Below are a few themes that students have taken on in recent years. (I’ve simply posted the title along with their introductory paragraph). Hope this helps!
“In conversation: Histories in the Making”:
“This week’s blog takes a look at current issues of history, or what constitutes the past within the disciplines of religion and anthropological archaeology. Exchanges between a religion studies student, Sam M., and an archaeology student, Stefanie W., take place to first understand the differences between these disciplines and to highlight the variety of approaches in search of multiple truths that cross-cut the making of histories. Underwriting this in our conversations between religion and archaeology is the focus on misnomers of “objectivity” and “accuracy,” as well as our perceptions of what history constitutes in the interpretations of identities and worldviews amongst different individuals, communities, and societies.”
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) : Making of a Hindu India
“Earlier this year, riots in Delhi resulted in the death of at least 51 individuals, with the majority being Muslims (The Guardian, 16 March, 2020). These riots were the direct result of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a controversial citizenship bill passed by the Indian parliament in December 2019. This act offers citizenship rights to the so-called persecuted minorities of India’s neighbouring countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh) where Muslims are the majority population. According to the CAA, Hindu, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Christian migrants from the aforementioned countries who took refuge in India earlier than December 2014 would be naturalized as Indian citizens under the basis of religious persecution. However, those who claim citizenship under this Act are not required to prove said religious persecution. Identifying as non-Muslim is sufficient to claim Indian citizenship, making it clear that with the CAA, the ruling party of India, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), is trying to create an environment of existential fear amongst Muslim Indians. This blog will explore the rise of religious nationalism and discrimination in India through an examination of the region’s religious and political history and archaeology; discussing initially India’s history of mistrust, followed by a study of the Partition Era and archaeology’s role in the creation of Indian identity, and then the attempted erasure of tribes in India – an underrepresented minority in the country. Having provided this context, we will discuss the role of the BJP in appropriating the past in order to spread false narratives about what it means to be Indian, equating Indian identity with the Hindu religion.”
“Blurred Prospects”
The anthropology graduate student experience can be incredibly rewarding on a personal and professional level but remains marked by institutional, sub-disciplinary, and individual uncertainty. We invoke the metaphor of “blurriness,” a quality of haze and ill-defined sight, to discuss our thoughts on the academy as two first-year doctoral students. Loa Gordon is a social-medical anthropologist who studies the self-administered care practices of Ontario university students with mental health struggles. Julien Favreau is a geoarchaeologist who studies 2 million-year-old stone tools from East Africa to determine from which outcrops human ancestors procured raw materials. Below we will reflect on the precarities we face as hopeful academics. By discussing the blurriness we encounter in the academy, in our respective sub-disciplinary niches, and in our individual research, we will delineate common feelings among our cohort and provide a platform on which to openly address these pressing issues.
“Identity and Interdisciplinary Studies: a comparison of archaeological and bioarchaeological perspectives”:
Identity is a broad and encompassing topic that touches on every aspect of our lives, so it makes sense that anthropological engagement of identity takes many forms. This blog post looks at two of these engagements, archaeology and biological anthropology, to (1) see where differences and similarities lie in the investigation of identity, and (2) to explore if one sub-discipline really needs the other. To do this, two articles were selected by specialists in the respective fields: one of us is a biological anthropologist looking at Roman diet through stable isotopes, the other a paleoethnobotanist exploring early hunter-gatherer diet, subsistence, and foodways in the south-central Andes. A brief description of the articles are presented below, as well as discussions on common threads and divergences between the articles.
“Anthropologists are ‘Story Telling Animals“
The concern for narrative and story telling is one theme that cross-cuts anthropological archaeology and social anthropology. We have covered this topic in class but there are particulars that are unique to each sub-field that we wished to cover in this week’s collaborative blog. The one commonality that the two fields share is the troublesome notion of objectivity. In the following paragraphs, we would like to examine narrative and its effectiveness in the two anthropological sub-fields.
An Experimentation in Collaboration: A Dual Approach to Traditional Ecological Knowledge:
Inspired by Koster et al.’s (2016) research in Current Anthropology we have chosen to discuss a topic which intersects our disciplinary interests of natural and social science. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is a body of knowledge that is site specific and is developed through generation of cultural transmission (Drew 2006). This knowledge concerns relationships between Indigenous persons, other organisms, and the living environment. Various disciplines have incorporated TEK in their research programs, and here we focus on its presence in anthropology. In this collaborative blog, we explore this issue from archaeological and sociocultural perspectives. These intersections concern the historical and ecological perspectives, management practices, and cautions of TEK.
