The Hold Life

Julie Livingston and Angela Garcia both provide ethnographies centered around the theme of illumination. In the case of Julie Livingston, Improvising Medicine works to illuminate the growing cancer epidemic in Africa as well as the unique way cancer is handled in situations of improvisation. Angela Garcia also works to illuminate via her ethnographic work, The Pastoral Clinic, by emphasizing the importance of dispossession in treating heroin addiction in the Española Valley and also working to counter common beliefs regarding heroin addiction. In defending these respective arguments, both authors use similar tone and voice; however, the structure of each ethnography is markedly different. Even with some weaknesses being relatively apparent

Ramon Gutierrez’s When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away is an exploration of the merging of Spanish, Franciscan and Pueblo Indian cultures throughout Spain's “frontier” in its colonial American empire before Anglo contact. Gutierrez builds a foundation for his analysis by discussing Pueblo Indian life prior to outside contact, Franciscan theology, and the class structure of Spanish communities in each of its respective book sections. He examines meanings of the cultural interactions of gift exchange, ownership, trade, sexual rights, labor, kinship, social status, religious beliefs, and honor among many others using marriage as a window. His interpretation of the complex cultural meanings of marriage illustrates the ways in which the

The Colombian culture is formed from the inheritance of the indigenous peoples present in the territory since ancient times, the Spanish traditions adopted during the colonial period and the African Customs incorporated by the slaves that led the conquistadors. This mixture of cultures constitutes a society with traits common to the rest of Latin American countries but, at the same time, very different also. Indeed, even within Colombia's own territory there are many differences between regions and others. Geographic diversity-can be found from tropical beaches to mountains of more than 5,000 meters in height with perpetual snows-and the natural isolation of some areas has led to this diversity. Some of the most important cultural groups according to their location are the so-called cops, located in the Altiplano Cundiboyacense; the countries, settled in Antioquia; The foresters, Settlers of the eastern plains; the Vallunos, settled in the area of Valle del Cauca; the coastal, inhabitants of the Caribbean coast, and the Santander, residents of the departments of Santander and Norte de Santander. All these groups are characterized by showing great cultural differences among themselves, which makes Colombia a fascinating country to know and enter into the day to day of its inhabitants.

When one pictures the societies that spanned throughout our Mesoamerica and South America the images of warriors, conquests, gold and great feats of architecture, spawn in the mind. Missing from not only there, but the focus of many studies are the crucial roles that women played in these societies. Between each society; the Mayan, Aztec and Inca, each has their own unique culture and role for women within it. One wonders the roles of women in society, where does she fit in; politics, religious practices, and within the home. These roles are dictated by the characteristics of the society in which they live. It is crucial to begin uncovering for each of these societies, the roles of which the women took on, through exploring three subject matters, the role of women concerning government and law, politics, the role of women in day-to-day life and lastly, religious roles of women.

It is apparent from Christine Eber's research in her work, Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town, that the gender roles and relations for men and women in the town of Chenalho have gone through somewhat dramatic changes since the 1960's and 1970's. They have gone from clearly defined roles for both men and women, to a more skewed framework that allows for a great deal of gray area. These roles have not only changed within the household and community, but also outside of them. The effects of these shifts in gender roles can be identified in relation to the Pedranos' traditional belief structure, the influence of religion, and the use/misuse of alcohol in

Huichols or Wixarika are a group of indigenous people live in the rough and rocky terrain of central Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountain whose rituals and traditions have endured all the way through the centuries, even in the countenance of absurd unusual. In spite of the efforts to change them to Catholicism follow by the Spanish invasion of Mexico, the Huichols’ immobile live today is quite related to the time as their ancestors lived many centuries ago. Huichols’ religion engages in recreations of central role in their everyday lives. From the most ordinary job, to the majority consecrated rites, each activity has special symbols and those symbols allude to Huichols’ belief system “myth”. Myth is defined as “a sacred story that people

Miner’s article presents numerous anthropological concepts including culture, social behaviors, symbols, material culture and holism. While providing us with a synchronic view of an unexplored culture, Miner tackles the principle mindset that governs the “Nacirema’s” social customs and “rituals”, looks at key symbols and material possessions as the focus of the culture, and highlights the importance of studying a culture in its entirety to gain a full and accurate understanding.

The Ayllus in Inca society were similar to the calpullis from the Mexica society. Cultivators lived in groups (an ayllu) of other peasants. Each was made of several families that lived together and shared the land, animals, crops, and tools that were allotted to each ayllu.

In this article, Sarah C. Clayton examines the gender roles and ideologies in ancient Teotihuacan. Stated in her thesis, this work will provide for a better understanding of social organization and diversity. Anthropologists separate gender (cultural) with sex (biological). For example, there were differences in different places in Teotihuacan, were the “mainstream” society had males with a higher power than females, and in Tlailotlacan, there were equal social status. People were buried underneath the apartment compounds, where archeologists examine the gender and the age and if social status may intersect with gender. Burial brings are essential information to gender roles, as Clayton views different numerical data. The author went more in

Today we live in a globalized world, the world is interlinked on so many social, political, and economic levels that everyone’s culture has somewhat bled into each other’s. So it is extremely rare for anthropologist to find tribes like the Yanomami. “The Yanomami are a tribe of roughly twenty thousand Amazonian Indians living in 200 to 250 villages along the border between Venezuela and Brazil.” (Borofsky, R., & Albert, B. 2005). The Yanomami have been studied by anthropologist since the 1950’s and are said to be important to anthropologist because of the unique lifestyle they live mostly unpolluted by the western world (Tiffany,S., Adams, K., 2002). When people are as isolated as the Yanomami, it gives anthropologist an amazing opportunity to study the unique development of a society. A product of society is social construction, a social construct is basically a set of rules that a society establishes for themselves over time, the members of that society may follow those rules but the rules aren’t inherent. The world that we know and the most rules that we follow are socially constructed. One of the biggest social constructions is gender, gender is a social construct that can seep into every area of life, this paper will explore the Yanomamis childrearing, politics and religion through the lens of gender. While the Yanomami live very unique lives that we can and should learn so much from, today the Yanomamis way of life is under threat.

Paul Gelles, Water and Power in Highland Peru: The Cultural Politics of Irrigation and Development is an interesting take on the structure of the indigenous culture surrounding irrigation water in the lower Colca valley in southwestern Peru. Gelles explores the influence of several seemingly clashing cultural influences, from the Inka to the Peruvian state on this small, rural community. This ethnography maps how traditional systems of irrigation coexist along modern, state-sanctioned models. Much of the focus is on how “competing structures of power and meaning are conceptually mapped onto the communities’ irrigation system over the course of its annual agricultural cycle” (Gelles, 2). It is fascinating to read how, despite pressure and disproportionate

The film, “The Spirit of Kuna Yala” expresses the perspective of the native peoples from the San Blas Islands of Panama. What makes this documentary dynamic is not that it is solely the perspective of the Kuna, but it gives insight that some of the individuals do believe that globalization of the world has benefits of their own, and is not just a force that dismantles fragile culture and the environment. The program, PEMASKY, maintains the forest of the Kuna Yala while still using the resources that it supplies to humans. The Kuna have contained the land for thousands of years, and believes it has to do with their identity inconjuction to the land, "we realize that the customs, the traditions ,that are practiced by the Kuna community, are

The cross-pollination religious customs and material culture in the Cuban Diaspora has provided a wealth of indigenous and assimilative sources (Gordon, 2014: 53), and this has afforded Mendive a rich abundance of inherited iconography of fauna, flora and otherworldly phenomena to consume and use in the process of creating his artworks. Mendive is able to animate the pantheon of Orishas, depicted as either interacting with or sometimes assimilating human postures and gestures. Such representations of the Santería cosmic beings investigate concepts of hybridity, “New Word” practices of syncretism, and notions of a perceived “combining” of different and seemingly contradictory beliefs through the “blending” of customs and traditions of different schools of thought and discourse (Turner, 2014).

In our modern era and by our modern standards, the Otavalo people of Ecuador shine with scintillating success in the global arena. A myriad of factors have contributed to Otavalo prosperity and wealth, factors both outside and within their control, but factors nonetheless dependent upon the fluidity and ever-changing construct of indigenous identity. Tracing the saga of this indigenous people’s rise to textile, musical and cultural capital, the opportunistic attitude of the Otavalo remains the foundation for modern wealth and commerce. The true question of Otavalo success, however, rests not in economic prosperity alone, but in their inherent ability to adopt socially befitting “modern traditions” and retain

What physical, behavioral, and verbal symbols affect the culture of Cincom, such as décor, logos, ceremonies, rituals, jokes, jargon, and stories?