Showing 1 - 10 of 14 Items

• Restriction End Date: 2025-06-01

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Emma D. Kellogg

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2019-05-01

Creator: Carlos Manuel Holguin

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2015-05-01

Creator: Katharine Herman

Access: Open access

This project compares the interaction between the government and the population in both Peru and Sri Lanka through the 20th century, focusing on the provision of care (services, benefits, and recognition as provided by the governing apparatus) as a locus for their most meaningful interaction. The provision of care can be seen as a form of communication established in certain practices, symbols, and discourses. Moreover, the provision of care works to reorient the subject population into a more beneficial relationship with the state–notably one of increased dependence and trust. Through the elaboration of what care is and how it functions, a care ideology is established creating a terrain through which the politics of the governed and the governing alike can be legitimized. Care ideology can then be considered a further articulation of the state idea, creating a dialogue about how governance can or should be affected within a certain context. These case studies then illustrate the terrain over which both of these governing bodies work. In Sri Lanka, the governing apparatus provides a means for citizens to live a symbolically meaningful life through paddy farming. In Peru, the governing apparatus provides access to the state through civil infrastructure like roads and education. Through care, material goods become invested with meaning and the state idea becomes materialized. Care is a then substantial project undertaken by the state to ensure its own reproduction and further widen the possibilities for the state project to be effected through its own citizens.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Lowell Ruck

Access: Open access

Franco-American culture is increasingly recognized as an integral part of the heritage of Maine and New England, and has attracted growing academic attention in recent years. But while many scholars and cultural promoters focus on the French language in their work on this subject, few studies have considered the position of traditional music in Franco-American communities in the 21st century. This thesis examines French Canadian traditional music as it is played in New England and the ways in which musicians think about authenticity and tradition in their art. Using material from ethnographic interviews, it illuminates how musicians draw from individual, familial, and communal experiences and from past, present, and future conceptions of authentic tradition in their roles as cultural mediators. Ultimately, it suggests that players of French Canadian traditional music interact with this tradition in diverse ways, and that in doing so, they help to maintain the vibrancy of Franco-American cultural practices. La culture franco-américaine est reconnue de plus en plus comme partie intégrante de l’héritage du Maine et de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et attire maintenant l’attention académique. Mais même si beaucoup d’érudits et de promoteurs culturels ciblent la langue française dans leur travail sur ce sujet, peu d’études ont considéré la position de la musique traditionnelle dans les communautés franco-américaines du XXIe siècle. Cette thèse se concentre sur la musique traditionnelle canadienne-française de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et sur les façons dont les musiciens conceptualisent l’authenticité et la tradition dans leur art. En utilisant des entrevues ethnographiques, elle illumine comment les musiciens tirent des expériences individuelles, familiales et communautaires et des idées du passé, du présent et de l’avenir dans leurs rôles comme médiateurs culturels. Finalement, elle suggère que les joueurs de la musique traditionnelle canadienne-française interagissent avec cette tradition de plusieurs façons, et ce faisant, aident à maintenir la brillance des pratiques culturelles franco-américaines.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Rene Sebastian Cisneros

Access: Open access

The Oaxacan Guelaguetza Oficial is a folk-dance festival in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico which takes place on the last two Mondays of July each year. This state-sponsored celebration of Oaxacan identity is intertwined within histories of Indigenous religious belief and Catholic everyday practice. The Guelaguetza Oficial can be traced back to late 19thcentury celebrations venerating the Virgen del Carmen Alto. Oaxaqueños today predominantly practice an Indigenous-Catholic tradition whose rituals, festive scripts, pantheon of popular saints, and immanent understandings of heavenly power over earthly events can be traced back to negotiations between Indigenous forms of popular belief and institutionalized Catholic practice. Through historical and present-day religious tensions between existing modes of Indigenous religious belief and institutionalized Oaxacan Catholic practice, this thesis asserts that while Indigeneity often represented an obstacle to different structures of power in Mexican history, hegemonic institutions eventually came to accept the lasting presence of Indigenous identity and religious life to varying degrees within Mexican society and culture. This resulting reading of Guelaguetza demonstrates how religion is fundamentally implicated in the history of public festival and popular culture in Oaxaca. Furthermore, this thesis argues that Indigenous-Catholicism has not lost its prominence in public space in Oaxaca despite the reforms of post-1910 Oaxacan state and Mexican national politics and the effects of globalized neoliberal economies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Joseph B. Lancia

Access: Open access

My thesis discusses the cultural, political, and social dynamics of mountains with separate Indigenous and Western names and identities. Centering on Aoraki/Mount Cook—the highest peak in Aotearoa New Zealand—I integrate personal experiences as ethnographic data through narratives, mainly of my time hiking while studying abroad in New Zealand and during the two recent summers I spent exploring Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Through its name, Aoraki/Mt. Cook maintains Indigenous Māori and Western perspectives: Aoraki being a Māori atua (god) and Captain James Cook being a significant colonial figure in the Pacific. The slash upholds both identities while ensuring that they exist together. These dynamics are explored in depth and extended to mountains in places including Colorado, Alaska, and Australia. While discussing Rocky I rely heavily on Oliver Toll’s Arapaho Names & Trails (2003) which contains a substantial collection of Arapaho knowledge of the area and I give strong attention to Nesótaieux (Longs Peak and Mount Meeker). Additionally, I look at Mount Blue Sky, Denali, and Uluru/Ayers Rock to discuss mountains that have had formal name changes and how legacies are maintained through toponyms. With discussing varying identities and perceptions of each example and the knowledge held in names I encourage readers to do research into local Indigenous knowledges to further their and others’ understandings of places. I emphasize the concepts of historical silences, the revealing of knowledge, and the importance of language to articulate that Indigenous knowledge might be difficult to find but is never truly lost.

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Matthew Cesar Audi

Access: Open access

Since the late 1800s, people have immigrated to the United states from Lebanon and Syria, and the community’s racial and ethnic position within the United States has been contested ever since. Previous research emphasizes that while people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are legally classified as “white” on the U.S. Census. However, many people from the region do not identify as white, and they often face discrimination or threats of violence. For people of Arab and Christian backgrounds this is further complicated because they are a part of the majority through their religion, but part of a minority through their ethnic background. In addition, media depictions of MENAs tend to be homogenizing and stereotypical. This thesis attempts to fill a gap in literature on Christian Lebanese American identities by conducting ethnographic interviews with Lebanese-Americans from a variety of generations. It pulls from theories of diaspora and race, emphasizing the importance of context and migration trajectories when understanding Lebanese American identities. My findings demonstrate wide-ranging diversity in how Christian Lebanese-Americans understand and articulate identity due to three major factors: divergent migrant pathways in multiple countries, generational difference given changing racial politics in the U.S., and generational difference given the impacts of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East upon young Lebanese-Americans.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Yaw Owusu Sekyere

Access: Open access

Inhabitants of the poor French banlieues are rejected and isolated from the larger French society, who refuse to acknowledge their marginalization. As a result, the cycle continues where no political change is made. The French film genre, cinéma de banlieue, seeks to explain the perspectives of the underrepresented and marginalized groups within France. This honors project analyzes the representations of the banlieue through the films of La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz), Wesh wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe ? (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche), Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma), Divines (Houda Benyamina), and Banlieusards (Kery James & Leïla Sy). These films focus on the themes of drugs, policial relations, the confinement of the banlieue, and the discrimination and stigmatisation that inhabitants of the poor banlieues face, all of which revolve around the idea of entrapment. This work intends to see if these representations of the banlieue, specifically on the periphery of Paris, perpetuate stereotypes, or propose a more complex dynamic.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Ray Tarango

Access: Open access

In the spring of 2011, the indigenous community of Cherán K’eri in western Mexico rose up to protect their forests. Organized crime, and its allies, had taken over this town during the previous decade and had logged significant portions of its communal forests in the surrounding hills. This thesis examines the following questions: How do townspeople recall their experience under a narco state? What pushed this indigenous community to organize to protect the forest despite the threat of violence? What was it about this landscape in particular that brought people together? Previous research into this uprising has overlooked the gender dynamics of the community, and has failed to consider the townspeople’s connection to nature. Using interviews gathered over eighteen months in three separate visits, this thesis argues that despite patriarchal expectations that men “protect” the community and its resources it was women who led and organized the uprising. Chapter One analyzes how organized crime took control of the community, suggesting that memories and trauma of the “war on drugs” deeply affected the townspeople. Chapter Two centers on the uprising itself, exploring not only the gendered dynamics of that spring, but connecting the material and affective importance of the forest to the women who led the uprising. This thesis analyzes how organized crime took control of the community and argues that townspeople’s multilayered connection to nature played a central role in the town’s movement.

Date: 2018-01-01

Creator: Elena Gleed

Access: Open access

Refugee Resettlement to the United States is a globalized and transnational process of making home. After Somali state collapse in 1991, more than a million displaced people fled to refugee camps across the Kenyan border. Today, over 12,000 Somali people now live in Lewiston, ME, an old mill town located along the Androscoggin River. As refugees are resettled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees they enter a system created over fifty years ago in response to World War II. Using post-colonial and feminist scholarship, this project analyses the “female refugee” subject as she appears in the official discourse of resettlement processes. I trace the historical emergence of this subjectivity from an individual and work-based neoliberal American ethos to non-governmental organizations run by Somali women in Lewiston. Drawing from document analysis and ethnographic interviews, this paper explores the how Somali women are made to be “new American workers” in a process that combines western liberal feminism with ideas of integration and cultural orientation to the United States.