Presenting an Admirable Self: Moral Evaluation within the Interview

This article considers the complicated nature of self-reporting within the in-depth interview. Despite the adoption of ethnographic methods in Christian ethics and related disciplines, the accuracy of interview data has received relatively little attention. Drawing upon my fieldwork with Christian social workers in the American southeast, as well as sociological and anthropological sources, I argue that research participants frequently endeavor to present an admirable portrait of themselves. Through selecting, omitting, and revising their stories, they undertake a kind of moral work, assessing their actions and attitudes according to available ethical criteria. Broader cultural norms, their own moral ideals, and anticipations of the interviewer’s judgments all supply resources for self-evaluation. Rather than presenting a methodological problem, understanding this possible dynamic within the interview supplies the Christian ethicist with firsthand insights into the moral labors of naming a good life.

Shape as a function of time + raw material + burial context? An exploratory analysis of Perdiz arrow points from the ancestral Caddo area of the American Southeast

Temporal assignments carry substantive weight, and archaeologists regularly assume that artefacts from discrete temporal units may differ in ways that convey changes in preference or behaviour. Similarly, archaeologists regularly assume that raw material differences articulate with stone tool morphology, and the role of differential raw material quality and preference associated with Caddo lithic technology remains largely unexplored. Whether a particular artefact is found in or outside of burial contexts is a sensitive and regularly discussed topic in the archaeological literature, providing valuable insights related to prehistoric burial practices, as well as generational shifts in aesthetics, design, and raw material preferences. These assumptions were tested using geometric morphometrics, yielding results in support of the hypothesis that Perdiz arrow point shape is protean, and that significant differences existed in shape by time, raw material, and burial context.

The Eight-Year Study and Progressive Education Cooperative Studies

During the 1930–1940s, the Progressive Education Association’s Eight-Year Study ushered in an era of secondary school experimentation, establishing an organizational process (the cooperative study) and introducing a research methodology (implementative research) for educational renewal. Cooperative studies embraced a democratic ideal that participants would work together for a greater good and maintained a fundamental belief that a diversity of perspectives, coupled with open discourse, would serve to better develop educational practices. Although no unified theory was established for cooperative study, activities focused on problem-solving were intended to expand teachers’ abilities rather than to establish a single method for the dissemination of educational programs. Implementative research was grounded in a faith in experimentation as an “exploratory process” to include gathering, analyzing, interpreting, and discussing data, and sought to determine the validity (in contrast to reliability) of programmatic interventions. Drawing on 1930s progressive education high school practices, more than a hundred selected secondary and post-secondary schools throughout the United States—public and private, large and small, Black and White, rural and urban—participated in national and regional cooperative studies, funded primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board. Experimental projects included the Progressive Education Association’s Eight-Year Study (1930–1942), consisting of 30 sites with 42 secondary schools (and 26 junior high schools) throughout the United States; the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States’ Southern Study (1938–1945), consisting of 33 White secondary schools in the American Southeast; the American Council of Education’s Cooperative Study in General Education (1938–1947), consisting of 25 colleges throughout the United States; and the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for Negroes’ Secondary School Study (1940–1946), consisting of 17 Black secondary schools in the American Southeast. These cooperative studies served to explore and further develop progressive education practices at the secondary and post-secondary school level. The intent of the 1930s–1940s cooperative study projects was to develop school programs that would attend to the interests and needs of adolescents without diminishing students’ chances for further education. Guided by “Eight-Year Study progressivism,” cooperative study staff placed great trust in the ability of teachers to address complex issues, belief in democracy as a guiding social ideal, and faith in thoughtful inquiry to create educational settings that nourished both students and teachers. Based on these fundamental themes, many cooperative study schools adopted what became a distinctive view of progressive education with correlated and fused core curricula, teacher–pupil planning, cumulative student records, and summer professional development workshops. Notions of “success” for these projects prove difficult to ascertain; however, innovative forms of curriculum design, instructional methodology, student assessment instruments, and professional development activities arose from these programs that served to influence educational theory and practice throughout the mid- and late-20th century. Perhaps equally important, cooperative study, along with implementative research, displayed the importance of educational exploration and school experimentation, implicitly asserting that a healthy school was an experimental school.

The Integration of Lidar and Legacy Datasets Provides Improved Explanations for the Spatial Patterning of Shell Rings in the American Southeast

ABSTRACTArchaeologists have struggled to combine remotely sensed datasets with preexisting information for landscape-level analyses. In the American Southeast, for example, analyses of lidar data using automated feature extraction algorithms have led to the identification of over 40 potential new pre-European-contact Native American shell ring deposits in Beaufort County, South Carolina. Such datasets are vital for understanding settlement distributions, yet a comprehensive assessment requires remotely sensed and previously surveyed archaeological data. Here, we use legacy data and airborne lidar-derived information to conduct a series of point pattern analyses using spatial models that we designed to assess the factors that best explain the location of shell rings. The results reveal that ring deposit locations are highly clustered and best explained through a combination of environmental conditions such as distance to water and elevation as well as social factors.

Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida

Elaborate rituals, from the cleared space of encounter to physical gestures and gifts, developed over the course of the sixteenth century in La Florida as Native met European. Searching for a common symbolism between cultures is often limited to those items that both groups recognize and use in a similar fashion. Those are frequently reduced to lived experiences, or the material culture of the body: food, shelter, and clothes. Almost all early Florida encounter rituals involved the body: touch, perception, and presentation of physical form. As this code developed, clothes became one of the most common methods of achieving connections as individuals chose items of dress to do some of the work of cultural interpretation that resonated with their own experiences and parent cultures. Beginning with early Spanish Florida and moving chronologically as other European powers entered the region, this chapter explores how these metaphorical encoding and decoding sessions developed. In the discursive and physical worlds of the early American southeast, textiles were key metaphors for connection and recognition. By the end of the sixteenth century, many Native groups from Carolina to Florida had a working knowledge of European textiles and their metaphorical role in the rituals of encounter.