Anthropology

ABSTRACT This chapter examines the U.S. Army's development and implementation of Decision Support Red Teams. We review the education of Red Team members, the structure of the education and use of adult education principles, and how teams use their training to help make sense of complex military environments.

Despite prevailing archaeological interpretations that the Toyah Interval (ca. 1200/1250-1700 CE) in Texas archeology was largely comprised of highly mobile bands of economically independent family groups of hunter-gatherers, early Spanish colonial accounts dating from 1528 to 1716 suggest that complex social arrangements were a common feature of Late Prehistoric Toyah society. Using the ethnographically-derived models of feasting, violence, and craft specialization, I explore the material culture of inequality and special status from both the aspects of Toyah ethnohistory and archaeology. Evidence for inequality and special status was sought in the mortuary data, while burned rock middens and bone concentrations documented at Toyah sites were analyzed for evidence of feasting behavior. Classic Toyah pottery was evaluated as a specialized craft industry, and a model for the native itinerant trader/crafter was developed and tested with respect to Toyah blade caches. As a result, it is hoped that this study will motivate future investigation toward more socially-based approaches in Toyah research, and that it establishes a dialog around the social factors behind the Toyah phenomenon in Texas archeology.

Duende is an expression of Spanish Flamenco that refers to a specific moment during the experience of the performance: moments that we cannot explain during artistic encounters; moments in which emotions take control over both, the audience and the performer. Duende cannot be predicted, neither faked nor forced, and it symbolizes “the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art” (García-Lorca 1933).
'Duende' is an ethnographic film and a written thesis that work together to explore the different narratives and experiences that the concept of the same name inspires. They are the result of a three-month fieldwork developed during the summer of 2015 among three different Flamenco environments: a dance academy, a Roma family, and one of the most important Flamenco festivals of Spain. At the same time, it explores the capacities of both film and text to tell narratives (Barthes 1998) together with their ability to create or modify experience (Mattingly 1998). Both text and images work together to present the narratives and experiences of Duende that I encountered doing fieldwork, and to provide the reader/spectator with a space in which to interact with them.

Flamenco and Jazz are both considered hybrid music genres. As such, processes of miscegenation and cultural interchange are seen as central to the formation of both genres (Salinas-Rodríguez 1994). This hybrid identity not only affects the music product, but also the individual identities of those who practise and develop these genres. Following García Canclini (2001) in this project I propose to understand the musical identity as the sum of continuous processes of hybridization, both at individual and at collective levels.

Building Agencies is a collaborative project developed over 6 months which resulted in a photo essay. His protagonist is Alan Williams, a landlord and property owner from Manchester (UK), who started the construction of a six-house block from scratch, without any previous construction experience, and only with the help of a few family members and friends. The essay explores the agency that the creator has over his creation, together with the agency of the creation over its creator (Gell 1998). Through the use of photography, it also explores the prosthetic character of handicraft objects as well as that of photography, both as a means of projecting oneself and being projected (Lury 2002). Finally, the photo essay tries to dig into the ethnographic approach of “thinking through things” (Henare, A., Holbraad, M. y Wastel, S. 2007) taking the building constructed by Alan, its history, its inhabitants,  and the pictures taken by them, as the departure point and the main source to get to know Alan.

"Grackles are sleek birds that wear the expression of rapacious fishes. Many years of cohabitation with humans has not loosened the danger on which they seem to insist. Perhaps it is their fast thin legs and tiny black beaks that give this impression. Sometimes they look at you as if to say “Pardon?” with stooped shoulders glistening in the sun, plumes blue, violet, and iridescent..."

/A flash nonfiction exploring Austin sensibilities/

What is the source of authority of an anthropological work? What does the anthropologist do? Why fieldwork? What is ethnography?

This is the text of a presentation for MA students at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas in Austin.

Austin is the capital of the American Renaissance of the beginning of the twenty-first century. The explosive construction of bridges, ramps, roads, buildings; the flow of creative, inventive, and resourceful people from all over the world—it all creates a space like no other. Austin Old-Timer and Newcomer | The End of Austin

The archeology of robots reveals a robotic creature as an object traversing spaces and time; humanoid robots are nostalgic objects. Robots emerged yesterday; they have history. Will robots be with us tomorrow? And if yes, then is what form? What functions would they have? Are they going to be humanoid?

Donna Haraway's (1991) reading of cyborg was one of the interpretations which facilitated the discussion around the question where the division between the human and the non-human, alive and dead, animate and inanimate, lies. Where the division is situated now, in the anthropocene eschatologies. These distinctions are transgressed every day. Humans are fascinated with phones, which create the affect of interconnectedness with the world but simultaneously alienate us from what might be called "real" experiences of presence. Humans interact with robots and in these interactions perhaps become more cyborgian themselves.

As atrocious actions, public executions and world-making endeavors of ISIS analyzed in terms of performativity open the space for questioning the dominant ideas of history and politics. ISIS released the video of the shooting of 25 Syrian soldiers at the Palmyra ruins in the beginning of June, 2014. On the video, the executioners, most of whom appear to be teenagers, parade the soldiers on the scene of the amphitheater, kneel them down and shoot. The Palmyra amphitheater is present as a visible twofold reminder of spectacle: as arena of violence and the metaphor for the arena of violence. A crowd, children among them, watched the execution. I argue that the public executions serve several goals for ISIS: not only does ISIS compose propaganda messages, but the very lawlessness and atrociousness of the executions function as a powerful claim of the group's legitimacy as a state in the ISIS imaginaries. Through the staged executions, ISIS seeks to create the world of power which is alternative to the Western world. In the process of creation of this world, ISIS generates landscapes of violence, and produces spaces haunted by killings. An attempt to redefine ancient ruins and to reenact medieval executions, is a claim to build a world of alternative historicism.

I examine the performance of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot in the Christ the Savior Cathedral, Moscow, 2012, and the immediate political context of this performance. Three members of the group were arrested, accused of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, and sentenced to two years in prison. One member was released on probation, the others were granted amnesty after they served nearly the full sentence. A relative harmlessness of the crime in comparison to the severity of the punishment was striking. Looking at the feminist activist group Pussy Riot and their most famous performance, I examine how political and civic activism can be read, interpreted, and practiced in the neoliberal context. I suggest that Pussy Riot is a telling story revealing the nature of Putinism as a Russian multicultural neoliberal project. By exercising state power over the female bodies of Pussy Riot protesters, the political imaginary of the Putin Modern strives not only to discipline the bodies of political activists, but also to perpetuate a patriarchal oligarchic regime maintaining a status of the second-class citizenship for women and sanctioning and condoning the genderization of those whom it deems fit. I argue that the reason Pussy Riot’s performance generated a political affect was that they, consciously or not, worked with Russian “cultural memory.” A spiritual practice and a tradition of the Orthodox sanctity called jurodstvo underpinned their actions in the given cultural context. The trial, in turn, evoked a specter of the show trials conducted by the Soviet state. The power dynamics at play during the performance followed by the trial, made many people co-participate by interpreting the events, articulating positions, and changing sides. The “meaning” of the action was, and still is, intensely contested.

Irina Oktyabrskaya, Valery Klamm, Craig Campbell, Vasilina Orlova:

"In our framing of this photo-essay, we let our conceptual approach revolve around affect rather than historical meaning. We are interested in situating the reader in the midst of a carefully assembled collection. We want to invite her to navigate an assemblage that renders multiple superimposed stories of life, that neither subordinates the rich complexity of the world made visible through photography to a single hermeneutic goal nor abdicates the role of critical description. Historical frames are hinted at, but are ultimately secondary to a visually rich narrative of everyday life that punctures through the social orchestrations of annual festivals and holidays. In addition to its focus on affect, the photo-essay composes a kind of story that refuses any attempts to extract form from content: neither is available for perception, as it were, without the other element."

Selfie as a cultural phenomenon, or rather a bunch of phenomena, is considered in this essay as an emergent figure of self-representation, which, despite its novelty, has a history as well as a futurity, and a subject of persistent critique. Narcissism and self-absorption are evident in selfies for many observers. Selfie is both a potential cause of violent death and a source of endless entertainment in the public imagination. Simultaneously, selfie is a territory of insecurity and of the body-positive self-affirmation. To answer the question, what is selfie, and in order to unpack some of its cultural implications, it is necessary to ask: what is self? And, it is acceptable to leave this last question without answer.

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There are two versions of this writing; 02 and 06.