Volume 58, No. 3, Fall 1999
Applied Archaeology
Christian E. Downum and Laurie J. Price
Key Words: applied archaeology, CRM, public education, tourism, ethics
The need to examine applied archaeology stems from the long-held recognition by archaeologists that study of past societies has an important impact on living ones. The pace of applied work in archaeology has greatly accelerated over the past twenty-five years. While legislation is the engine that drives much applied archaeology in cultural resource management, archaeologists also are developing many other creative and autonomous areas.
This paper offers a typology and examples of applied archaeology in seven areas: resource claims, cultural identity and representation, technology, public education, cultural resource management (CRM), cultural tourism, environment and ecosystem projects. After examining ethical considerations in applied archaeology, we conclude with discussion of how applied archaeology relates to applied sociocultural anthropology, including attention to methods, local community and social groups, culture broker roles, and qualitative program evaluation. Applied anthropology, and archaeology in particular, has major strengths to offer in building bridges outside the academy. Sociocultural anthropologists can benefit from being more aware of areas of potential collaboration with archaeologists in applied work. Archaeologists can benefit from becoming more aware of areas where sociocultural expertise is needed, e.g. oral history and other interview methods.
A Critical Look at NGOs and Civil Society as Means to an End in Uzbekistan
David M. Abramson
Key words: civil society, the state, development, NGO, Central Asia, Uzbekistan
Drawing on research from Uzbekistan to Washington, D.C., the author illustrates how conceptual ambiguities in development work can lead to corruptions of entire aid projects by structuring a recipient community of elites and thereby generating new forms of knowledge and practice, alignment and interest. The author then examines the dialectic of acceptance and subversion of NGO ideals by local recipients. In this process, the concept of civil society loses its utility as a conceptual category and gains the potential to become an instrument for dissembling structures and relations of power between different interest groups at subnational, national, and transnational levels.
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Common Cold: Data from Five Populations
Roberta D. Baer, Susan C. Weller, Lee Pachter, Robert Trotter, Javier Garcia de Alba Garcia, Mark Glazer, Robert Klein, Lynn Deitrick, David F. Baker, Lynlee Brown, Karuna Khan-Gordon, Susan R. Martin, Janice Nichols, and Jennifer Ruggiero
Key Words: colds, Latinos, middle-income Americans, flu
This paper focuses on conceptualizations of the common cold among Latin Americans, as compared with middle-class Americans. Four geographically dispersed groups of Latin Americans were chosen for study: Guatemalans in Guatemala; Mexicans in Guadalajara, Mexico; persons of Mexican descent in Edinburg, Texas (on the Texas-Mexican border); and Puerto Ricans in Hartford, Connecticut. In addition, a comparison group of middle-income Americans living in Tampa, Florida, was also studied to see the extent to which folk concepts were seen in what is considered to be a "mainstream" population. The data suggest a great deal of both intra- and intercultural agreement as to causes, symptoms, and treatments of the common cold. The cold seems to be viewed as very much in the realm of a biomedical illness, with the exception of ascribing the hot/cold system of causality to the common cold, among all five populations. Finally, the cold is clearly differentiated from "the flu," which seems to exist as an illness only among English-speaking populations in the United States.
Gender and Household-Level Responses to Soil Degradation in Honduras
Michael Paolisso, Sarah Gammage, and Linda Casey
Key words: gender, sustainable agriculture, soil degradation, Honduras, policy
In Honduras, the economic and social effects of natural resource decline, poverty and population pressure, all exacerbated now in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, are directly experienced at the household level. Recent research and policy work on gender and environment raises a number of interesting questions on how and why household labor responses to natural resource decline may be gender differentiated. This article presents results on the gender-disaggregated response to natural resource degradation. Specifically, we investigate whether women’s and men’s time allocated to corn production responds to changes in soil quality. We also address the issue of whether the gender division of labor is modified as households respond to soil degradation.
The Neoliberal Project and Governmentality in Rural Mexico: Emergent Farmer Organization in the Michoacán Highlands
James H. McDonald
Key words: neoliberalism, governmentality, globalization, dairy industry, agricultural policy, farmer organization, Mexico
This article explores the neoliberal project in the context of Mexico's new agrarian reform and the disjuncture between neoliberal ideals and on-the-ground reality. This is examined through the case of small-scale dairy farmers in northwestern Michoacán as they struggle to understand their relationship with a medium-scale dairy processor who is urging them to organize in the name of quality. This activity is consistent with the position of the neoliberal state that advocates farmer organization and new production techniques as the solution to problems of quality, efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness concepts articulated in new ways in Mexico by transnational corporations and the agrarian policies of the state. Framed by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, this article examines the complex, hierarchical web of state agents and their practices through which these new neoliberal concepts and practices produce and transform markets, people, and everyday relations at the local level in intended and unintended ways. Within this web, emergent contradictions between state agents, farmers, and processors reveal the failure of the neoliberal agenda as it is being implemented in the Mexican context.
Structure, Ideology and Tribal Governments
Robert L. Bee
Key words: ideology, sovereignty, structure, Indian Reorganization Act, Mashantucket Pequot, Native Americans, Quechan
The "sovereign"-cum-trusteeship status of Native American groups is under increasingly strident attack by federal, state, and local non-native interests. Huge revenues of several native-operated casinos have fueled the move even as they have increased the political leverage of some native groups. To counter this threat, tribal governments need both stability and effectiveness. Stability might well come from reform of native governance structures to better reflect prevailing grassroots governance ideology. While not challenging the need for such reform, this essay describes the difficulties of accomplishing it and suggests that working within the imposed governance structure and strengthening tribal judicial systems may be a more immediate means of meeting the non-native challenge.
Mayas and Tourists in the Maya World
Denise Fay Brown
Keywords: Mayas, landscapes, contested spaces, colonialism, tourism, Mexico
In 1992, an agreement was signed by the governments of five Latin American countries: Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, to join forces in the promotion of international tourism in the Maya zone. This elaborate and costly project, called the Maya World, promises the visitor "something for all tastes" in the way of cultural experiences and leisure pursuits. Such large-scale tourist projects raise many questions concerning the underlying motivations for the development and the impact that they will have on the peoples and environments of the regions. Essentially, the Maya World tourist project can be seen as a newly constructed cultural landscape, based on design features from the existing cultural landscapes of the 29 Maya cultures of the region, imbued with new meanings that make them significant to a target market, the international tourist. This paper examines the construction of the Maya landscape in a Yucatec Maya town in Mexico and compares aspects of this Maya world to that developed for the tourism initiative. Changes in the meanings of landscape features for the local Maya, brought about by the appropriation and commoditization of their world will have serious implications for the cultural survival of this indigenous group.
The Abstract, The Concrete, The Political and the Academic: Anthropology And a Labor Union in the United States
E. Paul Durrenberger and Suzan Erem
Key words: unions, organized labor, political anthropology, politics, structure, dynamics
We describe the political structure and dynamics of a labor union local in Chicago and how both interact with the goals and objectives of the members, stewards, union representatives, officers of the union local, and the international. We discuss how the political structure and process was revealed not because we focused on it but in the process of sabotage that occurred when we attempted a different kind of study.
Measuring the Typicality of Text: Using Multiple Coders for More than Just Reliability and Validity Checks
Gery W. Ryan
Key words: validity measures, reliability measures, intercoder agreement, text analysis, qualitative research methods
Social scientists often use agreement among multiple coders to check the reliability and validity of the analytic process. High degrees of intercoder agreement indicate that multiple coders are applying the codes in the same manner and are thus acting as "reliable" measurement instruments. Coders who independently mark the same text for a theme provide evidence that a theme has external "validity" and is not just a figment of the investigator's imagination. In this article, I extend the use of multiple coders. I use data taken from clinicians’ descriptions of personal illness experiences to demonstrate how agreement and disagreement among coders can be used to measure core and peripheral features of abstract constructs and themes. I then show how such measures of multicoder agreement can be used to identify typical or exemplary examples from a corpus of text.
Mindful of the Future: Strategic Planning Ideology and the Culture of Nonprofit Management
Eileen M. Mulhare
Key words: strategic planning, organizational culture, nonprofit organizations, management, anthropology of work
The widespread use of strategic planning (SP) by nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the U.S. may be attributable in part to the professional culture of nonprofit management rather than SP's efficacy as a management technique. Nonprofit management emerged as a profession in the 1980s, a decade after business theorists began losing confidence in SP. SP advocates helped shape the new profession’s culture by promoting SP and its basic tenets (ideology) as fundamental for organizational success. The experience of nonprofit managers in southeastern Michigan (1982-1990) illustrates this process. Some NPOs did benefit from SP. In cases where they did not, the professional culture encouraged users to blame faulty execution rather than question the validity of the technique. Today the profession still endorses variations of SP as "best practice." The discussion recommends that applied anthropologists and other management advisors consider first whether the NPO’s customary style of decision making (an aspect of its organizational culture) can be adapted to formulate wiser decisions about the future. If so, adopting SP may be unnecessary and even counterproductive.
Dangerous Liaisons: Trust, Distrust, and Information Technology in American Work Organizations
Marietta L. Baba
Key words: trust, distrust, risk, information, information technology, electronic communication
This paper employs an inductive, natural-systems approach to explore the complex social and economic factors whose interaction generate trust and distrust between individuals, subunits, and firms in American corporations. The objective of this investigation is to gain a better understanding of the role of interpersonal trust and distrust on the implementation and use of new information technologies in organizational settings. The focus of the investigation is work-group control of information flow across organizational boundaries under conditions of trust and distrust, and the consequences of advanced information technology for such information-control practices. A central finding is that more powerful parties often try to force a shift in the medium of information exchange to gain greater control in specific hierarchical relationships. When these changes threaten the quality or security of information required by less powerful parties, resistance is the result. The discussion suggests that deployment of advanced information technology without the application of local knowledge of social interrelationships increases the risk of implementation failure.
