Theme Ideas for Final Projects

1. Theme Ideas for Final Projects

2. The culmination of your final project should be a 5-10 minute presentation on the topic you select. In this presentation you must demonstrate strong knowledge of the topic, and the application of a variety of anthropological concepts that help to explain the issue being presented. For the project, you will not be doing original research; in other words, you will not be asking people about the conditions they are experimenting (this is a very rigorous process). Instead, you will be doing library research of a variety of sources that have looked at the issue, and then craft your own argument… Think of it as a sort of short “research paper,” but with pictures, videos, artifacts, clothing, or anything else that you can come up with to demonstrate your point…

3. Start by thinking of topics that are important or interesting to you. • For instance, if you feel strongly about gender or racial inequality, you may want to look at particular places where such conditions are strongly affecting individuals in a variety of ways. • Also note that issues rarely come alone, so you may also take notice of the intersection of gender and religious issues, or indigenous and political or economic issues. • So to start, brainstorm a bit about the kinds of things that you may want to do research about, here are some suggestions, but do not limit yourself…. • At the end of the suggestions there will be other instructions to ease the process…

4. Global Maya In the central highland Maya communities of Guatemala, the demands of the global economy have become a way of life. This book explores how rural peoples experience economic and cultural change as their country joins the global market, focusing on their thoughts about work and sustenance as a way of learning about Guatemala’s changing economy. Liliana Goldín observes the intensification of various forms of production and their growing links to wider markets. In this book she examines how people make a living and how they think about their options, practices, and constraints. Drawing on interviews and surveys—even retellings of traditional narratives—she reveals how contemporary Maya respond to the increasingly globalized yet locally circumscribed conditions in which they work.

5. Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon Lynn Stephen’s innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca—the Mixtec community of San AgustínAtenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle—who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration.

6. Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival Fair trade is a fast-growing alternative market intended to bring better prices and greater social justice to small farmers around the world. But is it working? This vivid study of coffee farmers in Mexico offers the first thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of fair trade. Based on extensive research in Zapotec indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, Brewing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair trade market. It compares these families to conventional farming families in the same region, who depend on local middlemen and are vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world coffee market. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book carries readers into the lives of these coffee producer households and their communities, offering a nuanced analysis of both the effects of fair trade on everyday life and the limits of its impact. Brewing Justice paints a clear picture of the complex dynamics of the fair trade market and its relationship to the global economy. Drawing on interviews with dozens of fair trade leaders, the book also explores the changing politics of this international movement, including the challenges posed by the entry of transnational corporations into the fair trade system.

7. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection Anna Tsing, focuses on one particular "zone of awkward engagement"--the rainforests of Indonesia--where in the 1980s and the 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, a province, or a nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforest includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others--all combining in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.

8. High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean Carla Freeman’s fieldwork in Barbados grounds the processes of transnational capitalism—production, consumption, and the crafting of modern identities—in the lives of Afro-Caribbean women working in a new high-tech industry called “informatics.” It places gender at the center of transnational analysis, and local Caribbean culture and history at the center of global studies. Freeman examines the expansion of the global assembly line into the realm of computer-based work, and focuses specifically on the incorporation of young Barbadian women into these high-tech informatics jobs. As such, Caribbean women are seen as integral not simply to the workings of globalization but as helping to shape its very form. Through the enactment of “professionalism” in both appearances and labor practices, and by insisting that motherhood and work go hand in hand, they re-define the companies’ profile of “ideal” workers and create their own “pink-collar” identities. Through new modes of dress and imagemaking, the informatics workers seek to distinguish themselves from factory workers, and to achieve these new modes of consumption, they engage in a wide array of extra income earning activities. Freeman argues that for the new Barbadian pink-collar workers, the globalization of production cannot be viewed apart from the globalization of consumption

9. Resources in visual anthropology • A note on visual anthropologyhttp://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/ruby/cultanthro.html • http://societyforvisualanthropology.org/ • Some possible visual anthropology concepts to explore • Japanese Anime Film and Popular Culture • Tattoo culture • Artistic expressions • Advertising and hypersexuality

10. If you pay close attention, a great deal of anthropological work seeks to explain uneven and unequal relationships in human organization. • You can use this to spark your own imagination in creating a project, • for instance, you may want to look at the relationship or friction between • Tourism and indigenous tribes • Women and political or religious organization • Women and globalization • Women and technology • Gender and politics • Gender and religion • Religion and technology • Religion and migration • Race/ethnicity and cultural forms reproduction (music, food, dance) – this could be further embedded in global contexts

11. You can also browse through your textbook for ideas and resources… -------------------------------------------------------------------- • Bear in mind that we, as anthropologists, follow a relativist perspective, so you must focus on explaining the emergence and forces that shape the issue, rather that making value charged judgments. • Instead frame it around how people are affected, by what mechanisms, and what are the real life implications of the issue.