Animism as a Means of Exploring Archaeological Fishing Structures on Willapa Bay, Washington, USA

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Losey
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Northwest Coast ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Willapa Bay ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fish Traps ◽  
The Social

Remnants of stationary fishing structures on the Northwest Coast of North America are commonly investigated by archaeologists, with most studies focusing on questions of function and chronology. Here it is argued that in Native Northwest Coast ontologies fish and fishing structures were considered animate and part of the social worlds within which humans and fish were engaged. Fish were considered capable of retaliating against those who treated them improperly, and one way of ensuring that no offence would occur was to dismantle fish traps when they were not in use. Using recently documented archaeological fishing structures on Willapa Bay, Washington, USA, as examples, it is argued that these and many other Northwest Coast archaeological fish traps were partially dismantled in the past.

Uploading selves: Inuit digital storytelling on YouTube

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Wachowich ◽  
Willow Scobie
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Canadian Arctic ◽  
Internet Technology ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Youth And Young Adults

This article explores the contemporary use of open-access video-sharing sites by Inuit youth and young adults. Based on 12 months of cyber-fieldwork and focused specifically on YouTube, it explores how Inuit young people across the Canadian Arctic are using online spaces to post short excerpts from their lives and connect with others. The paper situates these digital autobiographies in the recent trajectory of Inuit storytelling, showing that Internet technology allows individual narrators the freedom to bypass established rules and institutions of cultural representation. Self-produced videos posted online are more multivalent, dialogical, and provocative expressions of Inuit selfhood than those texts that may have circulated in the past. While the Internet has been celebrated for its global reach, many of the social relationships and dialogues seemingly fostered by this technology are intimate and localised. Inuit youth and young adults use video-sharing technology to creatively mediate pasts, presents, and futures in the creation of new social worlds.

The Tiny and the Fragmented

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Partial Form ◽  
Partial State ◽  
Neolithic Europe ◽  
Made In

Miniature and fragmentary objects are both remarkably fascinating and easily dismissed. Tiny scale entices users with visions of Lilliputian worlds. The ambiguity of fragments intrigues us, offering vivid reminders of the transitory nature of reality. Yet, the standard scholarly approach to such objects has been to see them as secondary, incomplete things, designed primarily to refer to a complete and often life-sized whole. This volume offers a series of fresh perspectives on the familiar concepts of the tiny and the fragmented, in chapters ranging in focus from Neolithic Europe to Pre-Columbian Honduras to the Classical Mediterranean and Ancient Near East. Diverse in scope, the volume is united in considering the little and broken things of the past as objects in their own right. When a life-sized or whole thing is made in a scaled-down or partial form, deliberately broken as part of its use, or considered successful by ancient users only if it shows some signs of wear, it challenges our expectations of representation and wholeness. Overall, this volume demands a reconsideration of the social and contextual nature of miniaturization, fragmentation, and incompleteness. These were more than just ancient strategies for saving space, time, and resources. Rather, they offered new possibilities of representation, use, and engagement—possibilities unavailable with things that were life size or more conventionally “complete.” It was because of, rather than in spite of, their small or partial state that these objects were valued parts of the personal and social worlds they inhabited.

“Traditional Music Weeps” and Other Themes in the Discourse on Music, Dance and Theatre of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand

1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 366-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. Kartomi
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Cross Fertilization

One of the most remarkable features of the past twenty years of scholarship on the Southeast Asian performing arts has been the sparking off of ideas between Southeast Asian-born scholars, whether trained in Southeast Asian universities or overseas, and Western scholars of the Southeast arts who live in North America, Australia, Europe, Japan and elsewhere. In colonial Indonesia (until 1945) and Malaysia (until 1957), research agendas of Dutch and British scholars respectively had complied with the social, economic and political priorities of the colonial powers and associated local court-centred artistic interests, though not always consciously. In Thailand, which was the only country in the region not to be colonized by a European power, Thai scholars had been actively researching their own court performing arts in the late colonial era but were nevertheless influenced by the colonial ethos of the region. In the past twenty years or so, the developing dialogue and contradictions between Southeast Asian and foreign scholars, each with their own partly distinctive assumptions and methodologies based on the priorities of their respective traditions and governments, have resulted in a healthy divergence, convergence, and cross-fertilization of ideas.

Opportunistic Whale Hunting on the Southern Northwest Coast: Ancient DNA, Artifact, and Ethnographic Evidence

2007 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 657-676 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Losey ◽  
Dongya Y. Yang
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Ancient Dna ◽  
Cervus Elaphus ◽  
Washington State ◽  
Northwest Coast ◽  
Olympic Peninsula ◽  
The West ◽  
Oregon Coast ◽  
The Past ◽  
Coast Site

Two modes of whale use have been documented on the Northwest Coast of North America, namely systematic whale hunting and whale scavenging. Ethnographically, systematic hunting was practiced only by Native groups of southwestern Vancouver Island and the northern Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. This hunting was undertaken with technology specifically designed for the task. Other groups on the Northwest Coast reportedly did not hunt whales but did utilize beached animals. Here we present archaeological evidence of whaling from the northern Oregon coast site of Par-Tee in the form of a bone point lodged in a whale phalange. This hunting likely occurred 1,300 to 1,600 years ago. Ancient DNA extracted from the phalange proves it to be a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). DNA recovered from the bone point indicates that it is made from elk (Cervus elaphus) bone, and the point's DNA sequence is identical to that from unmodified elk bone from Par-Tee, suggesting the whale was locally hunted. We present ethnohistoric data from the southern Northwest Coast describing opportunistic whale hunting with a variety of technologies. We argue that many groups along the west coast of North America likely occasionally hunted whales in the past and that this hunting occurred using nonspecialized technologies.

scholarly journals The Universities’ Transformation Thesis Revisited

2017 ◽  
pp. 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pia Vuolanto
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Nursing Science ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Active Interaction

The universities’ transformation thesis is often used to characterise the relationship between universities and society. It posits that, over the past few decades, universities have shifted from ivory tower research and disciplinary-based knowledge production to more and more active interaction with the surrounding society and towards transdisciplinary and problem-based knowledge production that targets solving the big problems of our time. The article revisits the transformation thesis in the context of Finnish nursing science at a time when this discipline was emerging at universities and the central arguments of the transformation thesis were formed. Using the social worlds framework, the article analyses the relationship between nursing science and society from the point of view of different social worlds and argues that the transformation thesis only partially captures these perceptions of the relationship between nursing science and society. Finally, the article proposes some other literature to be used in analysing universities’ interaction with society and particularly with the profession-oriented disciplines.  

Elk and Ogopogo. Belief Systems in the Hunter-Gatherer Rock Art of Northern Lands.

1991 ◽  
Vol 57 (01) ◽  
pp. 129-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Coles
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
The South ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Northern Latitudes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wild Resources ◽  
Social Scenes

The northern world, from the wide expanses of North America across the even wider spread of Asia and Europe, was subjected to the effects of the Pleistoceneice for centuries after areas to the south had been released from nature's grip. But as conditions eased the north, and open landscapes were newly created, plants and animals began to colonize and humans were not far behind. Across enormous territories of the Old and New Worlds, hunters, gatherers and fishers began to explore the resources of the virgin lands, and from before 8000 BP for at least five millennia their societies were seemingly in balance with nature's gifts. Settlements from all around the vast northern latitudes demonstrate a reliance upon wild resources that were abundant, varied and easily exploited. In such circumstances, the opportunities existed for the development and elaboration of systems of belief concerned with the principles of existence. Such systems in all likelihood took many forms of expression, only a few of which have survived today. Burials, tools and weapons, settlement organization and territorial exploitation are capable of demonstrating the systems for survivaldeveloped by these communities of people, and rock carvings and paintings add other possibilities for those who seek to understand the social scenes of the past.

The Need for Speed: Contrasting Timeframes in the Social Life of Kenyan Miraa

Africa ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Carrier
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Production Rate ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
Central Kenya

AbstractThis article contrasts two very different timeframes in the ‘social life’ of the plant stimulant miraa – known elsewhere as khat – in Kenya and beyond. One timeframe is connected with the old miraa trees growing in the Nyambene Hills District of central Kenya: these are known as mbaine, and are greatly respected for their age and link to the past. The miraa from these trees is put to much ceremonial use by the Meru inhabitants of the Nyambenes. The other timeframe is the very different one of the harvested stems. These stems are highly perishable and so must reach the consumer quickly, leading to urgency in their trade and transportation: the ‘need for speed’. The globalization of the miraa trade has intensified this urgency further: the stems are now desired as far away as North America. Miraa trees have not escaped this ‘commercial’ timeframe, and some farmers experiment with chemical sprays to speed up the production rate. The article concludes by arguing that such attempts to speed up the timeframes of the trees are met with resistance, and have not diluted the cultural significance of ancient mbaine trees and their ancestral links.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document