Reconfiguring the Empty Center: Drinking,Sobriety, and Identity in Native American Women’s Narratives

Although anthropologists have paid little attention to popular American psychological discourse about addiction and recovery, the cultural politics of its engagement by Native North American communities warrant closer examination. By ethnographically contextualizing personal narratives, this paper describes how addiction/recovery discourse has been selectively engaged by younger generations of women in a northern Plains reservation community. Sobriety is not only a therapeutic transformation but also a socially negotiated identity change in this community and, therefore, engages ongoing local identity politics. Many community members evaluate the legitimacy of claims to Native identity by essentializing boundaries between Native and non-Native, as well as between past and present-a discursive convention that O'Nell has called "the rhetoric of the empty center" (Disciplined Hearts: History, Identity and Depression in an American Indian Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 55). Yet by selectively appropriating elements of addiction/recovery discourse, younger women in the 1990s increasingly positioned emotional experience and expression as central arbiters of the legitimacy of Native identity. In so doing, they reconfigured the rhetoric of the empty center, eliciting both controversy and support from the larger community. This analysis highlights new dimensions of the social life of addiction/recovery discourse in contemporary Native North America, and calls for increased ethnographic attention to how localized cultural politics can orient the ways in which communities engage therapeutic discourses.     

Ghost Dancing the Grand Canyon. Southern Paiute Rock Art, Ceremony, and Cultural Landscapes

Combining rock art studies with ethnohistory, contemporary ethnographic analysis, and the interpretations of people who share the cultural traditions being studied, this paper documents a rock art site in Kanab Creek Canyon that appears to have been the location of a Ghost Dance ceremony performed by Southern Paiute and perhaps Hualapai people in the late 1800s. Using the site as a point of departure, it focuses on the way in which synergistic associations among place, artifact, resources, events, and historic and contemporary Indian people contribute to the construction of a contextual cultural landscape.     

Retrieving the Red Continent: settler colonialism and the history of American Indians in the US

While present in the contemporary academy, American Indian history remains marginalized by being associated with regional and national histories of the United States. Recently, postcolonial scholarship has provided a pathway out of that marginalization. The postcolonial critique of traditional anthropological and historical writing about indigenous peoples suggests a new way to imagine the relationship between American Indian history and other areas of scholarship. The most promising aspect of this critique is the formulation of ‘settler colonialism’. That framework first emerged among geographers and has recently been embraced by historians and anthropologists. The settler colonial framework offers a way to conceive of the Native past in a transnational context as well as to understand indigenous encounters with modernity as an ongoing struggle with colonial rule rather than as a campaign to accommodate Native people to ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ or to ‘assimilate’ them into a nation state.     

The whole universe is my cathedral: a contemporary Navajo spiritual synthesis

This article discusses the three major spiritual healing ways used by Navajo Indians today: Traditional healing practices that have been used for generations and still have a dynamic existence relevant to everyday Navajo life; Christian healing traditions, ranging from Catholic Charismatic to Protestant Pentecostal; and practices of the Native American Church (NAC). The complex relationship among these healing traditions on the Navajo reservation is examined through a case study of a Navajo woman whose personal spirituality includes all three. Faced with serious medical problems, this devout Catholic turned to Navajo Traditional and Native American Church spiritual diagnosis and treatment. This analysis is the occasion for a reflection on the contemporary relevance of the kind of spiritual synthesis characterized in this woman's experience.     

以生态景观构建乡村审美空间

乡村审美空间表层是非功利的,实质深层映射出人地关系本质的取向价值,是人地关系永久可持续发展问题。目前乡村研究多注重经济和土地利用,而以现实生态景观构建乡村审美空间还是有待于探讨的重要课题。近年来快速城市化发展,区域中的自然地理性质破坏对于乡村景观是致命的。立足地理生态环境架构乡村审美空间,分析乡村生态景观和审美空间对应的元素,以多尺度景观层面探寻表现在与之相映的景观空间形态结构、格局演化进程与机理响应,进而构建审美空间,组合形成现实的美丽景观体系。将生态文明和社会发展要求安排在景观空间格局配置的中,形成保持整体环境的景观网络。使得风景美的概念渗透在于城镇、乡村以至农田等更广阔的领域,从而建设具有风景画境界的"美丽乡村"。     

Calculating the Cultural Significance of American Indian Plants: Paiute and Shoshone Ethnobotany at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

Ethnobotanical studies are of interest to ethnographers, ethnobotanists, and cultural historians who study the prehistoric, historic, and contemporary contribution of plants to the sociocultural adaptations of American Indian people. A critical research issue is evaluating the differential contribution of plants to American Indian adaptive strategies. This article takes the first quantitative plant evaluation model and combines it with field data from the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, ethnobotany study to explore the utility of this model for evaluating the cultural significance of botanical resources to contemporary American Indian peoples.     

Biohistorical approaches to “race” in the United States: Biological distances among African Americans,European Americans,and their ancestors

Folk taxonomies of race are the categorizations used by people in their everyday judgments concerning the persons around them. As cultural traditions, folk taxonomies may shape gene flow so that it is unequal among groups sharing geography. The history of the United States is one of disparate people being brought together from around the globe, and provides a natural experiment for exploring the relationship between culture and gene flow. The biohistories of African Americans and European Americans were compared to examine whether population histories are shaped by culture when geography and language are shared. Dental morphological data were used to indicate phenotypic similarity, allowing diachronic change through United States history to be considered. Samples represented contemporary and historic African Americans and European Americans and their West African and European ancestral populations (N = 1445). Modified Mahalanobis' D² and Mean Measure of Divergence statistics examined how biological distances change through time among the samples. Results suggest the social acceptance for mating between descendents of Western Europeans and Eastern and Southern European migrants to the United States produced relatively rapid gene flow between the groups. Although African Americans have been in the United States much longer than most Eastern and Southern Europeans, social barriers have been historically stronger between them and European Americans. These results indicate that gene flow is in part shaped by cultural factors such as folk taxonomies of race, and have implications for understanding contemporary human variation, relationships among prehistoric populations, and forensic anthropology. Am J Phys Anthropol 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

The divergence of traditional Aboriginal and contemporary fire management practices on Wik traditional lands,Cape York Peninsula,Northern Australia

Fire has been a critical component of Aboriginal culture and natural resource management in Australia for millennia. Aboriginal fire management in Northern Australia is widespread and, in some more remote areas, has continued relatively undisrupted despite widespread changes in tenure and land use. For the Wik people of Western Cape York, there has been a continued connection to their culture and traditional lands. Recently, Wik traditional owners have formed a ranger program which has secured funding to manage contemporary land management issues. This includes the landscape‐scale management of fire for biodiversity conservation and greenhouse gas abatement. Because the work is being conducted by Aboriginal people, with consent from traditional owners and on their traditional lands, there is an assumption that the activities are compatible with historical traditional land management and cultural practices. In this study, we use participatory action research to compare contemporary fire management with the current understanding of traditional Aboriginal fire management to assess objectively the compatibility of these two paradigms. We do this by combining the experience and understanding of traditional owners with anthropological and ecological perspectives. We find that contemporary fire management is applied across traditional cultural boundaries using methods such as aerial incendiaries. Financial incentives and contractual obligations associated with fire management are externally driven or include modern considerations such as the protection of infrastructure. In contrast, traditional fire management was the prerogative of traditional owners and was applied at fine scales for specific outcomes. Fire management was governed by rules that determined how people moved across the landscape and how resources were partitioned and shared. Supporting the implementation of Aboriginal burning alongside current fire management practices could lead to significant community engagement in such activities and is likely to have much better biodiversity and social outcomes.     

mtDNA analysis of a prehistoric Oneota population: implications for the peopling of the New World.

mtDNA was successfully extracted from 108 individuals from the Norris Farms Oneota, a prehistoric Native American population, to compare the mtDNA diversity from a pre-Columbian population with contemporary Native American and Asian mtDNA lineages and to examine hypotheses about the peopling of the New World. Haplogroup and hypervariable region I sequence data indicate that the lineages from haplogroups A, B, C, and D are the most common among Native Americans but that they were not the only lineages brought into the New World from Asia. The mtDNA evidence does not support the three-wave hypothesis of migration into the New World but rather suggests a single "wave" of people with considerable mtDNA diversity that exhibits a signature of expansion 23,000-37,000 years ago.     

Jesus, peyote, and the holy people: alcohol abuse and the ethos of power in Navajo healing

Of the three religious healing traditions that coexist within the contemporary Navajo health care system, the Native American Church (NAC) and Pentecostal Christianity are more actively involved in the treatment of alcohol and substance abuse than is Traditional Navajo healing. This article examines these two more recent healing traditions as religious responses to the contemporary Navajo crisis of alcohol and substance abuse as well as to socioeconomic changes. These traditions offer new kinds of power, social networks, and personal meaning that facilitate a transformation of self, a revitalized sense of community, and a new vision of the possibilities of the future for Navajo people who suffer. Examining the ethos of power that underlies Navajo healing can complement the theoretical emphasis on harmony and beauty in anthropological research on Navajo culture and religion.     

Open for Inspection: Problems in Representing a Humanised Wilderness

Historically, a large percentage of non-indigenous Australians have obtained knowledge of Aboriginal people through channels which provoke an aesthetic response (paintings, film, literature, etc.). More recently, inhabited national parks, such as Kakadu and Uluru, have offered a supposedly more direct engagement with contemporary Aboriginal life, yet this engagement is also filtered through a number of aesthetic discourses. The necessity for any social group to construct representations of itself arises out of the complexities and contingencies of the political landscape. Although such representations can and do reflect a number of political perspectives, Aboriginal people occasionally have the opportunity to convey their own view of the social and historical circumstances which continue to impinge upon their lives. Although national park boards of management often encourage this indigenous voice, I argue that the resulting aesthetic representations tend to elide and suppress the untidy moments which gave rise to them. This, I further suggest, presents problems for any attempt to represent the contemporary social and cultural reality of a particular group of people.     

"Tobacco has a purpose, not just a past": Feasibility of developing a culturally appropriate smoking cessation program for a pan-tribal native population

Tobacco has long held spiritual significance to Native people of North America but, because of recreational use, it has become a health risk relatively recently. More Native people smoke than any other ethnic group (41 percent vs. 24 percent in whites and blacks), and death rates caused by tobacco-related diseases are disproportionately high. However, no tested, culturally tailored smoking cessation programs exist for this group. We used a critical-interpretive framework to understand the meaning of tobacco and the feasibility of smoking cessation interventions in a pan-tribal population. In June 2004, the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) and the Oklahoma Area Indian Health Service (IHS) collaborated on six focus groups with (IHS) patients. The patients served represent over 200 different nations. Our participants provided us with modifications to a currently untested program designed by the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma's Tobacco Prevention Program to enhance cultural appropriateness, including (1) an emphasis on visual presentation and a "Native" look to program educational materials; (2) comprehensive information about tobacco, quitting, and coping among Native people; (3) an acknowledgment and incorporation of traditional tobacco use and its diversity; and (4) the use of talking circles and counseling with Native facilitators.     

No aging in India: The uses of gerontology

This paper develops a critique of international gerontology through an ethnography and analysis of gerontological practice in India. The central theme of Indian gerontology — that of an imminent demographic and social explosion of an aging population who will tax the country's slender resources — misrepresents available data and fails to signify the experience of most Indian old people. Narrative and deconstructive techniques are deployed to examine the language of crisis and the complex sources of this misrepresentation. Three sources are explored: local disjunctions of class and gender in India, neocolonial biases in the structure of knowledge on aging central to international discourse, and subaltern strategies within India for subverting Western and elite Indian imperatives of what it means to be old.A variety of textual, ethnographic, and historical materials are examined: Indian and American literature pertaining to the 1982 World Assembly on Aging, a series of sociological texts each entitled Aging in India, and four contemporary Indian institutions designed to meet the needs of old people: a social service agency, a geriatric clinic, a retirement community, and an old age home.     

Young Asian women and relationships: traditional or transitional?

This article investigates social and cultural aspects of "teenage life" among south Asian girls in Britain, particularly their experiences of relationships with boys and the extent to which they become involved in sexual activities. In-depth interviews were carried out with teenage girls and young women from Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds and a comparative group of white British girls, in four schools and one college in the South and West Health Authority Region. Asian teenage girls conformed to different behavioural norms than their white peers. They were influenced by cultural traditions, religious obligations, family loyalties and community expectations. Few Asian girls became involved in relationships or sexual activities. However, once removed from the parental home, the influence of parents and their Asian community, their social and sexual behaviour changes; they experience an independence which often involves relationships and sexual activities. In contrast, white teenage girls experienced a different set of pressures which came from peers and boyfriends and accepted involvement with boys and sexual activity.     

Archaeology and the "Savage Slot": Displacement and Emplacement in the Premodern World

Many attempts to understand the cultural impact of the forces of modernism, capitalism, and globalization have come to highlight contemporary cultural diversity at the expense of reifying a homogenized past of traditional, static societies. The "savage slot" still provides a convenient myth for characterizing small-scale communities before the advent of modernism—communities that experienced dramatic change only as they were pulled into the world system. Archaeological evidence from the southeastern United States challenges this stereotype, as Native American groups routinely migrated and continually redefined notions of "place" and "locality"—processes often treated as distinctly (post)modern. Such case studies emphasize the importance of working toward a deep historical anthropology that will continue to undermine stereotypes about the Other in the past as well as the present.     

Nostalgia and Degeneration: The Moral Economy of Drinking in Navajo Society

This article focuses on how some members of Navajo society use narratives regarding alcohol and drinking to comment on cultural degeneration and the decay of the traditional Navajo moral economy. These narratives drinking are seldom solely about alcohol but refer to a host of distinct yet interrelated concerns involving moral values, individual and collective identities, underdevelopment, imagined histories, psychic conflict, and social contention. This article sheds light on how evaluations of alcohol and drinking problems, as encapsulated in narratives of degeneration, fit into the overall context of contemporary Navajo society. Narratives of degeneration juxtapose a degenerate present to a nostalgic past and in the process direct moral censure toward two primary groups in Navajo society, namely, young people and others who drink to excess, [drinking, Native Americans, Navajo, narrative, alcohol]     

Identity and healing in three Navajo religious traditions: sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózh [symbol: see text

In this article, we elucidate how the Navajo synthetic principle sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózh [symbol: see text] (SNBH) is understood, demonstrated, and elaborated in three different Navajo healing traditions. We conducted interviews with Navajo healers and their patients affiliated with Traditional Navajo religion, the Native American Church, and Pentecostal Christianity. Their narratives provide access to cultural themes of identity and healing that invoke elements of SNBH. SNBH specifies that the conditions for health and well-being are harmony within and connection to the physical/spiritual world. Specifically, each religious healing tradition encourages affective engagement, proper family relations, an understanding of one's cultural and spiritual histories, and the use of kinship terms to establish affective bonds with one's family and with the spiritual world. People's relationships within this common behavioral environment are integral to their self-orientations, to their identities as Navajos, and to the therapeutic process. The disruption and restoration of these relationships constitute an important affective dimension in Navajo distress and healing.     

‘Hip to be Irish’: ethnicity and Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’

A ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity surfaced in the 1980s – according to a number of scholars and journalists – and is comprised of what some consider to be more ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ Irish cultural attributes. Defining authentic and traditional Irishness is complicated, however, by the recent influx and highly visible forms of economic capital and media attention stemming from the Celtic Tiger – the surge of economic prosperity that began in Ireland in the 1990s – and the commercializing of Irish music and dance – such as Riverdance. In this paper, I propose, through my study involving Irish language enthusiasts, that this ‘new’ form of Irish ethnicity is more the result of rather than the reason for this surge in popularity. I use Pierre Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’ in questioning the ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity, arguing instead that a deeply seated, less-visible reservoir of cultural and social capital form the basis for this perceived contemporary ethnicity.     

The Role of Education in American Indian Self-Determination: Lessons from the Ramah Navajo Community School

Since 1975 the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act has enabled American Indian communities to enact self-determination through community-based schooling. In this study conducted by a Navajo researcher, the Ramah Navajo community defined self-determination and how it was operationalized within the community and school. The study demonstrates how education based on Navajo epistemology has been integral to self-determination at Ramah, underscoring the importance of incorporating Native American epistemologies in schooling for Indigenous students.     

Native American Tattoos: Identity and Spirituality in Contemporary America

Influences from counterculture movements and tattooing traditions from around the world have transformed the North American tattoo experience. Consultants' narratives reveal a desire to align with a primal human essence, seen as somehow lost through the process of civilization. Images are intentionally chosen to seek connection with people considered to embody a simpler, truer form of human life; what scholars routinely refer to as the “primitive,” or the Other. In the cases under consideration, an effort is made to connect to a particular so-called primitive, that is, the American Indian. Thus, the current renaissance of tattoo as fine art provides an occasion to reconsider American fascination with “playing Indian” and all things Indian.