Library: Anthropology

The problematic field of investigation for this study was for the care of bereaved human beings in the context of significant cultural shifts now shaping the twenty-first century. Deritualization was identified as a significant interdisciplinary concern that contributes to potential distress in processes of grieving. The objective of the research was the development of a practical theology of compassionate caregiving for the bereaved with deference to the problem of deritualization. The theoretical framework was guided by the Oxford Interdisciplinary Research model and the Loyola Institute of ...

The dissertation describes the processes surrounding the production of investigative knowledge within the Danish Police based on in-depth analyses of how investigators seek out, discover, and produce knowledge that can assist in the production of evidence for identification and prosecution. The central question informing the dissertation is the question of how knowledge comes about, and how such processes of knowledge can be studied anthropologically. The dissertation develops a theoretical frame for the study of knowledge, which addresses the becoming of knowledge as the effect of the inte...

U.S. fisheries legislation requires National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to attend to the critical social and economic issues surrounding the definition and identification of fishing communities, and to the effects that changes to the physical environment and regulatory decisions can have on such communities. To fulfil their mandate, National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) sponsored the research entitled Identifying Fishing Communities in the Gulf of Mexico to study the economic, social and cultural status of potential fishing communities along the Gulf of Mexico. ...

This work focuses on contemporary Zimbabwean Stone Sculpture - widely known until the early 1990s as "Shona Sculpture" - from the perspective of a critical anthropological analysis of cultural identity and representation. The analysis frames the inception of this art movement within the colonial socio-historical circumstances of its genesis, where discourse about the producers of this art form ("Shona discourse") was created. Drawing from the social context of inequality and racial (spatial) segregation, and from the concepts of the "primitive" in art and anthropology, the author aims to show ...

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, has been described in many ways. It has been called qigong, one of many schools of physical exercises that aim at improving health and developing supernatural abilities. Scholars and mainstream media have referred it to as a spiritual movement or religion, although practitioners claim it is not a religion. It has been called a cult, in the pejorative sense rather than in a sociological context, by the Chinese government and by some Western critics. In the writings of Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, it is referred to in different ways, though...

Personal impurity caused by childbirth, menstrual blood or death is an issue of concern prevalent in many cultures. In Japan, the generic term for these kinds of impurities is kegare and death impurity, a sub-type of kegare, is known as shi-e. The major topic of this book is death impurity. The definition and genesis of shi-e are explained. In addition, details of the influence shi-e had on ancient Japanese society as well as its continuing influence on modern Japanese society are given. Three hypotheses are stated and supported: (1) the shi-e concept began in Japan during the Yayoi perio...

This interdisciplinary dissertation explores the archetype of the "ape-man" from a phenomenological perspective, with its genesis and present continuation dependent on extant and accreted human behavior and morphology. In order to ascertain the embedded components of the ape-man archetype, an identikit ape-man as a discrete phenomenon is derived after the examination of cross-cultural examples world-wide. Next, this discrete phenomenon and its constituent parts are compared both to extant ape species' behavior and morphology and the paleoanthropological evidence to determine in what ways --...

Dostoevsky's novels have contributed to a conception of man that reverberates in the conclusions of prominent twentieth-century philosophical anthropologists. Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus, among others, have admitted that the works of Dostoevsky had an influence on the manner in which they learned to conceive of human nature and the world in which humans live. Our aim in this dissertation is to ask: what is there in the novels of Dostoevsky concerning the nature of man, of which certain philosophers could claim that in their phi...

Cranial and postcranial research on East and Southeast Asians has shown population variability between and within these two regions. Moreover, as populations vary by sex, sex differences vary by population. The purpose of this study is to provide the first descriptive and comparative analysis of two recently curated samples of complete, documented, contemporary skeletons from Thailand (N=104) and Hong Kong (N=94) that have not been previously studied. Sex differences reveal Hong Kong males and females as larger but less dimorphic than Thais. Stepwise discriminant function analysis of the...

Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, has been the landscape of religious, social and political conflict for more than 500 years. The Magindanawn people, who embraced Islam after contact with Malay Muslims in the late 1400s, have experienced clan rivalries and other outsider aggressions leading to disenfranchisement and displacement from their ancestral domain in west Central Mindanao. In the activism and rebellion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Magindanawn people were often caught between Philippine military forces and the Bangsamoro mujahideen. In the 1980s, there was some respite bu...