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Affectual Erasure examines how Argentine cinema has represented Indigenous peoples throughout a period spanning roughly a century. Cynthia Margarita Tompkins interrelates her discussion of films with the ethnographic context of the Indigenous peoples represented and an analysis of the affective dimensions at play. These emotions underscore the inherent violence of generic conventions, as well as the continued political violence preventing Indigenous peoples from access to their ancestral lands and cultural mores. Tompkins explores a broad range of movies beginning in the silent period and includes both feature films and documentaries, underscored by archival and contemporary film stills. She...
Closer to Antarctica than to Buenos Aires, the port town of Ushuaia, Argentina is home to a national park as well as a museum that is housed in the world’s southernmost prison. Ushuaia’s radial panopticon operated as an experimental hybrid penal colony and penitentiary from 1902 to 1947, designed to revolutionize modern prisons globally. A Carceral Ecology offers the first comprehensive study of this notorious prison and its afterlife, documenting how the Patagonian frontier and timber economy became central to ideas about labor, rehabilitation, and resource management. Mining the records of penologists, naturalists, and inmates, Ryan C. Edwards shows how discipline was tied to forest management, but also how inmates gained situated geographical knowledge and reframed debates on the regeneration of the land and the self. Bringing a new imperative to global prison studies, Edwards asks us to rethink the role of the environment in carceral practices as well as the impact of incarceration on the natural world.
Davies examines how Renaissance illustrated maps shaped ideas about peoples of the Americas, revealing relationships between civility, savagery and monstrosity.
Archaeological ideas and practices have experienced transformative change since the Society for American Archaeology’s fiftieth Anniversary. Authors in this volume from the SAA press consider critically some of today’s most noteworthy issues. Their voices—like their views—are as diverse as the discipline. Nonetheless, they repeatedly recognize deep articulation between archaeology and social, economic, and political milieus, from local to global scales. And they share conviction that much is to be done in the years ahead. This volume aims to rouse more voices to join the lively ongoing conversation.
Archaeological theory has gone through a great upheaval in the last 50 years – from the processual theory, which wanted to make archaeology more "scientific" to post-processual theory, which understands that interpreting human behavior (even of past cultures) is a subjective study. This subjective approach incorporates a plurality of readings, thereby implying that different interpretations are always possible, allowing us to modify and change our ideas under the light of new information and/or interpretive frameworks. In this way, interpretations form a continuous flow of transformation and change, and thus archaeologists do not uncover a real past but rather construct a historical past o...
Much of what we are comes from our ancestors. Through cultural and biological inheritance mechanisms, our genetic composition, instructions for constructing artifacts, the structure and content of languages, and rules for behavior are passed from parents to children and from individual to individual. Mapping Our Ancestors demonstrates how various genealogical or "phylogenetic" methods can be used both to answer questions about human history and to build evolutionary explanations for the shape of history. Anthropologists are increasingly turning to quantitative phylogenetic methods. These methods depend on the transmission of information regardless of mode and as such are applicable to many a...
This book combines transnational history with the comparative analysis of racial formation and reproductive sexuality in the settler colonial spaces of the United States and British Australia. Specifically, the book places "whiteness," and the changing definition of what it meant to be white in nineteenth-century America and Australia, at the center of our historical understanding of racial and sexual identities. In both the United States and Australia, "whiteness" was defined in opposition to the imagined cultural and biological inferiority of the "Indian," "Negro," and "Aboriginal savage." Moreover, Euro-Americans and Euro-Australians shared a common belief that "whiteness" was synonymous with the extension of settler colonial civilization. Despite this, two very different understandings of "whiteness" emerged in the nineteenth century. The book therefore asks why these different racial understandings of "whiteness" – and the quest to create culturally and racially homogeneous settler civilizations – developed in the United States and Australia.
A provocative case that “failed states” along the periphery of today’s international system are the intended result of nineteenth-century colonial design. From the Afghan frontier with British India to the pampas of Argentina to the deserts of Arizona, nineteenth-century empires drew borders with an eye toward placing indigenous people just on the edge of the interior. They were too nomadic and communal to incorporate in the state, yet their labor was too valuable to displace entirely. Benjamin Hopkins argues that empires sought to keep the “savage” just close enough to take advantage of, with lasting ramifications for the global nation-state order. Hopkins theorizes and explores f...
Fairies have been revered and feared, sometimes simultaneously, throughout recorded history. This encyclopedia of concise entries, from the A-senee-ki-waku of northeastern North America to the Zips of Central America and Mexico, includes more than 2,500 individual beings and species of fairy and nature spirits from a wide range of mythologies and religions from all over the globe.