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.

In a dissertation about museums on the American frontier in the early 19th century, I trace the demise of scientific cabinets and the accompanying rise of popular, pseudo-educational entertainments. Though I have written principally about Cincinnati between the years 1820 and 1830, I have also examined other Ohio museums operating in this decade and the cabinet of curiosities exhibited by General William Clark in St. Louis. I conclude that western museums in general gave way to dazzling but suspicious displays because these latter were far more profitable than scientific cabinets and because the promoters of popular entertainment were more interested in attracting audiences than were men of science in the West. In following the disintegration of scientific cabinets, I focus particularly on various museum efforts to attract public attention to systematized displays of western natural history and culture. The Western Museum in Cincinnati probably owned the nation's most extensive collection of regional specimens in the 1820s and 30s but its displays were not profitable enough to keep the institution in business. In the hopes of resuscitating the museum's fortunes, the owner of the museum built optical “machines” and cosmoramas that offered visitors a grander setting in which to behold pictures of local landmarks and local people. These were moderately popular. I show that their most successful incarnations succeeded by affording visitors images of aristocratic splendor; these provided the museum's customers with a flattering context for self-evaluation. I also show that the success of these exhibitions depended on the precision with which the museum's artists could copy nature. Ultimately, I argue, this enthusiasm for the accurate copy expressed itself in the wildly profitable household goods marketplace of the 1850s in which mechanically reproduced items were prized over all things handmade. In the latter chapters of my dissertation, I show how the Western Museum restored itself to prosperity by staging exhibits that provided visitors with a sharp, critical view of landscape and culture in the West. The criticism was directed by Frances Trollope, a recent immigrant to Cincinnati, who employed her children, their drawing instructor, and the sculptor Hiram Powers to construct painted, mechanized visions of the spiritual condition of western citizens. My dissertation shows that the windfall generated by Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1831) was anticipated by the success of her “Invisible Girl” and her “Infernal Regions,” shown at the Western Museum in Cincinnati between 1828 and 1830. I argue that these exhibits succeeded so well because, like her books, they proposed a drastic but resonant vision of life in the West in which the coarseness of local manners, religious customs, western art and nature itself in the Ohio Valley was indignantly denounced. Trollope's Infernal Regions was profitable enough to be copied by the other contemporary museum in Cincinnati; it was also recast in panoramic facsimile in St. Louis, and eventually transported, intact, in 1839, to the City Saloon on Broadway, in lower Manhattan.

This is a study of how sixteenth-century Spaniards used fundamental aspects of material culture, and the ideas and attitudes surrounding them, to subjugate the Aztec empire of Mexico. Edicts, relaciones, court decisions, letters and chronicles have been employed to discern the attitudes of the time. Those attitudes reveal that food, clothing and shelter were used both to distinguish Spaniards from Amerindians and to bind conquerors and conquered to the same social system. Principles of hierarchy and reciprocity were employed by Spaniards and Amerindians to define the appropriate customs and means of exchange in a new, syncretic culture of conquest. Together, Spaniards and Amerindians created a sixteenth-century body politic and organic society in what Europeans deemed a "New World".

This work deals with "special" burials among the Anglo-Saxon and Slavs in the early medieval period. The individuals in these graves are frequently labelled as "deviant", "criminals", as "socially other". This dissertation aims to focus more on the possible danger which "special" individuals represented for their communities after their death and on the possibility that the “special” burials were those of potential revenants or vampires. The introduction begins with a brief sketch of the evolution of approaches to burial by archaeologists and historians writing in English. It goes on to argue that “deviant burial” is not a self-explanatory category, but can be applied to a variety of very different inhumations. It suggests it might be better termed “special’ burial or the burial of the “special’ dead and formed part of regular inhumation practice; and it argues that the best way to understand these practices is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural framework. In particular, it discusses the possible insights offered by the development of the cognitive study of religion and belief, with particular reference to death and burial practices and introduces a “theoretical alternative model” for accessing how the deceased was treated from corpse to the grave. Chapter 1 examines Anglo-Saxon "special" burials, focusing on selected cemeteries where we can observe multiple occurrences of "special" burials or the employment of several "special" practices in one locality. These will first be analyzed with regard to the location of deposition and secondly compared within the wider framework of Anglo-Saxon "special" burial practices. Comparison with "special" funerary rites recorded elsewhere in the world by anthropologists will lead to the proposal of an alternative approach to some of recent and current interpretations of these practices. Chapter 2 focuses on Slavic archaeological material represented by the "special" graves excavated in Slovakia and the Czech Republic: both burials from cemeteries and also a group of individuals deposited in a range of objects found during excavation of Slavic settlements - in grain silos, wells or pits. As with Anglo-Saxon graves, the Slavic "special" burials are analyzed from the point of view of location and then in more global context of Slavic society. The possible interpretations of these findings are discussed. Chapter 3 focuses on the primary sources and their descriptions of "pagan" funerary rituals. It charts shifts in ideas and attitudes towards "special" funeral practices ranging from descriptions of these "pagan" practices, through efforts to delimit and penalize them in the law codes, to narratives of revenant sightings and descriptions of how to recognize and destroy them. This chapter will indicate some of the theories and new approaches proposed in the thesis. The concluding chapter brings these strands together. In particular, it discusses the possible insights offered by the development of the cognitive study of religion and belief, with particular reference to death and burial practices. It examines the changing patterns of religion - from traditional or "pagan" to Christianity – and the ways in which this change influenced both "special" burial practices and perceptions of vampires and revenants, with particular reference to the Christian doctrine of Purgatory. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the theories proposed on the basis of the material collected in this work and reference to corresponding interpretative shifts in present day archaeology and history.

This thesis describes a new approach tor investigating cairns, stone enclosures, stone alignments and other small archaeological features found in the deserts around the Egyptian Nile valley. Investigation of these features has previously been restricted by their ephemeral nature, damage from modern development and the limited artefactual, epigraphic or archaeological evidence associated with them. This research focuses on a case study of eight cairns and adjacent courts at the Middle Kingdom carnelian mine of Stelae Ridge in the Gebel el-Asr quarries in southern Egypt. While accepting previous interpretations of the cairn-courts as ritual structures created for the worship of local divinities, this research sought a fuller interpretation of the site in its landscape context and a more nuanced understanding of the structures, their chronological development and the decisions which governed their location and layout. This was achieved through systematic visibility analysis of the eight cairn-courts with geographic information system (GIS) software, which provided new data concerning the patterns of visibility associated with the structures. Interpretation of these patterns in the context of the archaeological and textual evidence from the cairn-courts, practical experience of visibility at the site and evidence from the wider cultural context provided a new and more detailed understanding of the site. Stelae Ridge was chosen because cairns upon it made highly visible landmarks, particularly for people travelling south towards the other sites in the Gebel el-Asr gneiss quarrying region. Initially practical, the Stelae Ridge cairns also developed a ritual function, creating tension between the highly visible cairns and the secluded ritual courts, and suggesting that the cairn-building process became ritualised. By the end of the cairn-building period, in the reign of Amenemhat III, new cairns were constructed in less visible positions, suggesting that the ritual aspects of the cairn-courts had largely subsumed their earlier practical function as landmarks. This type of GIS research has never been undertaken on Egyptian archaeological sites and previous interpretations of visibility in Egyptian contexts have been limited. The detailed interpretation of the Stelae Ridge cairn-courts achieved here, shows that the technology and approach applied to this research can make a meaningful contribution to the investigation of other similar non-formal structures, and at Egyptian sites in general. It also reveals that GIS visibility analysis can answer relevant archaeological questions, when employed as a tool for data generation and properly contextualised with other evidence from the site.

The primary purpose of this proposal is to evaluate the strengths and weakness of an Afrocentric education in an urban school to promote the academic achievement of impecunious black children. This study is important to understanding ways to improve the academic achievement of low-income and disadvantaged black students who are marginalized from the mainstream of American society. This proposal analyzes educational and social forces that prevent poor black children from achieving in urban schools and policies that separate them from the general school population. The study addressed the state of blacks in America today, and shows reasons why urban schools must change to save black students. The study also shows that the current educational system in urban communities does not work. The study discusses whether or not school integration has helped black children improve in their overall educational experience. This study examines and explores the development, characteristic, learning style, and cultural backgrounds of teachers and students who interact in traditional public schools in insolvent urban communities. This study also examines a critical pedagogy in the sociology of the black experience. This part of the study explores black children in a social and historical context in American society. The major finding in this study showed a significant improvement in students' academic achievement based upon documents from the state's DOE and it has renewed Bannker's charter. The sentiments from the major stakeholders appeared to be satisfied with the overall performance of the school and in the direction its going. The positive results on standardize norm reference test has soften the opposition once held by some of the stakeholders in respect to its radical departure from integration. Many parents have witnessed the positive changes in students' self-esteem and self-worth at Banneker and in the community. Therefore, many of the stakeholders believe that education programs of a cultural relevant motif designed does enhanced low-income and disadvantaged black students' academic achievement. This study was limited to low-income and disadvantaged black children attending urban schools where every effort to desegregated these schools has failed and the majority of children has failed and is continuing to fail.

<p>My dissertation project is an ethnographic history of "homes of capital," merchant homes located in port-cities of Gujarat in various states of splendor and decrepitude, which continue to mark a long history of Indian Ocean cross-cultural trade and exchange. Located in western South Asia, Gujarat is a terraqueous borderland, connecting the western and eastern arenas of the Indian Ocean at the same time as it connects territorial South Asia to maritime markets. Gujarat's dynamic port-cities, including Rander, Surat and Bombay, were and continue to be home to itinerant merchants, many with origins and investments around the littoral from Arabia to Southeast Asia. I argue that rather than a point of origin or return, Gujarat's merchants--many of whom are themselves itinerants from Arabia, Persia and Northwest India--produce and produced Gujarat as a place of arrival and departure: as a crucible of mobility. Gujarat's merchant homes offer a model of transregional engagement produced through the itineraries of merchants who continue to see the regions bordering the Indian Ocean as an extension of their homes.</p><p>While historians have generally studied these merchants through the bureaucratic archival records of imperial trade-companies, my project examines the yet-unexplored archives that collect around historic merchant homes. Curated by a current generation of merchant families who continue to ply old routes at the same time as they forge new ones, merchant homes offer a way to study oceanic connections from the inside-out and capital in cultural terms. Drawing on a rich array of collective and personal ethnographic and historical materials within homes, including architectural form; material objects; private journals, datebooks and travelogues; visual media; and merchant memory, my project brings into view a mercantile space-time on ocean's edge. Though emerging from concrete ethnographic and historical materials that cast powerful light on Gujarati merchant mobility in the British Empire over the course of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, my account of "homes of capital" pursues mercantile imaginings across long tranches of time routed through the political economic transformations of the period stretching between the tenth and twelfth centuries. I argue that these non-linear imaginings structured by oceanic mobility exist in the interstices of imperial, colonial and post-colonial state space.</p><p> </p><p>Placing merchant imaginings at the center of my analysis, my dissertation argues that the Indian Ocean was and continues to be a key spatial and temporal motivator of mercantile life. My project makes explicit the terms of this intimacy through a "chronotopic" study of merchant homes across Gujarat. Homes of capital in its broadest sense also include mercantile buildings like bridges, libraries, funerary sites, mosques and community centers, which, when linked together, created shaded pathways across the region in the face of an emergent colonial state centered on Bombay. In doing so I also reveal a more capacious mercantile subject, showing how new kinds of nineteenth-century circulations of Gujarati-language texts across merchant libraries, reading rooms and homes were embedded in and shaped a longue durée oceanic topography. My project documents the range of visual, material, textual and affective modes from within this topography through which merchants gave and give form to such a terraqueous region.</p> / Dissertation

Talvez demasiado complexa, caminho tortuoso para a compreensão das sociedades ameríndias, a questão do político parece receber pouca atenção por parte dos americanistas. Diante deste relativo e peculiar abandono, esta pesquisa visa fornecer estímulos e subsídios para a retomada das reflexões a respeito. Mais precisamente, alvitro sopesar o silêncio identificado e localizar o objeto a política tal como emerge num panorama duplamente restrito: à etnologia jê, dedicada a uma conjunção antropológica homônima de grupos indígenas, e ao período que, segundo os próprios jê-ólogos (cf. Coelho de Souza 2002), circunscreveria o processo de instituição de sua subdisciplina enquanto domínio científico relativamente autônomo, limitado, de um lado, pelo momento em que a etnologia forma, nomeia e individualiza os Jê no início do século XX , e, de outro, pelos esforços pioneiros de Curt Nimuendajú e pelo empreendimento sintético em que consistiu o Handbook of South American Indians (cf. Steward 1949). Espécie de Arqueologia (cf. Clastres 1980), o presente trabalho rechaça a pretensão de reagir à raridade com que o objeto a política jê encontra-se devidamente formalizado como uma espécie de pobreza enunciativa a compensar, e impõe-se o dever de tratar a variedade dos sentidos que lhe são imputados e a heterogeneidade de suas proveniências não como obstáculos no caminho de uma síntese qualquer, mas, justamente, como aquilo a descrever e a analisar. / Perhaps a rather slippery path to the understanding of Amerindian societies, perhaps an avoidable complexity, politics is a subject usually met with silence by americanists. Given its relative and peculiar abandonment, this research aims to supply incentives and materials for forthcoming reflections. More precisely, I try to locate and reconstruct the object politics along a double-restricted panorama: to Gê Ethnology committed to a homonymous anthropological conjunction of indigenous groups; and to the period which, according to my fellow gê-ologists (cf. Coelho de Souza 2002), encompasses the sub-disciplines establishment as relatively autonomous scientific niche, limited, on one side, by the ethnological forming, naming and individualization of the Gê in the early twentieth century , and, on the other, by Curt Nimuendajús pioneer efforts and by Julien Stewards synthetic enterprise, i.e., the Handbook of South American Indians (1949) later on the course of that same century. Some kind of Archeology (cf. Clastres 1980), this work repels the pretense of regarding the objects Gê politics lack of formal definitions as enunciative deficiencies to compensate for, and undertakes the incumbency of treating its polysemic fleeting substance(s) not as obstacles impeding any sort of synthesis, but as the very stuff of its descriptions and analyses.

O tema da investigação trata da presença estrangeira no desenvolvimento das Ciências Sociais no Brasil, entre as décadas de 1930 e 1950 tendo como fio condutor a atuação profissional e intelectual de Donald Pierson nos Estados Unidos e em dois momentos no Brasil, durante o desenvolvimento de sua pesquisa sobre relações raciais na Bahia e o período de atuação como professor na Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo. Esta pesquisa é desenvolvida no interior da área de história das ciências sociais com foco no momento de institucionalização das universidades brasileiras e projetos de instituições estrangeiras como a Fundação Rockefeller e a Smithsonian Institution. / The theme of this research is the foreign presence in the development of the Social Sciences in Brazil, between the decades of 1930 and 1950, having as guide line the professional performance and intellectual production of Donald Pierson in the United States and Brazil, between the development of his research on racial relation in Bahia and the period of his work as professor at the Free School of Sociology and Political Science of São Paulo. This research is developed within the area of Social Sciences History, and the focus is the moment of institutionalization of the Brazilian Universities and projects of foreign institutions such as Rockefeller Foundation and Smithsonian Institution.

An experimental attempt to consider the history of the London Missionary Society (LMS) from the lens of the artefacts that accumulated at its London headquarters, which included a museum from 1814 until 1910. The movement of these things through space and over time offers a rich perspective for considering the impacts on Britain of its history of overseas missionary activity. Building on anthropological debates about exchange, material culture, and the agency of things, the biographies of particular objects are explored in relation to the processes involved in the assemblage, circulation and dispersal of the LMS collection. Methodologically, the research is an attempt to develop what Latour has called a symmetrical anthropology, with archaeological approaches to the material products of historical processes as an important dimension of this. Drawing on attempts to study ‘along the grain’ in historical anthropology, and to move beyond iconoclasm as a critical stance, it is argued that museums should be understood as ‘other places’ in which objects are made by techniques of inscription and confinement which have a significant ceremonial dimension. At the same time, certain charismatic objects are shown to have transcended these contexts of confinement, affecting those they encounter, and shaping history around themselves.