Anthropology

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 111
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    Bryan Homesite
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2004) Smith, James; Pollan, Johnny T., Jr.
    In this overview of the history of Bryan Homesite, the authors present information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Bryan Homesite and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, stratigraphic sketches, census data, tables, pie graphs, diary entries, letters, and lists of deed records.
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    When Culture Is Not A System: Why Samoan Cultural Brokers Can Not Do Their Job
    (Taylor & Francis, 2006) Gershon, Ilana
    In independent and American Samoa, Samoan representatives have historically been successful at furthering their communities' interests when dealing with various colonial regimes. Yet during my fieldwork in California, I kept witnessing failed encounters between Samoan migrants and government officials. I argue that government officials helped create these problems through the ways they expected Samoan migrants to act as culture-bearers. I conclude by exploring how cultural mediators become the focal point for tensions generated by the contradictory assumptions government system-carriers and Samoan culture-bearers hold about how to relate to social orders.
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    Chenango Plantation
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2006) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Chenango Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Chenango Plantation and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, paintings, letters, classifieds, memoirs, newspaper articles, census data, diary entries, tax records, contracts, and lists of deed records.
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    Eldorado Plantation
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2007) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Eldorado Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, the current status of Eldorado Plantation, and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, web pages, handbooks, census data, and lists of deed records.
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    Sexual borderlands: Lesbian and gay migration, human rights, and the metropolitan community church
    (Springer, 2007) Howe, Cymene
    This article considers several questions surrounding sexual migration, binational same-sex couples, legal precedent, and the role of religious communities in lesbian and gay migration to the United States. With theoretical aspects of human rights serving as a starting point, the article then moves to a consideration of the legal dynamics of migration, the history of U.S. (im)migration law in relation to lesbian and gay asylum claims, and the Uniting American Families Act (2005). Drawing from the concept of sexual migration, the article proposes that religious or spiritual communities may provide important networks and ideological resources for lesbian and gay migrants who subscribe to religious values, particularly in a context of politically incendiary claims surrounding homosexuality and immigration. The analysis centers on the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), suggesting that with its socially legitimatized status, MCC may provide philosophical foundations necessary for effectively addressing human rights for lesbian and gay migrants.
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    Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary Activism in Nicaragua
    (American Anthropological Association, 2008) Howe, Cymene
    This article develops the concept of “televisionary” activism—a mediated form of social justice messaging that attempts to transform culture. Focusing on a locally produced and very popular television show in Nicaragua, I consider how social justice knowledge is produced through television characters' scripting and performance. The ideological underpinnings aspire to a dialogic engagement with the audience, as producers aim to both generate public discourse and benefit from audiences' suggestions and active engagement. Several levels of media advocacy interventions are considered including the production, scripting, and translation of transnational material into local registers. Televisionary activism offers challenges to several conservative social values in Nicaragua by placing topics such as abortion, domestic violence, sexual abuse, homosexuality, and lesbianism very explicitly into the public sphere. At the same time, sexual subjects on the small screen must be framed in particular ways, as, for instance, with the homosexual subjects who are carefully coiffed in normalized human dramas. Finally, many of these televisionary tactics draw from and engage with transnational tropes of identity politics, and “gay” and “lesbian” subjectivity in particular, confounding the relationship between real and idealized sexual subjects in Nicaragua. That is, these televisionary tactics “market” transnational identity politics but derive legitimacy through their very “localness.”
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    The Legible Lesbian: Crimes of Passion in Nicaragua
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Howe, Cymene
    This article considers a precedent-setting murder case in Nicaragua that rendered a conviction based upon the victim's ‘sexual option’ and status as a ‘lesbian.’ A significant achievement for advocates in Nicaragua, the case was also a victory for sexual and human rights proponents globally. This article queries how the sexualization of culture can be viewed through the spectacle of Aura Rosa's life, death and symbolic resurrection. Analyzing the discourses and practices of Nicaraguan activists, international rights campaigns, the state, and local media, I argue that the post-mortem process of re-figuring the victim as a ‘lesbian’ is imaginable only within a discursive field saturated with human rights paradigms including those of sexual rights. Central to these practices are notions of vulnerable bodies, ascriptions to particular models of modernity and an emerging ‘epistemology of the hate crime.’
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    Durango Plantation
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2009) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Durango Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Durango Plantation and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, census data, court records, and lists of deed records.
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    Duff Homesite
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2009) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Duff Homesite, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, and the current status of Duff Homesite. The item contains maps, photographs, census data, letters, and lists of deed records.
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    Retrieve Plantation
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2009) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Retrieve Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Retrieve Plantation and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, paintings, newspaper articles, advertisements, bills of the Texas state legislature, court records, drawings, diary entries, census data, letters, and lists of deed records.
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    Transnationalizing Desire: Sexualizing Culture and Commodifying Sexualities
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Howe, Cymene; Rigi, Jakob
    Sexuality, as a conceptual framework, has become a site for several social, moral, and political controversies, economic strategies, existential anxieties and ontological uncertainties. The transformation of sexuality, semiotically and in practice, particularly since the 1950s, reveals itself to be part of wider social and economic processes that have been variously described under the rubrics of ‘globalization’ (Appadurai 1996; Featherstone 1990; Hannerz 1989; Sassen 1998) and ‘transnationalism’ (Blanc et al. 1994; Glick Schiller et al. 1992), or the kindred categories of ‘post-modernity’ (Jameson 1991), ‘late capitalism’ (Mandel 1975) and a ‘new imperialism’ (Harvey 2005). In this special issue, we are interested in how sexuality as commodity and practice has come to stand for vast categories of meaning and experience in a transnational context. We explore how various forms of sexuality and desire inform national identities, the sexual policies of the state, and concepts surrounding commodification and subjectivity. We understand ‘transnationalizing desire’ to be the locus of several overlapping political and cultural processes regarding the intimacies of sexuality: how desire and subjectivity are understood on ‘local’ levels, and in turn, how these categories of meaning and experience become appropriated and re-articulated in transnational exchanges. Central to the analytical frameworks included here is how individuals and collectivities imagine the horizons of sexuality and desire, whether through legal interventions of sexual rights and responsibilities, interactions in the international marriage ‘market,’ or in modifying local hierarchies of sexual identity. Resonating in each of these discussions is a tension between ‘local’ practices, identities and values and those that are seen to be transnationally ‘imported’ varieties.
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    Darrington Plantation
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2009) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Darrington Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Darrington Plantation and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, census data, tax and court records, and lists of deed records.
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    Bates Plantation and Churchill's Ferry
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2009) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Bates Plantation and Churchill's Ferry, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Bates Plantation and Churchill's Ferry and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, census data, and lists of deed records.
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    Cloman-McFadin Plantations
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2009) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Cloman-McFadin Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Cloman-McFadin Plantation and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, newspaper articles, census data, tax records, last wills and testaments, and lists of deed records.
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    Bell Plantation and Hinkle's Ferry
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2009) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Bell Plantation and Hinkle's Ferry, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and machinery, the current status of Bell Plantation and Hinkle's Ferry and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, tax records, photographs, census data, and lists of deed records.
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    Cooperation and Co-optation in Transnational Activism
    (2010) Howe, Cymene
    Cooperation and co-optation, despite their shared prefixes, seem to suggest very different approaches to establishing coalitions, politics and sociality. Where cooperation suggests prioritizing collective knowledge - shared ways of thinking, being and doing - co-optation is often understood as a kind of political thievery, usurping the politics, ideologies and practices of one collective in order to advance the goals of another. The cooperative impulse to create a synergy of skills, seems to find its reverse when we talk of co-optation; it is instead the appropriation of those synergic skills, or put differently: hitching one’s political wagon to another’s in order to reap the benefits therein. While co-optation is often invoked in the negative as an inappropriate, or at least uninvited, form of borrowing, I would like to recast the notion of co-optation in a more positive register as that “process of placing one’s political goals within a larger rubric of political success.” What I would like to elaborate here, based on my anthropological fieldwork among sexual rights activists in Nicaragua, is what I am calling the “strategic co-optation” of lesbian and homosexual identity. While Nicaragua is a country likely still remembered for the Sandinista Revolution, what is less well known is that following the end of the Sandinista regime in 1990, the country instituted Latin America’s most repressive anti-sodomy law (Article 204), which mandated that “anyone who induces, promotes, propagandizes or practices in scandalous form sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex commits the crime of sodomy and shall incur 1 to 3 years imprisonment.”[1] My research has been an attempt to understand how advocates of sexual rights in Nicaragua, and their cooperantes (often in the form of feminists) have worked—discursively and practically—to overturn their country’s anti-sodomy law. Many activists have indeed wed their struggles to the categories of “homosexual” and “lesbian” subjectivity. However, I will argue that we ought not see this as an example of colonial discursive dispersions where Southern subjects are victims of an assimilationist logic handed down from the North. Rather, I want to suggest that as activists invoke these political terms—ones that certainly have traction in the transnational [2] world of human rights advocacy—they have done so in ways that allow for creative and flexible appropriations of the terms themselves. These categories are, in other words, spacious signs with political teeth that are being strategically co-opted to address locally relevant concerns, both political and cultural. First, let me outline some of the scholarly concerns about transnational gay and lesbian rights and identity before I then turn to the work of Nicaraguan sexual rights advocates.
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    Bynum Plantation
    (Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2010) Smith, James
    In this overview of the history of Bynum Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Bynum Plantation and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, paintings, newspaper articles, sketches, census data, court records, diary entries, and lists of deed records.
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