M.A. - Anthropology

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/591

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One fish, two fish: Investigations of temporal size changes in the Tikopia fishbone assemblage
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Perez, Elizabeth Mary; Kirch, Patrick V.; Anthropology
With few studies of marine resource depression in the island setting, this investigation of marine resource depression in the Pacific island of Tikopia aims to contribute to better understanding the visibility of resource depression in the archaeological record, the overarching narrative of resource depression in the Pacific, and Tikopia’s own prehistory. Overall analysis of eleven major elements and seven taxa from the Tikopia fishbone assemblage does not initially seem to indicate strong evidence for marine resource depression in the prehistoric cultural phases of the island. However, further investigation of some select taxa presents interesting differences by comparison, namely Scaridae, which exhibit statistically significant temporal decreases in size. Causes of reduction in Scarus may be attributed to selective fishing pressure, or environmental changes throughout the prehistoric cultural phases of the island.
Walking a new world into being? Healing and regenerative imagining on the Pacific crest trail
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Bannister, Mary; Brunson, Jan; Anthropology
Each year, hundreds of people spend 4-6 months hiking the entire 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which runs up and down the mountain ranges of so-called California, Oregon, and Washington. This research draws on three months of “hiking ethnography” and autoethnography, as I walked 1,500 miles on the PCT in 2024. In the Anthropocene, new ethics and ontologies of land are required, and the PCT is a space where many people envision themselves creating new worlds through the embodied practice of walking. Hikers describe their experiences as healing and transformative and as departures from modernity and capitalism. Hikers create embodied and emotional intimacy with the more-than-human environment, yet also import harmful normative and colonial understandings onto their experiences. I contextualize hikers’ experiences within the millennia-long histories of the places the PCT crosses. The places where hikers experience transformation are on stolen Native land which has been recharacterized by the U.S. government as places for recreation. Indigenous movements along the PCT work for Land Back, remembering erased Indigenous histories, and healing for Native communities. This ethnography considers land as an agentive actor and resists the depoliticization of place, showing that hikers’ interactions with land perpetuate both colonial and decolonial understandings. In considering healing and regenerative imagination on the PCT, this research considers walking new worlds which embrace Land Back, multispecies flourishing, collective healing, and the dismantling of oppressive capitalist and cisheteropatriarchal normativity.
A CHRONOLOGY OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT ON HAWAIʻI ISLAND
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Agruss, Emma; Quintus, Seth; Anthropology
The dryland agricultural systems of Hawaiʻi island are recognized as some of the most intensive in the Pacific. Constituted by a variety of infrastructural types, including long embankments, mounds, and terraces, these dryland systems have been the subject of archaeological research for several decades. Over this time, a body of radiocarbon dates has been collected relating directly to these different kinds of infrastructure, providing an opportunity to synthesize and compare agricultural chronologies for different forms of infrastructure and different areas of the island. This thesis aims to address this goal by building chronologies of agricultural development on Hawaiʻi Island using Bayesian statistics and joint posterior modeling. Using these methods, I show that there was no concentrated region of development at any time, as seen through any individual infrastructure type. Instead, the agricultural development was widely shared, and construction featured a high degree of continuity from the 16th century through the historic period, island-wide.
KNIT TOGETHER: CRAFTING SOFT SUPPORT STRUCTURES WITH YARN, PAIN, STICKS, AND STORIES
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) Ryan, Rita H.; Saethre, Eirik; Anthropology
This thesis is an exploration of how knitters with disabilities connect with one another through a shared project, and how the reciprocal effects of chronic illness and creativity inform the ways that knitters move with their materials throughout the project. Using queer theory and cripistemology to inform a feminist ethnography I consider what it means to live on “crip time” and be productive in a society that champions able-bodies that are not sick or in pain. Over the course of a year, I worked with five other knitters who have varying degrees and types of disabilities, to create six shawls. During this time I was able to experience how internal and external stresses cause shifts in the ways that each knitter chooses and works with various yarns and needles; the way we engage with each other both as artists and as people experiencing chronic illness; and how each of our understandings of time, productivity, and success become necessarily blurry and mobile. By making these stitches together this group of knitters created space where chronic illness and disability are no longer understood as Other. Exchanging normative time that our capitalist society demands for crip time is liberatory, and isolating all at once. Through the isolation and liberation however, crip productivity through this last year has resulted in solidarity, beauty, and strength.
Trust and confidence in a Hong Kong wholesale vegetable market
(1965) Silin, Robert H.
Geoarchaeological Investigation of Agricultural Terraces in Pualaulau, Hālawa Valley, Moloka‘i, Hawai‘i
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Tuitavuki, Kylie Aiea; Kirch, Patrick V.; Anthropology
Agricultural systems on islands provide good case studies for studying landscape modification, resource allocation, and the potential sustainability of these systems. The Hawaiian Islands offer a unique environment for analyzing how geomorphological constraints shaped landscape modifications, creating environmental legacies that were further developed under specific socio-political systems. This study investigates the archaeological remains of a terraced agricultural system in the ‘ili of Pualaulau in Hālawa Valley, Molokai, posing the question of whether the terraces were formerly irrigated. The location of the terraced agricultural system is slightly northwest of what today is an intermittent stream. Past climate data suggests that seasonal rainfall may have allowed for potential irrigation of the terraces during the rainy season. Varying levels of seasonal rainfall suggest that this terrace system could have been seasonally irrigated, diversifying its uses for potential year-round cultivation. Geoarchaeological methods are used to determine 1) whether terraces within the designated dryland agricultural system were potentially seasonally irrigated, and 2) how frequently seasonal irrigation was used in this terrace system. Particle size analysis (PSA) and an assessment of sediment particle angularity are used to determine the origin and mode of deposition of sediment particles within the terraces. Samples from a natural colluvial slope, from known dryland terrace systems, and from the adjacent streambed serve as controls for samples collected from the agricultural terraces. Utilizing established agricultural systems, like the side-stream terrace systems of Pualaulau and Kapana, for permanent or seasonally irrigated agriculture demonstrates the adaptability of early Kanaka Maoli working and living in Hālawa Valley. As populations continued to grow it was necessary for these populations to adapt to seasonal changes in natural resources, to better support their communities.
A stylistic analysis of the Mangaasi tradition, Central Vanuatu
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1982) Bordner, R.; Anthropology
This study is an attempt to apply a decorative motif analysis similar to those used success fully in the past with the Lapita ceramic tradition on the Mangaasi ceramic tradition of central vanuatu. Definition was made of those elements which typified the
Obesity and related seriological variables in a migrant Samoan population
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1978) Klapstein, Susan; Anthropology
Human adaptability is a major focal point of anthropological inquiry and the physical changes resulting in response to a new environment are an important aspect of the process of human adaptability. Obesity and elevated blood pressure are two examples of these physical changes. High levels of obesity are relatively recent occurrences in the evolution of mankind and in modern times, obesity, blood pressures and serum lipids tend to be more elevated in Western, urbanized populations, including several Westernized Polynesian societies. The adverse effects of associations between obesity, blood pressure and certain biochemical variables have long been recognized and studied. High levels of obesity have been found to produce numerous adverse health effects and have been implicated in elevated blood pressures and serum lipids. Obesity is also associated with cardiovascular disease, as well as being a risk factor in coronary heart disease, a major health problem in Western industrialized Polynesian societies. The adverse effects of associations between obesity, blood pressure and certain biochemical variables have long been recognized and studied. High levels of obesity have been found to produce numerous adverse health effects and have been implicated in elevated blood pressures and serum lipids. Obesity is also associated with cardiovascular disease, as well as being a risk factor in coronary heart disease, a major health problem in Western industrialized societies. A group of Samoan migrants residing on the North Shore of Oahu provided the opportunity to measure obesity, blood pressure and serum lipids, and their relationships to the length of residence in the Westernized environment. Weights and blood pressures were elevated and similar to those observed in other Westernized Polynesians. However, cholesterol and plasma sodium levels were lower than anticipated. A modification in the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system was suggested as promoting the low sodium values and perhaps influencing blood pressures. Weight and biacromial diameter also had significant relationships to blood pressure. Length of residence in Hawaii did not have a significant effect on blood pressures, weights or serum lipids. It was proposed that the subject population may not have yet resided a sufficient time on Oahu for a significant relationship to occur. Levels of acquired weight were examined through the use of skinfold measurements. Acquired weight categories were based on the size of the subscapular and triceps skinfolds which measured trunkal adipose tissue and were thought to represent acquired fat. The categories appeared useful in identifying individuals with elevated blood pressures and cholesterol values. It appeared that higher innate obesity, as well as acquired obesity, may influence these values. Also, women were found to attain higher levels of obesity than were males. The statistical evaluation of acquired weight categories was disappointing but would probably improve with a larger sample size.
Conservation Against Conservation: Contesting Ways of Understanding Forests in Southern Myanmar
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2019) Flanagan, Brendan; Padwe, Jonathan; Anthropology
In this thesis I seek to provide an understanding of how a specific rural community in Southern Myanmar, the Karen inhabiting the Kamoethway Valley, have come to identify as indigenous protectors of the environment, by paying attention to the strands of history that have produced the current conjuncture. In particular, I aim to show that, when faced with the prospect of exclusion by conservation, engagement with an explicitly environmental indigeneity remains a tactic of considerable nuance for marginalized communities. A central part of my argument will be that the forms of knowledge behind this tactical maneuver are multiple, drawing both upon local tradition and transnational discourses.
When Treatment Is Violence: Making, Treating, And Regulating Addiction In Nepali Private Rehabilitation Centers
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2019) Zeller, Thomas; Brunson, Jan; Anthropology
Situated in Kathmandu, Nepal, this thesis discusses the causes and consequences of placing addiction treatment within the privatizing Nepali healthcare market. Based on fieldwork conducted during the summer of 2018, I examine the ways in which state biopower is exercised in diffuse states, where multiple stakeholders operate to create and maintain a profitable status quo. This status quo involves the dispersal of the exercise of biopower to private actors, in this case for-profit rehabilitation centers, which are privileged to intern and treat addicted individuals on the periphery of state and medical regulatory structures in spaces of exception. I discuss the social processes through which drug abuse discourses, created by private addiction treatment centers, create the substance dependent as immoral individuals, effectively revoking their right to make claims of safety on the state. Finally, I examine how the lines between violence and therapy are blurred within private addiction treatment centers through narratives describing mistreatment and torture within the treatment setting.
Learning Local Care: An Ethnography of Caregiving in Hawaii
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2019) McConkey, Erin Siobhan; Saethre, Eirik; Anthropology
This thesis is an ethnographic account of caregiving and end-of-life decision-making in Hawai‘i. By participating in family caregiver classes provided by a local hospital, I detail how the socioeconomic realities of living in Hawai‘i and the biomedical authority of medical professionals actively work against the interests of caregivers who make health decisions based on both cultural values and economic limitations. Through the embodied experience of practicing care in the home, caregivers selectively reject the biomedicalization of care and organize their actions around the institution of family. As evidenced through examples from two key informants the circumstances of family caregivers are varied and complex, leading to a variety of experiences and creative solutions. Though the embodied experiences of family caregivers disillusions them to the examples provided through the family caregiver classes, the classes succeed in providing a platform for family caregivers and professionals to hold meaningful discussions.
Put-or-Pay: Erasing the Impacts of Waste-To-Energy through Narratives of Sustainability in Honolulu
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2018-12) Chatterson, Nicole; Padwe, Jonathan; Anthropology
The City and County of Honolulu (the City) claims to observe the U.S. EPA waste hierarchy, which positions waste reduction as the most effective strategy for managing waste and minimizing pollution. Source reduction precludes the generation of trash through policy, education, and consumer-culture interventions. However, the City primarily manages waste only after it has been generated through H-POWER, a $ 1 billion waste-to-energy (WTE) facility which burns waste to create and sell ‘clean energy’. H-POWER is owned by the City and operated by the multi-national corporation Covanta, which has contractually required the City to provide 800,000 tons of trash input annually to maintain revenue streams, which equal about $130 million/year. This thesis explores the material and discursive tensions of H-POWER as a sustainable waste management solution. Situated in a critical discard studies framework, and using tools from critical discourse analysis, this work unpacks the WTE-as-sustainability narrative offered by the City and Covanta, suppresses the serious consideration of waste reduction as a management modality and uplifts a neoliberal, technocratic waste-as-commodity approach that (re)creates consumer culture ideologies. This narrative positions H-POWER as: 1) a local clean energy source, and 2) a better choice than landfills. Zero Waste advocates contest WTE on the grounds that: 1) WTE generates problematic levels of GHG emissions, which are misrepresented in industry narratives, 2) WTE reinforces upstream pollution by incentivizing the production of goods to become trash-fuel, and 3) WTE is an environmental health concern.
The Taste of Home: Alcohol, Identity, and Health in Hawaii's Japanese Diaspora
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2018-05) Chapman, Christopher R.; Anthropology
This thesis is an ethnographic account of social identity and health negotiation through alcohol use among Japanese nationals in a Japanese-style pub in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Currently, over 18,000 Japanese nationals live on Oahu. Compared to the larger population of Japanese-Americans, approximately 300,000, these Japanese nationals constitute a small, invisible diaspora limited by cultural and economic barriers. Japanese-style pubs, in Honolulu, provide a place where identity is mediated through mutual alcohol consumption in close social groups, most notably through interaction via gift exchanges and commodity purchases. However, the effect and course of intoxication is embodied – it is learned through discourse and practice through time and space. The form of alcohol rituals is distinct as it is a reconfiguration of an embodied practice cultivated in Japan, embedded within conflicting structures governing alcohol abuse. Alcohol consumption is a vulnerable, gendered, and contradictory form of health and diasporic identity commodified in a sociocultural microcosm.
Shells and Stones: A Functional Examination of the Tuamotus Adze Kit
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2017-08) Klem, Jonathon M.-A.; Anthropology
Based on a study of functional variation in 84 stone and 192 shell adzes from the Bishop Museum Tuamotus adze collection, this paper argues that the Paumotu, or the inhabitants of the Tuamotus, maintained trade with the high volcanic islands of Central East Polynesia in part to acquire resources that did not naturally occur within the Tuamotus. This project relies upon experimental research conducted on Polynesian adzes (Best, 1977; Turner 2000, 2005), and morphological typologies (Shipton et al., 2016), and emphasizes the importance of material type and intended function as the driving forces in the production of the East Polynesian adze kit. The author found that the Tuamotus Adze Collection exhibits significant variation for several functional characteristics identified by previous studies along the lines of material type. These differences in function align with Turner’s (2000) functional adze typology, with the shell adzes filling the role of Turner’s Type A, while the stone adzes are spread between the Type A, Type B, and Type C adzes. Because each of these functional types are fundamental in canoe construction, the observed differences between the shell and stone adzes in the Tuamotus Adze Collection suggest that the acquisition of high-quality basalt from the nearby high volcanic islands in Central East Polynesia was critical to the maintenance of the ship-building industry present within the Tuamotus.
Shang Ritual and Social Dynamics at Anyang: An Analysis of Dasikong and Huayuanzhuang East Burials
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2017-05) MacIver, Andrew E.; Anthropology
The Shang period (1600-1046 BC) of early China has received considerable attention in archaeology. Ritual is thought to be important in the development of Shang society. However, there are considerable gaps in knowledge pertaining to the relationship between ritual and society across the entire sociopolitical spectrum. Burials hold great potential in furthering our understanding on the formation and maintenance of the Shang belief system and the relationship between ritual and society across this spectrum. This analysis reveals the substantial variability of Shang burial practices within the Late Shang center at Anyang in modern Henan, China.
Organizational Change In Political Economy And Ideology: Transition From The Early Historic To Pre-Angkorian Period Cambodia, Viewed From Thala Borivat
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2018-12) Heng, Piphal; Stark, Miriam T.; Anthropology
Investigating the intersection between ideological shift and the early state formation is a perennial topic of archaeological inquiry, but most archaeological work until recently concentrated on either New World societies or on case studies from the Near East and South Asia. This rich comparative research base has yielded insights into social, economic, and ideological structures in the face of organizational change, but few examples have been included from East or Southeast Asia. This research focuses on developments in the lower Mekong basin (modern-day Cambodia) to understand the roots of the Angkorian state that flourished from the 9th to 14th centuries CE. Using the pre-Angkorian period to study early state development offers insights for Asian scholars and valuable comparative insights. Documentary evidence, both internal (epigraphic) and external (Chinese), suggests that states emerged by the 6th/7th centuries CE in parts of the lower Mekong now associated with Cambodia. Chinese documents describe the rise of the Chenla kingdom. Such contemporary Tang dynasty descriptions coincided with the earliest appearance of a suite of new traditions: brick architectural shrines and temples, elaborate Indic statuary which these brick structures housed, and Khmer and Sanskrit dedicatory inscriptions on the doorways and rooms of these ritual public structures. Previous scholars have explained early state formation in Cambodia as reflecting largely either external influences (or primarily trade with China and India) or internal developments (and specifically, the rise of an agrarian elite who appropriated Indian religious ideology to legitimate their claims to power). Increasing attention to Cambodia’s archaeological record suggests that both processes were at work in the pre-Angkorian world. This study investigates the relationships between the introduction of Indic religious ideologies, their temples and organizational changes during the transition from the Early Historic to the pre-Angkorian periods by using a political economy model. Archaeological strategies are employed to investigate organizational changes associated with economic system, interaction, ideological shift, and political centralization. The economic model of agriculture and trade, new ideologies associated with the Indic-related temple, and social stratification, are best evaluated from the scope of pre-Angkorian temple economy to explain its state formation through the analysis of distributional surface data and excavated materials. This research concentrates primarily on one pre-Angkorian regional center in northern Cambodia along the Mekong River in Stung Treng Province: Thala Borivat. A secondary center, Sambor in Kracheh, is investigated to provide a comparable settlement dataset. This region lies far from the Tonle Sap region where the Angkor temples later emerged and from the Mekong delta where first millennium states arose. Thala Borivat is strategically located between important upland resources to the north in modern-day Laos and the rich alluvial Mekong delta to the south. Yet no previous archaeological fieldwork has been undertaken to study settlement patterns in this area.
The Dharma of Bums: Identity, Neoliberalism, and Biomedicine in the Practice of Treating Homelessness in Honolulu
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2016-12) Hemrajani, Aashish
Focusing on Honolulu, the city with the highest rate of homelessness in the United States, this thesis demonstrates that the existence of a visibly immiserated population functions materially to create the need for an industry of care and ideologically to serve as an embodied site of difference. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork at a transitional shelter and with a student-run free clinic, I examine the process of identity production as it occurs between homeless people and service providers. The public visibility of homelessness leads to the denigration of this population, resulting in a lack of personhood. The process of entering a shelter is viewed as a neoliberal ritual of social reintegration. A free clinic for the homeless demonstrates the on-the-ground process of developing co-relational identities. Finally, a Halloween carnival allows actors to perform the identities and meanings constructed around homelessness in a way that incorporates elements of costume and fantasy.
Gray Patronage: Rethinking Undocumented Migrant Workers' Precarious Lives along the Thai-Burmese Border
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2016-08) Intarat, Phianphachong
Sustainable Seabed Mining: Corporate Geoscientists’ Visions in the Solomon Islands
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2016-05) Harris, Lindsey
Mining companies’ corporate social responsibility programs represent their projects as sustainable. However, "sustainable mining” and the mitigation of social and environmental impacts remains an elusive goal. Numerous studies have documented how terrestrial mining industries disenfranchise and endanger local communities and destroy ecosystems. This paper tracks “sustainability” into seabed mining, a nascent, boutique mining industry which has garnered increasing commercial and political attention in part because corporate scientists represent seabed mining as a benign and profitable alternative to terrestrial mining. Empirically grounded in three months of participant observation on a Nautilus Minerals exploratory vessel in the Solomon Islands, I use actor network theory and critical discourse analysis to investigate how corporate scientists and technicians on the ship saw sustainability as a natural feature of seabed mining extraction aside from corporate social responsibility programs. The scientists used remote sensing oceanographic devices, echosounding equipment, mapmaking software, and cameras to see the seabed at the mining sites as lifeless and empty and to render the ocean invisible and unproblematic, and drew on a rich range of agricultural and pillaging metaphors and comparisons with other disastrous mining projects to reveal sustainability as a relational quality of seabed mining. Visualizing the extraction regime as sustainable is a new strategy seabed mining companies use to co-opt NGO criticisms. This work raises important questions about the limits of sustainable development and technnoscientific vision and the future relationship between telemining projects and environmental and indigenous rights groups.
Health in Prehistoric Fiji
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2015-12) Martinez, Gabriela
Previous bioarchaeological research on skeletons from the Sigatoka Sand Dunes site (1820 ± 90 BP) on Viti Levu, Fiji focused primarily on biological relationships. Using previously recorded skeletal and dental indicators of health, this research will provide one of the first glimpses of health among prehistoric Fijians, including differences between males and females. The results of this research indicate that the people buried in the Sigatoka Sand Dunes experienced few episodes of growth disruption, and low rates of fracture and infection. In the absence of deleterious health factors, they were able to attain comparatively tall statures. Some of the observed dental pathologies may be attributed to cultural activities determined by sex. Compared to other Pacific series, the Sigatoka skeletons exhibited low frequencies of linear enamel hypoplasias and dental pathologies.

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