Abstracts
Panel 1. The Politics of Historical MemoryMaureen Donohue (Tufts University)
“God Blessed America From Our Steeple": Tourism and Religion at the Old North Church
The Old North Church, officially titled Christ Church in the City of Boston, is a crossroad of historical and religious significance. The church was not only immortalized in Longfellow's poem "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere", but is also a small but active Episcopal church. Fundamentally, the research question examined the relationship between tourism and religion. How does tourism affect, directly and indirectly, the practice of religion? How does religion influence the historical message? How is the civil religion seen at the Old North Church? To answer these questions, four services were attended and three "coffee hours", informal gatherings after the 11:00 service. Informal interviews were conducted with several members of the congregation in this setting, and a formal interview was conducted with Reverend Stephen T. Ayres, Vicar at the Old North Church. At these coffee hours, member directories and church newsletters were available, in addition to weekly bulletins, all of which contained information about the church and its congregation. In addition, many information sessions for visitors were attended to see what message was given to tourists and if this message focused on the congregation or the historical aspect.
Cathy Stanton (Tufts University)
Locals, blow-ins, and outsiders: A taxonomy of discursive authority at an industrial heritage site
Lowell, Massachusetts is a former textile manufacturing city that has invested heavily in heritage-based redevelopment strategies—museums, a national historical park, architectural and landscape restoration, folk and ethnic festivals—as a way to reinvent the city in a postindustrial society. Through a complex series of negotiations over the past thirty years, the various groups involved in heritage discourse in Lowell have arrived at a division of cultural labor in which local natives, newcomers, and those from outside the city are granted separate spheres of authority within the overall project. This paper will describe these categories of authority, explore how they are constructed, and investigate their implications for community participation and critical perspectives within Lowell's heritage realm.
My research shows that discursive authority in this realm is organized around two poles: localness and outsiderhood. Within the local pole, there is a further distinction between "true locals" (those who can claim both nativity in the city and association with one of its many ethnic/immigrant groups) and newcomers to Lowell. Among the newcomers, those who belong to recent immigrant groups (notably southeast Asians, but also Latinos, Brazilians, and Africans) are granted a kind of provisional localness by virtue of their association with ethnicity and immigration, qualities which reinforce the historical and cultural narratives told within the heritage realm. Newcomers who are not identified as ethnic are forever considered "blow-ins," a specific Lowell term for non-natives. While these distinctions help to support considerable local participation in cultural production in Lowell, they also privilege members of long-established Euro-American ethnic communities over newer immigrants, and curtail the ability of "outsider" public historians and other critical professionals to raise questions about inequalities and complexities in status quo relationships of power within the city and within the heritage realm itself.
Sari Alper (Wellesley College)
Visigothic Hispania and Spanish Nationalism
Alex Green (Brandeis University)
Artifact Acquisition: The Contemporary Culture of Looting
This paper explores the contemporary “culture of looting” as it exists in the post-Iraq War setting. I attempt to describe the entire spectrum of this culture, from the looters to the middlemen and ultimately, to the buyers. The goal of this work is to expose the similarities and differences between scientific excavation and unscientific excavation. I also consider issues of perception- the perceptions that archaeologists have of looters and buyers, and the perceptions that buyers have of archaeologists. These perceptions are fundamentally important in understanding how each of the involved groups justifies its way of going about artifact collection.
This is also an investigation into the ways in which legitimacy can be created for objects that have been obtained illegitimately. The supposed routes that objects can take towards their final destinations will be analyzed to identify points at which histories and specificities are created to enhance the appropriateness of purchasing or otherwise obtaining looted objects. To best describe these routes I analyze more conventional aspects of the antiquities market, specifically looking at museums’ and auction houses’ relationships to looted items.
Iraq will be the backdrop for this paper. Archaeologists with firsthand knowledge of the present looting situation in Iraq are being consulted for general and specific information that can lend insight into the more inaccessible ends of the culture’s spectrum. This information will lend itself substantially to understanding how and why non-professional looters turn to looting and specifically, how they perceive their own culture and culture history.
It is my hope to present a clear image of the contemporary culture of looting. An understanding of this culture cannot help but lend insight into the entire world of artifact acquisition and its relationship to the anthropological field.
Anastasia Konstantakatou (Tufts University)
The Construction of Ethnic Identity among Young Latin Americans of Greek Origin
A study of immigration patterns of the Greeks reveals that the United States, Australia and Germany were the three most popular destinations. The Greeks started immigrating in the end of the 19th and throughout the early and middle 20th Century, in an attempt to find a better, more prosperous life, as well as for ideological reasons. A relatively small wave of immigration occurred in Latin America. Today, there are approximately 25,000 Greeks in Brazil, 20,000 in Argentina, 3,000 in Venezuela, 2,000 in Chile and smaller communities in other countries. Lack of access to Greek cultural materials, professors, and gradually decreasing population are factors that threaten the Greek presence in Argentina. Thirty years ago, the population of Greeks in Buenos Aires alone was 40-45,000 people. Still, the sense of "Greek Identity" has not vanished.
In this paper I will focus on the young Greeks of South America. Through a series of interviews, I will explore the relation that this younger population has with its country of origin. During the past year, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in conjunction with the General Secretariat of Greeks Abroad (GGAE) organized "a hosting program" offering young people of Greek origin from South America, Africa and Oceania the opportunity to get acquainted with the Greek culture and language. My field work was based on over fifty interviews conducted with participants in this program. I have also been in contact with South American representatives to the World Council of Hellenes Abroad.
My work investigates the importance of Greek Heritage in the lives of these young Greek-Latin Americans. Interviews therefore focus on such components of Greek identity as language, history, religion, traditions and customs in an attempt to get a sense of how immersed they have been in Greek culture. I also try to determine each participant's connection to Greek culture and the importance they give to their Greek origins. Ultimately, I try to understand how the Greek Identity is constructed, manifested and transmitted among this relatively small minority of Latin America. Utilizing material from studies on identity and immigration, I hope to reach conclusions on this understudied population and to discover if the reactions to their host countries are substantially different to those of Greeks in other countries such as the US and Australia.
Cecilia Dos Santos (Tufts University) and Lexie McGovern (Tufts University)
Salvadorans In Somerville: Changes in Family Structure and Gender Roles Among Salvadoran Immigrants.
Immigrants face enormous sociocultural strains. It is poorly understood how these strains may be affected by the family structure and timing of immigration. Over the course of fall, 2003, we conducted research comparing Salvadorian couples who had families in the United States with those who immigrated as families. Research was under the direction of Professor Pacini-Hernandez, as part of her Urban Borderlands course. We were assisted by two students from Somerville High School, in association with the Welcome Project located in the Mystic View Housing Development in Somerville, MA. Our high school partners provided us with initial interviews with their family members. From here we turned to relatives and friends of our first narrators. We also generated a list of possible participants through the help of various community leaders.
We recorded life-history interviews, usually at informants' homes, of ten Salvadoran immigrant families. Interviews typically lasted 45 minutes to an hour and were conducted entirely in Spanish. We focused on shifts in the gendered work structure, changes in the relationships between males and females, as well as relationships between parents and their children. No data were obtained about the legal status of any of our narrators.
Our narrators indicated that families that began here had a less difficult time adapting to different cultural values, such as American gender roles, than couples that began families in El Salvador. Our narrators made it clear that these families who come from El Salvador are more likely to separate due to the strain of cultural differences. These couples struggled to define gender roles within a new society that demands dramatically different norms.
Our research also focused on the role of single parenthood, specifically single motherhood in the immigrant community. Often this culture clash among couples leads to dissolution and single parenthood. Our narrators also indicated that women who became independent of their partners while in a relationship more confidently took on the role of the sole caretaker and financial provider.
Another direct effect of the migration process is the change in work structure, particularly in terms of how women move from domestic responsibilities to the joining the labor force of the formal U.S. economy, often times sharing the double responsibility of working inside and outside the home. Changes in family structure inevitably affect the children in these families. We concluded that families either reconcile two opposing cultures (i.e., raise children bilingually with strong ties to El Salvador), or allow their children to Americanize while disconnecting from Salvadoran culture. Either strategy creates points of tension and communication/cultural understanding problems between parents and children.
Our findings may not be generalizable to the larger Salvadoran community in Somerville. The research timeframe was limited to one semester. We were able to conduct only ten complete interviews, most of them with families from within the Mystic View Housing Development, a subsidized government housing project of predominantly low-income families. Seven of our ten interviews present a female, specifically mothers’ perspective on the immigrant experience. In addition, not only were the families from the same Somerville neighborhood, but due to our snowball-sampling research technique, our interviewees are related or have a previously established personal relationship with one another. This obviously predetermines interconnected experiences.
Kerri Sheingold. (Brandeis University)
Liminality and the Trickster Figure
The archetypal trickster figure and the liminal period in ritual share many common characteristics, the most prominent of which is their ambiguous nature, including the ability to cross boundaries. With this paper I intend to explore affinities between the trickster and the liminal period, with attention to psychological needs and desires. My discussion will concentrate on several animal masks used in African rituals of initiation, arguing that animals used in rituals of initiation are often the same animals used as trickster figures, and that the reason these specific animals are chosen is because of their ambiguous nature or boundary crossing qualities.
Panel 3. The Labor of Self-Fashioning
Daivi Rodima (Brandeis University)
Personhood and Labor among the Kuria of Tanzania
Participation in joint work groups among the Kuria of Tanzania has profoundly affected their social identities and reconstructed local gender and age categories. Tension between the spirit of cooperation and individual accumulation in these groups has restructured participants’ conceptions of self and personhood, and has contributed to the commodification and manipulation of the image of “group labor”.
Carol Ortenberg (Brandeis University) In a letter to Susan B. Anthony, United States suffragist Lucy Stone once wrote, “Women are in bondage; their clothes are a great hindrance to their engaging in any business which will make them pecuniarily independent.” While Stone was discussing women’s clothing in relationship to Western gender ideas, the same can be held true for women in the Bedouin society and in India. The women of these groups have extremely strict dress codes that are much more stringent than the rules of dress for men of their cultures. This paper seeks to examine how the Bedouin and Indian dress codes for women are not merely ways of dress, but speak to a much larger idea of how their cultures view female sexuality and roles in society. Both the gender (the social/cultural role) and sex (biological aspect) of women in these two societies must be examined. First-hand accounts by Sarah Lamb and Lila Abu-Lughod will be considered in light of Michelle Rosaldo and Sherry Ortner’s discussions of women in the public sphere.
Jessica Meissner (Brandeis University)
Practice and Discourse at the Burning Man Ritual: Explorations of Agency and Late Capitalist Society
Ellen Rovner (Brandeis University)
Passing Over: Hats and the Ritual Symbolism of Rebirth at a Seder
The American middle-class family, once imagined as a close, bounded, blood-linked group of individuals, is now commonly conceived as a dispersed, often multi-cultural, fluid entity. Family members move away from home; they marry, sometimes to “people not like us;” they die. The need for something to lessen isolation, to link us with a common familial past, and to dispel fears of mortality becomes more urgent. Ritual action, simply defined as a “patterned process in time” (Turner 1967: 45), often fills this need in families. Family rituals are performances of a recalled shared past, sensory elaborations of a collective memory that simultaneously sustains and reshapes group memory and identity (Halbwachs 1980: 188). Family rituals comfort participants with their known repetitiveness, “slowing, stopping even reversing time, if only for a moment” (Gillis 1996: 82).
In 1996, the chief ritual maker in my family, my mother-in-law Phyllis, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Her diagnosis came several weeks before Passover, a Jewish holiday observed through the Seder ritual that, in my married life, had always taken place at Phyllis’ holiday table. As Phyllis and our family faced her impending death, Passover’s important themes of loss, dispersion, and continuity took on an excruciatingly poignant, metaphorical immediacy for our family. The greatly anticipated festive meal and the lively recitation of the Passover story, both rich in symbolism comforting familiarity, did some of the family’s collective work that year. It was Phyllis, however, always the masterful bricoleur, and her imaginative use of her hats as extraordinary Seder ritual objects that marked the Seder as a transformative ritual in a difficult and wonderful way.
Old hats, long forgotten inhabitants of Phyllis’ attic and closets’ dark corners, were called into action in a new way; a way that instilled them with meanings that were not necessarily consistent with their conventionally perceived properties (Parmentier 1997: 9). No longer only markers of class and gender, the hats’ inclusion in the family’s key ritual action permeated them with symbolic power that signified a kind of conversion of death into life (Lienhardt 2002: 339); a power that far surpassed their manifest meanings and intentions (Turner 1967: 45).
Haley Collazo (Brandeis University)
Fernando Ortiz's Ajiaco: Feeding the Cuban Body, Feeding The Cuban Nation
Thiis paper examines one prominent metaphor of Cuban nationalism during its Republican period (1902-1959)—Cuban nationalist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s metaphor of el ajiaco. Ortiz uses the image of a traditional Cuban stew to illustrate the importance of mestizaje, the fusion of diverse races and cultures, to the future of the Cuban nation. I’ve divided my analysis into two sections. I begin by comparing Ortiz’s imagery to French historian Ernest Renan’s ideas of nation and nationalism – specifically those laid out in his famous piece, “What is a Nation?” Renan locates the nation not within geographic, political, religious, linguistic, or ethnic boundaries, but within a more ephemeral, shifting realm, and calls it a grave mistake to confuse race with nation. Is this a mistake Ortiz makes? How does Cuba stand up as a case study, where mestizaje is held up as the origin of the true Cuban citizen, and the process by which Jose Marti’s “Cuban Race” is created, and the young nation solidified?
In the second half of my paper I delve into a more detailed analysis and critique of the metaphor itself. My analysis of Ortiz’s imagery focuses on four issues: first, how Ortiz’s key anthropological concept of transculturation is exhibited lucidly through a culinary metaphor; second, the implicit hierarchical ordering of the stew’s ingredients; third, the related aspect of the different degrees of homogenization required of each ingredient; and finally, the processual nature of identity formation and nation building revealed in the boiling of the stew.Jennifer Cone (Wellesley College)
Women’s NGO’s in Post-Socialist Romania: Internal and External Obstacles
1989 marked the demise of socialism across Eastern Europe. Soon after, many Western governments brought money and aid into the newly democratic states of Eastern Europe with the ultimate goal of creating civil society and integrating Eastern Europe into the European Community. Considered to be the foundation of civil society structure, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) received much of the financial and instructional aid offered by Western donors. Women’s organizations were given particular precedence as Western models saw the introduction of the women’s movement to Eastern Europe as a necessary precondition for modernization, Europeanization and democratization.
While the socialist period in most of Eastern Europe was not particularly beneficial to women’s status, the era was particularly dire for Romanian women. They faced discrimination not only in the workplace and in the private sphere of their communities, but, with the prohibition of contraceptives and abortion, were effectively denied control of their own bodies. Since 1989, there has been a small but steadily growing women’s movement in Romania as manifested through women-focused NGOs, much of which has been aided by Western donors. Yet the women’s movement remains hampered by the historical context of women’s status, and the current fragile economic, political and social climate that exists in Romania. Moreover, while Romanian women’s NGOs have Western assistance to thank for many of their successes, the relationship with Western aid actors has been problematic. I will analyze both the internal socio-cultural obstacles to the post-socialist women’s movement as well as the conflicts generated by a lack of cultural understanding between Romanian women’s organizations and Western donor groups.
Advertising in Anthropological Perspective: Looking at the Production and Consumption of Meaning
This presentation explores the potential contributions of anthropological theory to the study of the culture-producing effects of advertising. How can we gauge advertising as a site of culture production? How can we conceptualize and theorize about advertising and cultural transformation? Based on the preliminary ethnographic data I gathered among the consumers in the post-socialist Czech Republic, which is rapidly transitioning to a capitalist economy, I try to avoid the deadlocks of structuralist and postmodernist theorizing. Ethnographic fieldwork among consumers throws into high relief the local culture and experiences through which advertising audiences co-opt, negotiate, and resist the meanings advertising promotes.
Catherine Brinkley (Wellesley College)
New Age Shamanism as an Organized Religion in Post-Socialist Siberia
Shamanism, originating in Siberia, was brought with the first migration of people to the Americans during the last ice age, and it has miraculously survived to the present date, persisting through the conversion efforts of Christians and communists alike. Now, however, Shamanism faces its biggest threat: globalization. The way of life in Siberia is dramatically changing as nomadism is replaced with cities and global enterprises. Without the Siberian way of life to support Shamanism, the religion is using a tactic that previously would have destroyed it: Shamanism is becoming an organized religion. Ancient spiritual traditions are being translated into modern times, and a new brand of Shamanism rises out of middle class capitalism.