Community through the eyes of children: blending child-centered research and qualitative geovisulization

Community is an ambiguous concept, and the meanings of community as a subject of study have received a great deal of attention across various disciplines. This paper discusses how children's diverse meanings of community shape and are shaped by the social, cultural, and physical environments of their everyday lives. To explore these meanings I combine principles of child-centered research and qualitative geovisualization into a research methodology. I demonstrate that this integration displays the transformative nature of qualitative analysis and visualization to support interpretive analysis of various forms of qualitative and spatial data together, and offers us a hybrid methodological framework for gaining insights into the diverse meanings of community held by the children. The main case study is drawn from a multi-year research collaboration called the Children's Urban Geography (ChUG), in which I participated along with children who lived in a relatively poor but emerging multi-cultural Hispanic neighborhood in Buffalo, NY.     

Using foraminifera to distinguish between natural and cultural shell deposits in coastal eastern Australia

Foraminifera are single cell protozoa that are ubiquitous in marine environments. Although the hard casings, or tests, of foraminifera are routinely studied in the earth sciences, they have been little studied by archaeologists, despite their potential to contribute to understandings of coastal site formation processes and palaeoenvironments. In this study techniques and methods of foraminiferal analysis are developed and applied to the problem of distinguishing between natural and cultural marine shell deposits, using the Mort Creek Site Complex, central Queensland, Australia, as a case study. Results allow separation of natural and cultural deposits based on foraminiferal density. Natural deposits were found to have >1000 foraminifera per 100 g of sediment, while cultural deposits exhibited <50 foraminifera per 100 g of sediment. Results allow us to better understand site formation processes at the Mort Creek Site Complex and highlight the potential of foraminiferal analyses in the interpretation of terrestrial marine deposits.     

Heritage on the move. Cross-cultural heritage as a response to globalisation,mobilities and multiple migrations

Globalisation is creating new perceptions of social and cultural spaces as well as complex and diverse pictures of migration flows. This leads to changes in expressions of culture, identity, and belonging and thus the role of heritage today. I argue that common or dominant notions of heritage cannot accommodate these new cultural identities-in-flux created by and acting in a transplanetary networked and culturally deterritorialized world. To support my arguments, I will introduce ‘Third Culture Kids’ or ‘global nomads’, defined as a particular type of migrant community whose cultural identities are characterised high patterns of global mobility during childhood. My research focus on the uses and meaning of cultural heritage among this onward migrant community, and it reveals that these global nomads both use common forms of heritage as a cultural capital to crisscross cultures, and designate places of mobility, like airports, to recall collective memories as people on the move. These results pose additional questions to the traditional use of heritage, and suggest others visions of heritage today, as people’s cultural identities turn to be now more characterised by mobility, cultural flux, and belonging to horizontal networks.     

Mixed Metaphors: Dynamic Modernities in Southeastern North America

The concept of modernity has played an essential role in the development of anthropological archaeology. Providing the philosophical foundation upon which both culture historical and processual archaeologies were constructed, the application of theories based in modernism has led to the persistence of essentialist notions concerning the archaeological records of both Western and non-Western peoples. Examining archaeological materials from the Muskogee Creek peoples of interior Southeastern North America, I contend that previous conceptualizations of modernity lack sufficient nuance to adequately address the diversity of cultural practices among the post-contact Creeks (circa A.D. 1550–1830). Rather than the dichotomous perspective of Western moderns and indigenous primitives that predominates, recent archaeological research in Southeastern North America reveals a cultural milieu in which dynamic, contested modernities were created by both the colonizers and the colonized.     

Marine trophic levels targeted between AD 300 and 1500 on the Georgia coast,USA

The marine trophic levels targeted during Swift Creek (AD 300–700) and Savannah (AD 1200–1500) occupations at the Cathead Creek site (9Mc360) and at two sites from the Kings Bay Locality (9CAM171a, 9CAM177), coastal Georgia, USA, differ in a consistent temporal and spatial pattern. Vertebrate and invertebrate remains from these three coastal sites contain similar suites of estuarine animals. However, Swift Creek peoples at these distinct hydrological settings obtained more biomass from fishes and less from molluscs compared to the subsequent Savannah occupants. The two Swift Creek faunal collections are less rich, more diverse, and more equitable than the two subsequent Savannah collections regardless of location. Furthermore, the mean trophic level is higher in the Swift Creek collections compared to the Savannah ones at both locations. These observations apply to both biomass and Minimum Number of Individuals. These differences likely are defining characteristics distinguishing the Swift Creek and the Savannah economies. More research is needed to determine the extent to which these temporal and spatial patterns are attributable to environmental and cultural variables.     

Landscape, ideology, and religion: a geography of Ocean Grove, New Jersey

In this paper, I examine Ocean Grove, New Jersey, a religious community established in 1869 by the Methodist Church as a camp meeting site. The founders selected a location and designed the physical and cultural landscapes according to an ideology of perfectionism, autonomy, exclusion, and homogeneity. Even though the community has experienced dramatic changes in the last fifty years, I argue that the physical, cultural, and political geography of Ocean Grove has served to perpetuate this ideology. However, I also argue that even though it is such a singular place, in accordance with Harvey's claim that all places must accommodate to capital accumulation, Ocean Grove's history shows examples of some quite familiar responses to a larger system of political, social, cultural, and economic circumstances.     

The spatial dimension of the woodland period

ABSTRACT

State archaeological site files are a critical component of cultural resource management and information management toolkits. Yet, engagement with these datasets for research purposes can be difficult, at best. We address some of the challenges to a synthesis of spatial data from state site files by examining the Woodland period components of Deptford/Cartersville, Swift Creek, and Weeden Island. We also examine time slices of a large set of radiocarbon dates from contexts reported to be associated with Deptford and Swift Creek. Dates are plotted on a map at the same spatial scale as our site files dataset to evaluate time and space simultaneously. This study reveals important gaps in the radiocarbon dataset that can be rectified with strategic sampling. It also supports some long-held ideas about the spatial distribution of Deptford, Swift Creek, and Weeden Island. For example, Weeden Island is demonstrated to be strongly centered on the Alabama and Florida Gulf Coast, whereas Deptford is concentrated on both the Gulf and the Atlantic Coastal Plains.     

Animal Remains from the Carter Creek Site: Late Woodland Adaptive Strategies in the Upland Frontier of West Central Illinois

Abstract

The Carter Creek site (11-Md-817) was a village located at the prairie edge in west central Illinois during the early Late Woodland Weaver phase (Esarey et al. 1984). This occupation represents a frontier upland community (Green 1987, 1993). Animal remains recovered from the Carter Creek site are compared to contemporaneous samples from the region in order to test hypotheses proposed by Green (1987, 1993) and Styles (2000). It is found that the “pioneers” at Carter Creek continued to hunt and fish as their ancestors had (cf. Green 1987, 1993), but with some adjustments to optimize local resources (cf. Styles 2000). There is no evidence of venison trading or tribute found at this or any contemporaneous sites.     

Re/membering the town body: methodology and the work of local history

This paper seeks to rework connections between material productions of memory and formations of local identity, both theoretically and empirically. A growing literature about sites of memory suggests that social groups continually reconstruct the past for political-economic purposes. Often, this literature does not sufficiently theorize the production of social groups, particularly when these groups are taken to be a priori units of analysis. Identity is thereby presumed while showing that some version of history was invented. I suggest that presumed and contested histories embody the performance of group identifications just as social groups construct the past. Commemorative books from Stockbridge, a small rural New England community with national cultural prestige, are then used to outline a town narrative in «double-time» where history both structures and is structured by performances of identity. The projects of local historians, I argue, performatively reconstitute local identity through ongoing processes of union and differentiation. Yet in the production of literature memorializing a town body called Stockbridge, the projects have presumably drawn from localized resources. Narration in double time thus works methodologically both to erase and to evoke the small community, endeavouring to make it visible as a fundamental yet fictitious social formation.     

The Politico‐Historical construction of the Pintupi Luritja and the Concept of Tribe

This paper explores the history of the emergence of Pintupi Luritja as the dominant language in the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu (Mt Liebig), traced from the people's first encounters with settlement in the 1940s at Haasts Bluff, through to the present. It is a political history, as movement toward settlement demanded a re‐structuring of social relations within a newly settled polity. To elaborate on this polity I examine the concept of a language community through the construction of Pintupi Luritja as a ‘communilect’. The development of this communilect as a lingua franca in these early settlements signals the value of the original term ‘Luritja’ as a trope. The meaning of this original Indigenous term is not only indicative of the regional history, but also of the flexible potential in group formation. The pattern of contact and settlement in this Pintupi Luritja region has compelled a socio‐linguistic re‐configuration, lending a currency to the label Pintupi Luritja that suggests a modern, firmed up, ‘tribe’. This tribe is a ‘secondary phenomenon’ formed through the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations — stateless societies — by the colonial State (Fried 1975). At issue here is the inter‐cultural aspect of this language formation that is the elemental process in the creation of this ‘new’ social formation.     

Pre-Clovis in Texas? A critical assessment of the “Buttermilk Creek Complex”

Lithic artifacts from the lowest strata of the Debra L. Friedkin site, located on Buttermilk Creek in central Texas, have been interpreted as an undisturbed pre-Clovis assemblage (Waters et al., 2011a). Stone tools and debitage were recovered from sediments stratified just below diagnostic Clovis artifacts and dated by OSL to between 13.2 and >15.5 cal kya. Invoking commonly observed cultural and natural site formation processes, we offer an alternative explanation of the “Buttermilk Creek Complex” as a Clovis assemblage in secondary association with the dated sediments.     

Miralinidae (Marsupialia: Phalangeroidea) from northern Australia,including the youngest occurrence of the family

Five isolated molars from two localities in the Northern Territory, the middle Miocene Bullock Creek and late Oligocene Kangaroo Well sites, are assigned to the new miralinid genus Barguru, which includes the three new species: Barguru kayir, Barguru maru and Barguru kula. The Miralinidae was previously thought to be restricted to the late Oligocene and early Miocene, but the occurrence at Bullock Creek extends the time range of this family into the middle Miocene. Analysis of metaloph development in the Miralinidae suggests that loph formation in this family followed a different trajectory to that of phalangerids.     

Reviving Community Spirit: Furthering the Sustainable, Historical and Economic Role of Fish Weirs and Traps

Stone wall fish weirs and traps were once an important means for inland and coastal communities to catch fish. In many places the weirs and traps have been left to deteriorate and other more productive but less sustainable practices have taken their place. It was considered that they have fulfilled their historical and economic role and it was the loss of community spirit that has contributed to their decline. A recent survey in Yap, Federated States of Micronesia found a diverse and extensive number of fish weirs and traps, and a community keen to restore and reinvigorate their associated cultural practices and community spirit. The paper draws on comparative data from other places of the world to investigate weirs and traps, and to see if a similar revival could be observed. Of importance was a need to highlight the value of pursuing this type of research for contemporary communities and maritime archaeological practitioners in the current international management framework for underwater cultural heritage.     

Trans youth and social media: moving between counterpublics and the wider web

Today’s trans youth grew up with the internet and online LGBTQ resources and spaces are important to these communities. This article focuses on conceptualising the digital cultural strategies that trans and gender questioning youth adopt both as social media users and producers in order to cope and thrive. Drawing on ethnographic data detailing a group of trans youth’s engagements with LGBTQ social media counterpublics and the wider web, and their movement between these spheres, in combination with close readings of online material identified as salient by the participants, this article argues that in the face of rampant transphobia and cis coded online paradigms, trans youth respond both critically and creatively. More specifically, I highlight how they resist prescribed user protocols of mainstream social networking sites as well as employ pragmatic strategies for navigating a binary gendered online world, staking out their own methods and aesthetics for self expression and community formation. Having examined the content and style of social media examples highlighted by the participants, the article contends that trans youth’s consumption and production of types of online and social media is significantly more diverse than research to date has recognised.     

Caught between extremes: the culture and economics of traditional mask art in contemporary Sri Lanka

In contemporary Sri Lanka, the commodification of local mask production resulting from cultural tourism has caught the traditional mask artisan in a tight spot between “tradition” and “modernity”. The impacts of tourism are diversely received and interpreted within the local mask artisan community, with tourism simultaneously resulting in what can be called a “cultural discovery” and “cultural decline”. Within this cultural debate, this paper is an attempt to understand how the traditional mask artisan arrives at a balance between “tradition” and “modernity”, and culture and commerce. Qualitative research conducted in southern Sri Lanka shows that tradition and modernity are shifting conceptions. Negotiating a balance between tradition and modernity is, therefore, largely a matter of meaning and interpretation. When cultural commodification occurs, tradition and modernity are continuously redefined and reinvented by both the traditional mask artisan and cultural consumer to fit their own needs and agendas. Cultural commodification contributes to the survival and revival of Sri Lanka's mask tradition, a strategy that is simultaneously welcomed and contested within the local mask artisan community.     

归侨认同意识的形成及其动态——以广东粤海湾华侨农场为例

基于田野调查的内容,选择粤海湾华侨农场作为研究对象,采用"多元社区"概念,以归侨群体在文化适应过程中的能动作用为理论视角,从多元社区的形成、归侨文化与认同意识的形成、归侨认同意识的动态等方面考察和分析了归侨社区内部高度复合性的群体关系以及由此而产生的内部传统调适和整合机制。     

New local cultural policy evaluation methods in the Netherlands: status and perspectives

Efforts to improve local public policy-making in the Netherlands have led to two changes in local government. First, a budgeting system that focuses political debate on the outcomes of policies rather than on their costs was implemented as of 2004. Second, as of 2006, municipalities have been obliged to install a local Audit Committee (rekenkamercommissie). The committees examine the efficacy and efficiency of municipal policies. Several of these committees have devoted research to cultural policy. In this article, I present the manner in which this budgeting system and the institution of Audit Committees have impacted the evaluation of local cultural policies in the Netherlands. Furthermore, I discuss the way practices relate to key dilemmas concerning evidence-based cultural policy.     

A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF MISSISSIPPIAN CERAMIC VESSELS FROM TOWN CREEK

Abstract

Vessel shape, size, and use-alterations are used to identify vessel types and vessel functions among Mississippian ceramics from the Town Creek site in central North Carolina. Possible functions are discussed for vessel types, and broad distinctions are made regarding vessels that possibly were used for cooking, serving and eating, or storage. The composition of the overall vessel assemblage at Town Creek indicates that it is generally comparable with other Mississippian assemblages. A consideration of the distribution of vessel types by context allows some insights into the association of different activities with different parts of the Mississippian community at Town Creek, namely, that the mound area was associated with distinctive vessel assemblages.     

英国殖民当局与马华公会的成立

针对学术界对马华公会成立过程的不同观点和分歧,在认真研究英国殖民部相关档案的基础上,在马来亚华人社会的分化问题、马华公会领袖们的组织宗旨、英国殖民当局在马华公会成立过程中的作用等方面进行了探讨。得出结论,华社并不总是处于一盘散沙的状态,在某种特定的条件下是能做到团结一致的;马华公会是英国殖民当局发起成立的组织,英国殖民当局在马华公会成立过程中发挥了决定性的作用。英国殖民当局的主要动机是希望马华公会成为协助当局恢复秩序的政治力量;马华公会的华社领袖们则希望与马来族群合作,结束英国殖民统治,建立一个新的民族国家。     

Historic and symbolic violence in the Romani Fuenteovejuna by TNT-El Vacie: Gender,ethnicity, and interculturalism

Abstract

I address here the performance of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna undertaken by TNT-El Vacie, giving particular consideration to the ways in which Antonio Álamo’s adaptation, Pepa Gamboa’s direction, and the staging of El Vacie, a company composed exclusively of Roma women, constitute a site of resistance as well as a performance of gender, identity, and place. From this vantage point, I wrestle with issues of agency, dialogism, and intercultural communication to make sense of ontological as well as hermeneutic aspects of the performance text: deletions and additions; orality and authority; meta-theatricality and self-reflexivity; acting and becoming. In addition, I bring to bear the fact that the name of the company, El Vacie, bears witness to the impoverished settlement or shantytown where the women reside, which stands within a mere two hundred yards of the theater where the play is performed. The name of the company signals the identification of the actresses with the marginal space in which they live, enriches the text, and further complicates their reading of Fuenteovejuna by adding levels of referentiality and indexicality that redefine boundaries as well as processes of exclusion and inclusion. While this is not the first collaboration between TNT and El Vacie—it was preceded by the successful and award-winning 2009 staging of La Casa de Bernarda Alba—I consider this performance a particularly important contribution to the construction of a historicized cultural politics of identity that makes the Romani community visible by positioning the women of El Vacie center stage as participants, creators, and interpreters of the national cultural patrimony. Through this cultural intervention, certain spaces and markers of the Roma community acquire visibility as they get inserted into a national historical discourse from which they previously had been historically excluded.