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ABOUT THE COLLECTION

The Arizona Anthropologist is a competitive high-quality annual journal designed, reviewed and published by an editorial board of graduate students in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. The open access archives are made available as a collaboration between the Arizona Anthropologist and the University of Arizona Libraries.

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Visit https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/arizanthro for more information about this journal, or contact the editors at arizonaanthropologist@gmail.com.

Recent Submissions

  • Arizona Anthropologist Number 12, Winter 1996

    University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 1996
  • Book Review

    Coyle, Philip E. (University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 1996)
  • About the Authors

    University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 1996
  • Traditional Peoples and the Struggle for Land in the Amazon Basin

    Tucker, Catherine M. (University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 1996)
    Current processes of deforestation and development in the Amazon Basin continue historical trends that have devastated indigenous populations and drastically reduced their land rights. While protection of the Amazon ecosystem has become a worldwide concern, many indigenous and folk groups employ forest management strategies that utilize natural resources without causing permanent degradation. This paper considers historical, political and socioeconomic circumstances that threaten the survival of indigenous groups and their sustainable forms of forest use. The paper argues that discrepant cultural models and attitudes contribute to the differences in land use between traditional Amazon residents and newcomers. The problems and possibilities entailed by efforts to protect traditional land rights are also discussed.
  • Communicating Romantic Intentions through Social Dancing

    Duvall, Tracy (University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 1996)
    This is an analysis of how young Latino men and their female dance partners communicate their romantic intentions while dancing, or perhaps through dancing. I find that apparent ethnic and class distinctions and levels of romantic interest affect the way these people dance, especially in three key indices of romantic intentions: eye contact, hand placement, and hip position. Because these intentions are culturally unspeakable in this context, talk is important mostly for its non-referential effects.
  • Women and Condoms: A Preliminary Study of Practice and Meaning

    Adrian, Shelly (University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 1996)
    Experiences of condom use and meaning among feminist women of an urban college area of southwestern United States in 1994 were explored through ethnographic interviews. Women's disposition to use condoms coincides with the targeting of female consumers as a market for condoms. However, constraints on women's condom use are related to the meanings of condoms in the context of particular relationships, and to the meanings of condoms vis-à-vis ideas of sexuality, and to macrolevel power relations of gender. For some women condom use is an important component of self-transformation.
  • "Well I've Reason to Believe, We All Have Been Deceived": Proposition 187, Racist Discourse, and Resistance

    García, Rogelio (University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 1996)
    This paper analyzes racist discourse resulting from and related to California's Proposition 187. Contrary to the views of politicians and economists, I maintain that 187 is indeed a racist measure designed to prevent the entry of people of color, mostly Latinos, into California. Analyses of racist discourse should be contextualized within issues of power, cultural difference, space, culture, and nationalism. After outlining theories of racism, I use Teun van Dijk's work on racist discourse to analyze some of the discursive strategies employed in relation to Proposition 187. The next section discusses the discourse of resistance in Tucson, Arizona and California. Some attention is given to the symbolic violence against Latinos. I argue that discourse cannot be separated from the material world in which it is practiced.
  • "The Bead of Raw Sweat in a Field of Dainty Perspirers": Nationalism, Whiteness and the Olympic-Class Ordeal of Tonya Harding

    Krause, Elizabeth L. (University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 1996)
    This paper examines the interrelations of whiteness, gender, class and nationalism as represented in popular media discourses surrounding the coverage of the assault on Olympic ice skater Nancy Kerrigan and the investigation of her rival, Tonya Harding. As with other recent works that have refocused the issue of "race" on whiteness, this essay seeks to unveil the exclusionary social processes in which boundaries are set and marked within the "difference" of whiteness. The concepts of habitus and historicity are used to understand how Tonya Harding became marked as "white trash," and the implications of her "flawed" qualifications are explored. Furthermore, this paper identifies ongoing ideological struggles over moral regulation and reproduction of the nation and its subjects.
  • "The Customs of our Ancestors": Cora Religious Conversion and Millenarianism, AD 1722-2000

    Coyle, Philip E. (University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 1996)
    Using documentary and ethnographic information, an analogy is drawn between conquest-period (ca. 1722) and contemporary political and religious institutions among the Cora (Nayari) people of the Sierra del Nayar in the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico. Fundamental to these political and religious institutions-then and now-is the idea that the deceased elders of the Cora people continue as active agents in the lives of living Coras, particularly as the seasonal rains. Based on this analogy, an inference is extended from contemporary attitudes of Cora people in the town of Santa Teresa toward the political and religious customs that mediate their relationships with these deceased ancestors, to the possible attitudes of Cora people toward their religious customs at the time of the Spanish conquest of the region. Millenarian fear, an anxiety that is widespread in Santa Teresa as contemporary Coras confront their own failure to adequately continue the customs of their ancestors, is inferred to have been a motivating factor in the Cora's acceptance of Catholic religious customs during the colonial period of their history.