Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains x, 148 p. : ill. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation presents an original reconstruction of Kintwadi kia Bangunza, the movement of Simon Kimbangu in Belgian Congo, from the period 1921 to 1942. It interprets the movement ancestrally, arguing that Kimbangu and his initiates were spiritualists who worked to heal the dead and reverse the European occultism of the First World War. When the prophetic healers (bangunza) received the sick, they became mediators between the living and dead, performing rituals using Holy Spirit medicine to retrieve, reconcile with, ascend and avenge their ancestors. This dissertation brings together a wide variety of sources in five languages, gathered from over a year of archival research as well as several months of anthropological fieldwork. It presents a feminist, interdisciplinary analysis of the transformation of Kintwadi from its beginning as an ancestral healing movement, into a revolt movement led by the ancestors and finally, to its institutionalization as various churches. This dissertation argues that how we read Kintwadi, provides a useful prism through which to consider the politics of decolonization in Africa today.

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[Truncated abstract] Conservative, incremental and modest approaches to redressing gendered workplace cultures have had limited success in challenging the demographic profile of densely masculinist workplaces. In this thesis I draw on a study of women in police work to argue that combating highly institutionalised, entrenched masculinist practices calls for more than modesty. Indeed the study shows that ambitious, even contentious, recommendations for new procedures can play an important role when the goal is tangible change in cultures where there is an excess of men. In conclusion I posit the need for some bold risk-taking, alongside incremental tactics, if the aim is to change the habits and practices of masculinist organisations . . . This dissertation maps that interventionist process across a four-year period. In assessing the role played by the feminist methodology I analyse what people can learn to see and say about organisational practices, how they participate in or seek to undermine various forms of teamwork, as well as how individual team members display their new understandings and behaviours. I conclude that the techniques for supporting women in authoritarian, densely masculinist workplaces should include some bold and highly visible ‘critical acts’, based on commitment from the top coupled to strongly motivated and highly informed teamwork.

This dissertation examines how logics of financial securitization and heteropatriarchy have shaped the production of surplus populations in reconstruction policies from the TEPCO Fukushima nuclear disaster in post-2011 Japan. Through multi-sited fieldwork with nuclear subcontractors, labor organizers, anti-irradiation mothers, and state-recognized nuclear evacuees, it elucidates nuclear reconstruction and remediation efforts more broadly as projects that resecure financial and affective investments in nuclear imperialism and colonialism through the disciplining of communities exposed to radioactive fallout. Each chapter examines nuclear reconstruction through the partial construction of archetypes of positions within the geography of nuclear reconstruction. Through this method, an analysis emerges of how reconstruction policies and their justification through risk communication discourses of “harmful rumor” reproduce the conditions of the nuclear industry in Japan, disciplining the irradiated through a racialized domesticity imposed by American imperialism, the reproduction of an eco-eugenic heteropatriarchal organization of value, and through systems of labor brokerage inherited from Japanese colonial production. The form of the dissertation and its inclusion of autoethnographic reflections argues for a feminist transgender mode of anthropology that centers the fragmentation of anthropology, the ethnographer’s body, and classical constructions of “the field.” Through the use of poetry, translation, archives from workplace struggle, work from local historians and economists, American Studies, Anthropology, and Japanese Studies, it aims to normalize a way of doing anthropology that is characterized by the splitting of the voice, disruption, and ethnographic refusal.

<p>The adoption of children across international borders has emerged as an important cultural phenomenon. It shapes the way North Americans understand families, and forms relationships between sending and receiving countries. This dissertation explores the transnational adoption of children between Canada and China with a focus on the subjective experiences of Canadian women who have adopted children from China, their dreams, motivations and lived experiences of becoming an adoptive mother. Highlighting these narratives, this dissertation serves to balance critique with advocacy, and complicates the binary opposition in both scholarly and popular culture presentations of transnational adoption as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The dissertation also explores the social pressures that Canadian women endure and how gender expectations and cultural ideas of femininity depend on a woman experiencing motherhood. Through the window of transnational adoption this dissertation examines discourses about infertility, philanthropy, kinship, gender and the construction of transnational adoption as kidnap or rescue.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Many scholars have considered Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to be a translator of Afro-Cuban culture. In her 2019 monograph on the artist, for example, Genevieve Hyacinthe writes: “brownness made Mendieta a powerful translator of Black Atlantic forms into contemporary art language because she was not, and could never be, part of the dominant white culture.” Mendieta also announced herself as a translator (and inheritor) of Siboney and Taino cultures. Her gallery notes that to celebrate her return to Cuba’s “maternal breast” as an adult, the artist titled the rock carvings she made there with “names of zemis, or Taíno spirits, such as Bacayu for ‘Light of Day.’” I argue that alongside her claims on Taino cultural heritage we might consider her actual ancestry and claims on Indigenous women in the art of Cuban settlers before her. My dissertation considers Mendieta as a translator not of Taino myths or Black cultural practices but of ethnological texts and nationalistic folklore which catalogued and caricatured Black and Indigenous cultures. “Bacayu,” for example, is not a Taino “zemi” but rather a word she culled from a glossary of Black and Indigenous terms: a performance of knowledge over Indigenous cultures rather than a Taino cultural product. It hails from a lecherous story written by a Havana dentist about the death of an “Indian doncella.” Each chapter considers her translations of such pieces, focusing in particular on her translation choices which I suggest are motivated by her feminist and anti-imperial politics. My first chapter considers the influence of ethnographic studies on Abakuá and particularly the writings of Fernando Ortiz in her Iowa campus performances which reference crime scenes and “sacrificial” initiation ceremonies. Rather than offering unmediated access to Black religious practices, I suggest she is performing an abased view of Abakuá as seen through the (exterminationist) lens of Ortiz’s scholarship from his criminological ethnography, Los negros brujos (1906), to his less punitive but still highly fetishizing account of Abakuá in “La ‘tragedia’ de los ñáñigos” (1950). I don’t believe Mendieta translates this work to oppress Black people. Rather as a bodywork artist composing a militant, corporal language of feminist critique, she aims the violence of cultural translation toward her chauvinistic art school cohort. The second chapter considers her literary translation of “La Venus Negra, based on a Cuban legend,” which was composed by Adrián del Valle, Ortiz’s secretary at La Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País for which he collated Cuba’s first public library among other projects. The original legend can be contextualized by del Valle’s broader stewardship of Cuban letters: he penned “La Venus Negra” for a collection celebrating the Centenary of Cienfuegos from the family notes of a prominent cienfueguero, Pedro Modesto. Examining the tacky national showcase in which the legend originally appears, I consider the ways Mendieta repositions la Venus Negra as a display of her own “will to continue being Other.” In particular, her translation imposes a “Siboney” ancestry on la Venus Negra and dispenses with the conditions which determine the protagonist’s muteness (in the original, la Venus Negra is a nude Black woman who is captured and displaced from her island hideout by criollo enslavers). In Mendieta’s translation la Venus is not muted Black protest incarnate but becomes an anti-colonial symbol. Mendieta publishes the piece in the feminist magazine Heresies, illustrating the legend with a silhouette of her own body from her Silueta Series. Again, I don’t think Mendieta poses as a Ciboney woman or absents Black women in a gesture of ill will toward Black and Indigenous people. Rather, she does so as an anti-imperial strategy consistent with Fidel Castro’s cadre, as her unavowed translation of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Calibán” into her “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States” curatorial statement indicates. In the essay, Retamar, a white Cuban scholar, aligns the revolution with Black and Indigenous Cuba by “reclaiming” the caricature Caliban, which, as Coco Fusco writes, Shakespeare himself had based on an “Indian” exhibited in London. In the third chapter, I consider Mendieta’s Esculturas Rupestres, not as tributes to Taino spirits but as monuments of settler longing for mutilated Indigenous women. The legend I mentioned in the introductory paragraph, “Bacayu,” for example, is settler fanfiction about a daughter of a “cacique” whose death portends the coming of the white man and includes a lengthy description of the dead woman’s body. I also point toward the misnamings of Black women which appear within this rock series (Black Venus, Mother) which are often overlooked by scholars who ask us to read the work as Taino myth. Finally, building on these themes, I suggest a comparison to the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica: emphasizing the similarities in their “cannibalistic” approaches to translation. Although differently aligned politically (leftist, anarchist), Oiticica’s family, like Mendieta’s, were culturally and politically prominent settlers; and, like Mendieta, Oiticica is often read as a translator of Black Atlantic culture. Further both artists engaged in the caricaturing of Indigenous “American” cultures. In New York, Oiticica translated Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) to contextualize his work and the work of his friends. Artists in Brazil had adapted de Andrade’s manifesto into a translation program “cannibalizing” European and North American cultures, a practice they misidentified as Tupi as de Andrade had. Comparing Mendieta and Oiticica as translators reveals shared patterns of Latin American vanguards employing caricatures of Black and Indigenous cultures in anti-imperial performances. These caricatures and their resemblance to caricatures in the U.S. also point to older (and enduring) transnational networks of white nationalism in the Americas.

1 Abstract This diploma thesis aims to describe the practices of the low-threshold center for homeless women "Mezi svými" by which the principles of critical social work are being executed and negotiated in the broader context of "antiradical" Czech social work (Valová and Janebová, 2015) and its discourse "reintegration ". In general, social work is expected to provide its clients with protection against social exclusion or to support their reintegration into society. However, in a situation where employment is considered a key element of integration, social work gets into some difficulties because it cannot create jobs on its own (Castel, 2003). Hence I investigate how peer and social workers find a balance between 1) the ideals of critical social work that organizations subscribe to, and 2) the need to "integrate" women back into the system, activate them, and motivate them to find work. In seeking answers to this question, I pay special attention to the asymmetry of power that characterizes the relationship between social workers and their clients, and I observe the role that peer workers play in sharing power with clients. Key words: Feminist anthropology, intersection of disadvantages, critical social work, power, women in social distress, peer workers, reintegration, work.