Urban Social Tapestries

<p>This dissertation reassesses the impact of U.S. annexation of Arizona and New Mexico in 1848 by recovering the imposition of and resistance to the new national border and identities among Spanish-Mexican, mestiza, and Euro-American women from 1846 to 1941. I analyze the impact of U.S. annexation of Arizona and New Mexico on gender roles, ethnic identity, and cultural practices by focusing on the roles of the domestic space, food culture, and material culture in dividing and bringing together women across these ethnocultural groups. By exploring the political intent and consequences of quotidian choices, this dissertation demonstrates the centrality of women in the daily and domestic negotiations over national and cultural borders during the territorial period (1850-1912) and the era of early statehood (1912-1941). Using English and Spanish-language sources, this dissertation argues that Euro-American and Spanish-Mexican women continuously used their homes, housekeeping, cultural customs, and foodways to define their new statuses in the region and negotiate the new cultural, physical, and national boundaries. Euro-Americans used their own and others’ cultural practices to maintain their whiteness and to construct Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and American Indians as non-white and to define gender and class in the region. Simultaneously, Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the new physical, social, and cultural boundaries by asserting their cultural citizenship even though they were denied full citizenship.</p> <p>In the first three chapters, I study the U.S.-Mexico War and the territorial period (1846-1912) by analyzing the roles of material and food culture and the homespace in shaping each group’s constructions of whiteness, nationalism, and ethnic identity and in shaping the processes of cultural assimilation and resistance. I highlight how Euro-Americans used the newly established U.S.-Mexico border to “other” the people and practices they associated with Mexico or “savagery.” Additionally, I argue that Spanish-Mexican and Mexican American worked around gender and legal borders by engaging in trade, traveling across the international border, and inserting themselves in the political and legal activities of Euro-Americans to maintain their homespaces.</p> <p>In Chapters 4 and 5, I address how women across ethnocultural groups used cookbooks and historical memory to create their place in community, state, and national identities after Arizona and New Mexico were incorporated in 1912. Using literary and cultural studies approaches, I address the narrative spaces, such as cookbooks and pioneer histories, in which women across ethnocultural groups claimed a stake in the public memory and community identities. I argue that Euro-American women appropriated some Spanish cultural practices and celebrated the pioneer past while denying full citizenship to people of color. Simultaneously, I argue, Spanish-Mexican and American Indian women used cookbooks and/or oral histories to challenge narratives of their inferiority and to claim their cultural citizenship.</p> <p>This dissertation brings light to the persistent and continuous roles of women, the body, and the home in shaping daily politics in the region. By pushing at the edges of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history methodology to include gender studies methodology, this dissertation introduces the homespace and motherhood as gendered and raced contact zones that were sometimes used to enforce and at other times challenge U.S. territoriality. I argue that the domestic activities of women offer significant, new insight to the political narratives of settler-colonialism, gender roles, nationality, and race in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This dissertation moves away from overtly political acts to the seemingly “mundane” activities of cooking, dressing, and housekeeping to broaden our understanding of the connections between political behavior and cultural practices. These gendered negotiations provide a critical history of the intimate ways U.S. colonial efforts in the American Southwest played out and shaped the current dynamics of borderlands communities.</p>

CHAPTER 4 - Cultural Boundaries and Ecological Frontiers in Coastal Regions: An Example from the Alaska Peninsula

Government recently introduced the Transport Law Reform Bill, which if passed by Parliament, will allow foreign vessels to uplift and discharge cargoes and passengers along the coast of New Zealand. Coastal shipping is part of the domestic transport industry, which has benefitted from deregulation and considerable restructuring over the last decade. This paper provides a brief review of the coastal shipping industry in New Zealand and an overview of international cabotage laws. An alternative open coast shipping policy proposed by the New Zealand Shipping Federation, which is based on ‘level playing fields’ principles, is presented. The scope of cost benefit analysis is outlined and the potential costs and the potential costs and benefits of the Government's open coast shipping policy are summarized. Despite the potential costs to New Zealand of an open coast policy appearing to be considerably greater than the potential benefits. Government officials have not undertaken an empirical cost benefit analysis...

Understanding plant significance across cultures and borders is a driving goal in ethnobotany. Often, empirical studies aim to highlight and explain variation in plant knowledge and uses between communities across national, geographic, and cultural boundaries. However, such studies underinvestigate commonality of values and practices between communities. In this cross-border study of highland pastoral communities in both Caucasian Georgia and Turkey, we propose and implement an approach that synthesizes Cultural Importance (CI) and Identified Cultural Importance (ICI) indices. We label this method a “Unified Cultural Keystone Species (UCKS)” approach. We demonstrate that such an approach is uniquely capable of perceiving shared Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and practices across cultures and borders. Our results identify three primary Cultural Keystone Species (CKS) that cut across cultural and political boundaries in the Western Lesser Caucasus. We argue that these findings allow for a more comprehensive understanding of ethnobotanical knowledge and practices in the study area. This, in turn, can enhance conservation and restoration strategies in the study region and beyond by highlighting the breadth of biocultural knowledge and value held within shared traditions and landscapes. By so doing, we show a way to heighten scientific perceptions of the importance of cultural and linguistic connections to environmental well-being in specific places.

Academy breaking boundaries[sbnd]the effect of integrative learning on the acceptance of others

Does pay transparency help or hurt? Evidence on employee motivation

Can climate-smart agriculture mitigate the Urmia Lake tragedy in its eastern basin?

This chapter focuses on the commentaries present in Testament Exegesis Bibliography. It considers sample texts from the New Testament and examines something of their background in the Old Testament. The chapter argues some important points of interpretation and understanding that are either overlooked or underdeveloped by the New Testament commentaries. The examples presented here begin with specific concepts as found in faith/faithfulness, in the beginning of the Lord's Prayer, and in the parable of the sheep and goats. Some examples illustrate the application of diverse areas of study such as ancient Semitic protocol of giving gifts, mytho-poetic imagery of the West Semitic world, and anthropological studies of social and cultural boundaries in areas of world view and of clean and unclean foods. One example considers a theological perspective that sought to address a broad area of New Testament doctrine and practice. Keywords:Lord's Prayer; New Testament commentaries; Old Testament

As I suggested in my general introduction, social and cultural boundaries were far more flexible for artists and practitioners than those of headmistresses and women doctors. Hitherto, the autobiographical writings of women artists (whether they were painters, dancers, actresses, musicians, composers or sculptors), have primarily been researched and read for their recording of their public accomplishments and for information on the participants within these artistic circles. For example, Sophie Fuller submits a survey of Edwardian women composers and defines what and how their scores are remembered.1 Suzanne Raitt wrote on female singers in the context of the paintings that John Singer Sargent undertook.2 Women painters are either part of an overall survey of painters and sculptors across time, or they are the subject of conventional biography combined with a catalogue of their work.3 Much the same cursory treatment attends the biographical content of actresses. For example, Roger Manvell wrote of Ellen Terry concentrating upon her career rather than any private or personal aspects; and Sara Maitland tackled Vesta Tilley's life in the context of issues of gender and cross-dressing.4 KeywordsPublic DomainPrivate LifePrivate SpherePerformance ArtistPossessive PronounThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This article revisits Irawati Karve’s early scientific work in Berlin (1927–1931) to illuminate how her empirical refusal of Eugen Fischer’s racial-biological hypothesis constitutes a pivotal moment of epistemic disobedience within the institutional core of European scientific racism. By examining Karve’s doctoral research, her later anthropometric writings in India, and the contradictions of her caste and colonial positionality, the article argues for understanding decolonial pedagogy through ‘disciplinary dependence’, a framework that resists isolated disciplinary silos and instead cultivates relational, cross-disciplinary modes of knowing. Drawing on insights from decolonial theorists, critical pedagogy, and Indigenous epistemologies, the article shows how Karve’s methodological tensions can inform contemporary debates on decolonizing science, curriculum, and knowledge production. The concept of disciplinary dependence is proposed as a pedagogical approach to encourage ethical disobedience, epistemic plurality, and collaborative knowledge-making across scientific, social, and cultural boundaries.

The attention that the problem of national identity has received in the context of the modem situation has become a reaction to ongoing changes that have affected all spheres of society. This question arises especially acutely today in the era of globalization, when social and cultural boundaries are erased, when there is an increasing influence, and sometimes even suppression, of some cultures by others. The study of national identity and the influence of globalization processes on it in a multinational state, when there are clashes and mixtures of different cultures and national traditions, is relevant and in demand in modern reality.

Cyberspace is the geographies made possible by the adoption of computer technologies into everyday life. At first, this broad description and its emphasis on plural geographies may not seem intuitive. Yet, the breadth of this description is helpful when considering the massive variety of ways that computer-related technologies are unevenly incorporated into human life. The incorporation of these technologies is altering the scales and rates at which people can organize, intervene in, and understand human and nonhuman worlds (Hayles, 1996). Yet these processes are not universal. They differ from place to place and matter in different ways for different people as individuals and collective groups. Thus, cyberspace crosses numerous social, political, economic, and cultural boundaries (Haraway, 1991, 1997). The term cyberspace was first used by novelist William Gibson (1984), but the phenomena now described by it predate the term’s common use. It is difficult to understate the widespread resonance that the publication of Gibson’s novel and the popularization of the term cyberspace has had in terms of underwriting studies of cyberspace (Bukatman, 1993a, 1993b; Chesher, 1994; Stone, 1992). Often, the term is used interchangeably with specific technologies (especially the Internet and the World Wide Web) and their effects (e.g., Starrs, 1997; Starrs & Anderson, 1997; Warf, 2001; Warf & Grimes, 1997), not to mention being used in marketing strategies for the late dot.com industries and the so-called New Economy (Graham, 1998). With some important exceptions, early commentators took a techno-utopian stance toward cyberspace and saw what Bell (1973) called the postindustrial society and Toffler (1980) called the Third Wave finally coming to fruition. Gibson uses the term to both tell a story and provide a critical commentary about technology and society (Benedikt, 1991). The simultaneously conceptual and material relationships between technology and society are central to the concept of cyberspace. The plural geographies comprising cyberspace raise the issue of spatiality. The term spatiality is itself a complex and contested concept (Johnson, Gregory, & Smith, 1994). In a broad sense, spatiality refers to co-constitutive relationships between societies and their spatial organization. The concept informs a wide range of academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities in what has come to be known as the spatial turn (Soja, 1989). While this idea may appear rather simple, it is a source of considerable philosophical and practical debate (Crang & Thrift, 2000; Gregory, 1994; Harvey, 1996; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 1994; Smith, 1990; Soja, 1996). With respect to cyberspace, research centers on how the incorporation of computer-related technologies into everyday life can change how human spatialities are organized, intervened in, and understood.

Food is a revealing index of social and cultural boundaries. It is the symbolic fulcrum of many religious rites, such as the Eucharist in Christianity or the Islamic Eid al-Fatr post-Ramadan feast. Food preferences and aversions also circumscribe the distances between cultures and classes. What is considered a delicacy or an acceptable meal in one place—say, horse flesh to the French or dog meat in parts of China—may elicit disgust elsewhere, as in England or the United States. However, social differentiation through food is not limited to exceptional cases; our everyday product choices and manners are important cultural statements about who we are. Food, David E. Sutton perceptively states, “hides powerful meanings and structures under the cloak of the mundane and the quotidian.”1 It is surprising then that scholars have only begun to explore the cultural exchanges, social and econom ic inf luences, and patterns of consumer choice guiding food consumption. We have volumes of nutritional and empirical (especially market-driven) data on culinary practices, but still limited material on post-Second World War gastronomic trends. The last decade has begun to reverse this trend, led by the groundbreaking works of Michael Pollan, Donna Gabaccia, Hasia R. Diner, Eric Schlosser, and Tom Standage. These and other authors are considering why individuals and cultures eat and view food experiences as they do.

Constructing identity by deconstructing differences: Building partnerships across cultural and hierarchical divides

It is no news that popular music plays a fundamental role in the negotiation of identities. Many academic studies have provided evidence in this regard (Bennett 1986; Frith 1996; Garcia Canclini 1995; Grossberg 1989). Popular music provides a bridge for integrating ethnic and dominant cultures; it is a vehicle for crossing social and cultural boundaries in the process of developing a multicultural identity. In this sense, it is not only a reflexive tool but also a potentially constitutive factor in the patterning of cultural values and social interaction (Waterman 1991, 66–67), providing society with a framework for intercultural engagement in a variety of ways (Bendrups & Johnson 2011, 85). This is particularly relevant in the context of increasing cultural diversity that is resulting from greater volume and rapidity of global flows of people and cultures. This is changing the dynamics of most urban settings around the world, including in contemporary Australia.