 Subjects -> SOCIOLOGY (Total: 553 journals)
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- “With All The Ghosts that Haunt the Park...”: Haunted
Recreation in Brent (Ontario)
Abstract: When I first visited Brent, the defunct logging village, now campgrounds in the northern reaches of Algonquin Provincial Park I went searching for ghost stories. Often described as a “ghost town,” Brent has been occupied since the earliest days of logging in the Ottawa River/Kiji Sibi Valley and holds an important place in the oral history of the Park. The village was a place where many died after violent accidents during the timber rush of the eighteen-hundreds, where Algonquin Anishinaabe Peoples had camped and likely held a village of their own prior to colonization. Brent was once a bustling community, the former site of the Kish-Kaduk Lodge and an important railway stopover during the First World War. Further, Brent was home to the last year round resident of the Park. Mr. Adam Pitts, known to many local cottagers as the “Mayor” passed away in his home in 1998 one year after the railroad tracks were removed by the Canadian National Railway Company and the electricity was shut off. Now his cottage is a ruin some claim to be haunted by the Mayor’s restless ghost. And there are other ghost stories I heard in Brent that haunt the edges of the colonial imagination, stalking unwary travellers as they meander through what they sometimes assume to be “pristine wilderness.” Common patterns of self-apprehension and identity formation associated with tourism and heritage management in Algonquin Park are imbued with nationalist value through a prismatic complex of cultural appropriation, the denial of complicity in colonial violence, and the contingent obfuscation of Indigenous presence and persistence in the area, a process I call haunted recreation. Countering this complex is critical for working past the historical and intergenerational trauma associated with Canadian settler-colonialism and the contemporary inequities of Canadian society.
PubDate: Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Introduction: Extraordinary, Ambiguous and Unsettling
PubDate: Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- A Monstrous Morality: and their Relatives as Enforcers of Social Control
Abstract: The tzitzimime – as reflected in central Mexican ethnohistorical sources and precolumbian imagery – represent a diverse array of mostly female divinities associated with fertility. Under Spanish influence, they were re-conceptualized as malevolent, mostly male agents of the Christian devil. Related beings attested elsewhere, especially in the ethnography of eastern Mesoamerica, are distinctly monstrous. They are particularly salient in “wild” contexts, outside the realm of culture, and serve as enforcers of social norms. This paper traces the development of these creatures from their quasi-monstrous tzitzimime forbears and considers how they have been – and continue to be – conceptualized in relation to sociopolitical differences in their cultural contexts.
PubDate: Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Monsters, Disaster, and Organic Balance: Digesting History Through Oral
Traditions
Abstract: This paper examines “Coyote, Whirlwind, and Ravine,” a long tale told in the Northern Paiute language by McDermitt storyteller Pete Snapp and recorded by folklorist Sven Liljeblad in the early 1960’s. It weaves in traditional episodes of western Numic folklore to narrate the history of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone community as witnessed by an elder born shortly after the beginning of the colonization of this area of the Northwestern Great Basin in the western United States. This paper explores how the bodies of certain characters who emanate from landscape, mainly monsters, are tools for the narrative expression of social change, for the telling of history, and the expression of Indigenous spiritual frameworks. It places the experience of the Indigenous social body, embodied by Coyote, through the grinds of the ultra-material Ravine and confronts it to ethereal nefarious powers. Poetics of materiality applied to the body of Coyote operate a structural transformation. Mythical turmoil expresses social experiences and change in the colonial context, but also makes manifest the transformation of the social body that result in the contemporary form of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone community.
PubDate: Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Automated Monsters of Vengeance: Comparing Goddesses in Ancient Greece and
Hindu India
Abstract: Monsters that act “automatically,” without thought or conscious awareness, constitute a category whose primary exemplar in American culture is the zombie. However, automaticity can be found in other realizations of the monstrous, including in ancient Greece and contemporary India. This paper compares the two. In Greece, the beings known as Eryines hunt and attack people who are guilty of crimes against members of their own kin group. One of the best examples is Orestes, whom the Erinyes pursue relentlessly because he killed his own mother, Clytemnestra. On the southeastern coast of India, among members of the Jalari fishing caste, there is a spirit called Sati Polalmma, who, like the Erinyes, attacks those who have broken oaths made to kin, especially oaths that concern sexual fidelity. The Erinyes and Sati Polamma are chthonic beings, associated with the earth, and are said to predate the patriarchal order of male deities. The paper explores automatic action as a characteristic of one category of the monstrous.
PubDate: Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Trnavský Execír. Historická monografia špecifickej mestskej štvrte
[Execír in Trnava. Historical Monograph of a Specific Urban District]
PubDate: Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Growing Appetites and Hungry Subjects: Addicts, the Undead, and the Long
Arc of Theory in Western Social Science
Abstract: This paper explores the Western philosophical idea of “appetites” through the lens of “addiction.” I begin with a brief ethnographic description of a woman whose subjectivity seems to emerge only in the play of her unmanageable desire for various pharmaceuticals. In other words, she is a self-described “addict.” I then look at the relationships between addicts and the undead, especially vampires and zombies, who are seemingly enslaved to their appetites. This leads me to an analysis of the centrality of what I am calling “recursive need satisfaction” in much of Western (especially Anglophone and Francophone) Social Theory that, I argue, relies on a particular understanding of “appetite” in establishing the political-economic subjectivity that lies at the heart of market-oriented state. This same understanding also pushes this formation in a specific historical direction of increasing growth and organisational and technological complexity. As a globalised Western society in the last few decades has become ever more anxious of its place in the world, its impact on various interdependent systems, and the validity of the grand récits that served as its charter, such growth and complexity have emerged as objects of anxiety, even apocalyptic fear, and the terms “addict” and “addiction” have seemed ever more useful for modelling these concerns. I end with some reflections on how we use both zombies and addicts to think through some of the same issues of unchecked and damaging consumption.
PubDate: Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Of Anthropophagy and Anthropology: Monsters and Men in and Northwest Coast
Myth and Ritual
Abstract: Monsters can be divided into two categories: human-like and non-human. Non-human monsters tend to be chthonic beings that are associated with the earth and natural forces. Humanoid monsters represent metaphorical transformations of humanity itself, and as such reveal basic cultural values, such as sociability, while displaying their opposite. Humanoid monsters are the more terrifying, precisely because we recognize ourselves in them, although in an uncanny refraction. In the epic poem Beowulf and in myth and ritual of the Kwakiutl and Heiltsuk cultures of the Northwest Coast, manlike monsters play a central role.
PubDate: Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Book Review: “Čilejkars” – Tradition as a Symbol of
Cultural Identity
PubDate: Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Alone in the Country of the Catholics: Labrador Inuit in Prague (1880)
Abstract: The ethnographic shows of the end of the 19th century responded to an increased hunger for the exotic, especially among the bourgeois classes in Europe and North America, and to the establishment of both physical and cultural anthropology as scientific disciplines with a need for study material. At the same time they served as a manifestation of European superiority in the time of the last phase of colonialist thrust to other continents. “Scientific colonialism” reached also to regions without actual colonial or imperial ambitions, as the story of Labrador Inuit who visited Prague during their tour of Europe in November 1880 will prove. The reactions of local intellectuals and the general public to the performances of the “savages” will be examined in the context of the Czech and German nationalist competition and the atmosphere of colonial complicity. Thanks to the testimony of a member of the group, Abraham Ulrikab, supplemented by newspaper articles and other sources, it is possible to explore the miscommunication arising from the fact that the Inuit were members of the Moravian Church, professing allegiance to old Protestant tradition in the Czech Lands and cultivating a fragmented knowledge of Czech history and culture.
PubDate: Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Book review: Inequalities and Conflicts in Modern and Contemporary African
History: A Comparative Perspective
PubDate: Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Public Health Policies in the Akyem Abuakwa of Ghana (1850-1957)
Abstract: Akyem Abuakwa is one of the largest states of the Akan ethnic group in Ghana. Notwithstanding its size and important contribution to Ghana’s development, historians have paid little attention in doing academic research on the health history of the people. Using a qualitative method of research, this paper does a historical study on public health policies in Akyem Abuakwa from the 1850s to 1957. We utilised documentary and non-documentary sources to discuss the various public health policies implemented in Akyem Abuakwa from the pre-colonial era to the colonial era. We examined the impact of the policies on the people of Akyem Abuakwa and the various challenges faced by the British colonial administration in their quest to implement public health policies.
PubDate: Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Making the World Safe for Patriarchy: Trump and the Zombie Apocalypse
Abstract: Both Donald Trump in the White House and zombies in American fiction, movie, and television serials, highlight changes in American social structures, especially marriage and childbirth. Instead of a critique of such structures, however, the zombie genre largely reinforces traditional norms. To be sure, Trump himself is not a zombie, although his followers are often represented the living dead in American political cartoons. What is the connection between the two' In the first place, zombie fiction can be viewed as culturally conservative in orientation, because of its emphasis (whether intentionally or not) on the traditional nuclear family. Second, zombies, almost by definition, do not have a leader, except that the genre deliberately toys with this theme in one recent television series. This paper discusses the two themes – crowds that become like zombies and leaders who create zombie-like followers – in the context of the genre’s overall conservative critique.
PubDate: Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Taiwanese Identity – Past Factors and Present Circumstances
Abstract: Taiwan is an island that off the coast of China. To say that Taiwan is a country is to offend the Communist People’s Republic of China which claims sovereignty over the island and markets it to the world as a “renegade province” which must be re-united with the mainland, by force, if necessary. For people who know very little about Taiwan and its big neighbour across the Taiwan Strait this may even sound convincing, but the truth is more complex. In 1949 the nationalist government (Kuomintang or KMT) having lost the Chinese Civil War retreated from the mainland; the communists have never ruled the island.The settling of the Republic of China’s government in Taiwan and the era of “White Terror” was another one in a series of historical events that were fundamental in forming the modern Taiwanese identity. Whatever the proponents of “one China” claim, the truth of the matter is that there is a shift in attitudes of the inhabitants of Taiwan in how they feel about themselves (Taiwanese, Chinese or both). This is a crucial fact that will have to be acknowledged in the cross-strait relations. The identity argument as such, is independent of any historical claims. And this Taiwanese identity has been evolving and will continue to do so, shaped by the past and the most recent events like the Hong Kong protests, the pandemic, politics and the military aggression and intimidation by the People’s Republic of China. This article will examine these factors in turn.
PubDate: Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Maíz sólo se come: Contemporary agriculture in Uaxactún
(Guatemala)
Abstract: This paper aims to explore agriculture in modern-day Uaxactún, Petén, Guatemala. The results are based on two types of data – spatial and anthropological. Spatial data are represented in the visualization of recent agricultural features (Milpas) visualized from orthophoto maps, processed in QGIS 3.10.1. Anthropological data were obtained during July and August 2019 in the Uaxactún, as a part of the Regional Archaeological Project of Uaxactún (Proyecto arqueológico regional Uaxactún – PARU). 18 respondents had taken part in the research. The research was conducted by semi-structured interviews and participant observation. To list finds – the average Milpa dimension was described, most interesting crops and agricultural techniques were described, and a model of the local agricultural year was provided. The key find is that, even if one could interpret recent Uaxactún agriculture as traditional, the drives and motivations of the farmers are modern, capitalistic, and monetary oriented.
PubDate: Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Pre-Hispanic Nahua Slavery
Abstract: The article deals with pre-Hispanic Nahua slavery. Based upon an examination of Nahua perception of slavery/slaves, Nahua forms of slavery (apart from the slaves destined for sacrifice there were slaves destined for work) and the social and legal position of Nahua slaves (destined for work) the author concludes that the Nahua institution traditionally called “slavery“ is different from its counterparts known from the history of Occident. Except for slaves destined for sacrifice to the gods which are discussed only briefly in the article, the Nahua slaves (i.e. the slaves destined for work) had a certain degree of personal freedom and certain rights. Becoming a slave at birth was possible only exceptionally and the enslavement of persons was in many cases (even if not in all cases) only temporary. The treatment of Nahua slaves – compared to the living conditions of their counterparts in many other world cultures – was significantly better, more humane. This can be seen from the fact that the master was entitled only to his/her slave’s labor and not to slave’s life, health, family members or property, as well as from the fact that the slave could obtain freedom in many ways, not only by the manumission made by his/her master. Although slaves were considered a kind of both physically and mentally “less perfect“ individuals who were “dirtied“, that is, morally tainted and dishonored by their enslavement and its reasons (mainly a delinquent behavior, i.e. non-payment of debts or perpetration of certain crimes), they were not systematically excluded from the wider society formed by free persons and they lived with their families in their houses and neighborhoods.
PubDate: Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT
- Search for Indian America 4 [Hľadanie indiánskej Ameriky 4].
Conference Report
PubDate: Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT
- The Worshipers of Stones. Lacandon Sacred Stone Landscape
Abstract: This article deals with the Lacandon cosmology, one of the few Maya cosmologies which has been exceptionally structured and until today, very well preserved. The present study is based mainly on associations related to stone. There are investigated the emic classifications of the Lacandon. Their classification of divine beings according to their location, and their connection to the stone houses, whether of natural or cultural origin. In the article are analyzed the most sacred Lacandon sites such as the rock shelters, cliffs and caves around the Lake Mensäbäk and Lake Yahaw Petha, as well as Yaxchilan, the archaeological site with the long tradition of Lacandon pilgrimages. The Lacandon believe in different types of transfer of spiritual energy through stone. The stones could be considered on different levels as the seat, heart or embodiment of deities. These relationships and contexts are very complex. The article tries to identify it and to offer some linguistic and theoretical approaches.
PubDate: Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT
- A History of Koshe Town in South-Central Ethiopia from 1941 to 1991
Abstract: Koshe town is the administrative and commercial center of Mareko woreda.1 It is found in Gurage Zone Southern Nation Nationalities and Peoples Regional State. According to the tradition the origin of the name “Koshe” is originated from the plant which called by the name Koshe which abundantly grow in the area. The establishment of Koshe town is directly associated with the five years Italian occupation. Due to the expansion of patriotic movement in the area Italian officials of the area forced to establish additional camp in the area in a particular place Koshe. This paper explores the role of Fascist Italy for the establishment of Koshe town.The former weekly market shifted its location and established around the Italian camp. Following the evacuation of Fascist Italy the Ethiopian governments control the area. During the government of Emperor Haile Selassie Koshe town got some important developmental programs. The most important development was the opening of the first school by the effort of the Swedes.2 The Military regime (Derg)3 also provided important inputs for the urbanization of Koshe town. This research paper observes the development works that flourish in Koshe during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie and the Military regime, and also asses the role of different organizations for the urbanization of Koshe town.
PubDate: Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT
- Class, Urbanity and the Environment. The Ethnography of the New
Middle/Creative Class Identity in Warsaw's Industrial Suburbs
Abstract: In this article we analyse local community-based concepts and practices related to establishing a new middle-class identity when under social and “environmental” pressure. We based our ethnographic inquiry in “RA” – a Warsaw suburb – well-known as a former village but now a location for industry and waste-processing plants. Its vicinity, despite being populated, is polluted by heavy traffic, noise and an unpleasant odour, all of which recently have become the stimulus for social mobilisation and intense criticism toward the local authorities and an inconsiderate urbanisation policy. A key role here is played by two organisations, both exerting a strong influence on the new middle/creative class living in gated communities – a novel phenomenon for the local sociocultural landscape. We argue that this activism and struggle for a clean environment is rooted in the post-1989 Polish politico-economic transformation and the emergence of new middle-class identity projects. Thus, we reveal that sustainable urbanisation and “green policies” in Poland are embedded in middle-class identities, and gain momentum especially when class identity and image are under threat.
PubDate: Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT
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