples and palaces, but as political arenas in which different social actors created and transformed social realities and values. My primary question is how power relations and ideologies emerge from people's practices and their engagements with materiality--more specifically, the construction of plazas and ritual performances. I address this question through the combination of various methods including the following: spatial analyses based on GIS, extensive excavations, epigraphic studies, and material analyses through petrographic microscopy and particle-induced X-ray emission (PIXE). Using these methods, I conducted archaeological research at El Palmar, a Maya polity located in southeastern Campeche of Mexico. During the 2007-2014 field seasons, I investigated eleven plazas in total with eight located in the urban core and three in its outlying areas. The results from the urban core suggest that the power relations at El Palmar changed through time. Such changes are reflected in the designs of both public and exclusive plazas and associated ritual events. The results in the north outlying plaza, where a hieroglyphic stairway was built around A.D.726, further suggest that a group of officials negotiated their status and power with rulers. The protagonist of the event was not an El Palmar ruler but an official who emphasized diplomatic relations with foreign rulers, giving the El Palmar ruler only scant reference. Considering inter-regional contexts, however, they were not only engaged in internal power struggles, but also cooperated to negotiate with foreign dynasties. This complex mechanism of power was closely tied to the remodeling of the plaza and ideological symbolism materialized by mortuary practice, fire rituals, and termination rituals. My dissertation concludes that ritual performances in outlying plazas were not merely a reflection of royal ideology promoted by rulers but could have introduced new power and ideological relations in the community, relations that would be difficult to identify solely through the analysis of the main plaza.

Popular images of indigenous cultures, both past and present, have served to construct pernicious racial stereotypes of native peoples throughout the Americas. These stereotypes have led to the discrimination and marginalization of native peoples; however, they also have functioned to construct identities and cultural values of non-Indian people. Existing scholarship on the representation of native peoples of Latin America has focused on the ways that nineteenth-century elites in that region appropriated certain elements of indigenous cultures to construct a sense of national unity and historical continuity. However, this scholarship has overlooked the ways that images of the Maya produced social and cultural identities outside of Latin America, as the U.S. public avidly consumed a variety of images of the Maya and commercialized their material culture in the early twentieth century. Analyzing the question of identity construction through the appropriation of Mayan culture, this dissertation focuses on the U.S. construction and use of a particular racial discourse about native people. Public audiences consumed racial discourses in the context of a series of transnational cultural initiatives, including international expositions, popular film, and textile exhibits, which shaped public understandings of the Maya. I argue that despite growing public interest in Mayan culture and shifting understandings about the relationship between race and culture, these venues of visual display reinforced and reproduced older racial discourses of Indian degeneracy. I examine documentary evidence, such as travel brochures, newspapers, and archival materials to show that sites of visual display invented a new language of "indigeneity," which functioned to define not only native peoples, but also to shape U.S. public social identities. I conclude that the production of racial discourses of the Maya as culturally and racially inferior throughout the twentieth century defined contemporary understandings of U.S. identities and the role of indigenous history.

Some six million people in modern Central America are considered to be “Maya” and thereby descendants of an ethnic group that created one of the great early civilizations of mankind. The present study, in a first section, looks in some detail at how the Maya became a group of its own, slowly separating itself from Mesoamerican neighbors, taking on an ethnic identity, markers and boundaries Attention is paid to what can be considered uniquely Maya and what remained features shared with other groups. This historic section follows the Maya until early colonization. The next section gives an overview of modern Mayaness, activism and Maya claims to preserve and revitalize a supposed heritage, taking it into the 21st century. With the historic section as a mirror and background, the study aims at identifying how Mayaness is maintained through time, how silent testimonies tell us about the use in the past of ethnic and cultural markers. Proofs are given of such elements still alive. The text goes on to discuss the future of Maya ethnic identity and culture, its continuity while changing.

The work of Maya Deren, Marguerite Duras and Margarethe von Trotta, three filmmakers who are also authors, inhabits a space between patriarchy and polemic feminism. The result, a refocusing and re-arrangement of traditional literary and cinematic discourse, may be termed a feminine authorship. The principles of this authorship mainly derive from Laura Mulvey’s controversial but influential application of psychoanalytical theory to feminine cinema in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Screen, 1975), an investigation of the “male gaze” in film. Her propositions have been further developed by critics such as Teresa de Lauretis (1980), Mary Anne Doane (1987) and Judith Mayne (1990) as well as Mulvey herself (1981). Mulvey’s approach shares with classical psychoanalysis an emphasis on the unconscious and its visual manifestations in dream and memory. Deren, Duras and von Trotta encode the latter in spatial imagery expressive of both women’s repression and their hidden resourcefulness, most frequently drawing on the gothic novel and the exotic tale. In order to accomplish their vision, the three filmmakers variously offer original interpretations of well-established modes and genres such as surrealism (Deren), the nouveau roman (Duras), and the documentary (von Trotta), but none could have done so without conceding to a number of compromises with patriarchal discourse, partly for economic, partly for ideological reasons. This thesis asserts (in contrast to Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Peggy Kamuf) that these compromises need not be read as a flaw, but contribute to a discourse in its own right. By analyzing authors from diverse cultural, social and linguistic backgrounds who, moreover, cannot be clearly categorized within the alleged dichotomy of patriarchy and feminism, this study seeks to expand the definition of feminism across national and ideological boundaries. In so doing, it may contribute to the study of other women authors and filmmakers whose views and methods have been similarly unorthodox.