Suchergebnisse

Networks of interaction as well as community formation have been widely researched within Southern Zambezian archaeology of the early second millennium A.D. Despite this, research into these communities is often asymmetrical with objects delegated a passive role in the formation of not only networks of interaction but also socio-material development. Further, research tends to focus on society as the source of action in these processes. Using the site of Mtanye, the aim of this study is to create a relational ontology in which agency is distributed among heterogenous entities. Moreover, this study attempts to demonstrate how networks of interaction might have shaped this community. Mtanye is a Leopard's Kopje phase 2 site with stratified Transitional K2 (1200-1250 A.D.) and Mapungubwe (1250-1300) deposit. This site has further been placed into the wider conventional narrative as being evidence for the expansion of the Mapungubwe state. In order to recreate the networks of interaction that were present at Mtanye, Actor-Network Theory informed in part by the ethno-historical record was enlisted. The results of this study show that Mtanye has hill occupation, stone walling and access to prestige goods, characteristics conventionally not ascribed to periphery sites. Further, the results of this study suggest that it is more prudent to view the socio-material development of Mtanye, not in terms of the political or economic expansion of a hegemonic power but rather as a product of heterogeneous networks of interaction. This study may further provide a framework for understanding socio-material development and networks of interaction during the early second millennium A.D. in Southern Zambezia.

The period between the fragmentation of the 'Abbāsid empire in the 10th century AD and the formation of the Mamlūk state in the 13th century was one of considerable social, economic, and political change in the Levant. The period is marked by competition and shifting alliances among centralizing polities and autonomous local elites, a situation that makes archaeological investigation both difficult and rewarding. This dissertation examines the tension between autonomy and centralization within the Ayyūbid polity (ca. 1186-1263 AD) through the lens of industry, focusing specifically on copper production. The Ayyūbid copper production system in southern Jordan is reconstructed using data from systematic archaeological excavations and surveys in the arid lowlands of Faynān, including new excavations at two early 13th century copper production sites: Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir (KNA) and Khirbat Faynān. The analysis takes a Braudelian approach, situating the 13th century copper industry within long-term (primarily economic), medium-term (primarily political), and short-term (primarily social) changes in the Faynān region, and southern Jordan more broadly. The primary conclusion of this work is that the short-lived revival of copper production was part of a broader reorganization of the southern Levantine agricultural regime toward industrial-scale production of cane sugar. This reorganization took place, first, under the rule of the Ayyūbid princes of al-Karak in central Jordan, who adopted a local provisioning strategy that provided them considerable autonomy from the regional centers of Cairo and Damascus. Copper production in Faynān ended in the late 13th century, as the region came under the control of the Mamlūk state, and the Levantine sugar industry was integrated into a production system more dependent on Cairo.

This is a performative engagement with the theory and practice of Black girlhood. I begin with an excerpt from my play-in-process, crushed little stars, which is itself a meditation on the sad Black girl. I share this process of play not only to present play making as a powerful epistemological tool, but also to blur the boundaries between what constitutes theory as opposed to practice. I (re)imagine Black girl sociality as a site of restoration and healing against the racist, sexist, and ageist world with which Black girls are forced to contend. Accordingly, this project contributes to the diversification of girlhood studies, challenging the disciplinarity of the field by extending ethnographic and sociological perspectives to include the vantage point of performance and creative practice.

The choice of location for a landfill site has a significant effect on the economy, ecology and overall environmental well-being, and is therefore a vital decision in the process of city planning. In Mafraq, the huge increases in population, as a result both of the arrival of significant numbers of Syrian refugees, as well as an increasing birth rate, has increased the pressure on the limited resources available, as well as emphasising the necessity of building a proper system of waste management, as well as a well-located landfill site. In relation to the latter, the aim is to position it so as to minimise any negative impact on either the environment or on public health. In terms of GIS, vector analysis tools and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) were applied to ascertain the best location for a landfill site. The aspects that were assessed in this research included slopes, roads, airport, wells, soil, faults, international borders, Wadis, and urban areas. The weighting given to each item was determined using the Boolean technique in terms of its importance to the location of a landfill site. The conclusions indicated that 18 sites in the area researched were potentially suitable for landfill sites, but that the Jordanian government had to undertake further work using the results of the GIS research to determine where the site should be located.

Feminist theorists have long critiqued the conceptual binaries that underpin western thought as mapping to gender. In the late 20th century, digital technologies seemed poised to rework the boundaries of divides such as public and private, self and Other, masculine and feminine, or virtual and real. Drawing on posthumanist, transfeminist, and new materialist approaches in feminist thought, I analyze digital media interfaces as material sites of enacting and producing gender. In my fieldwork with young, mobile, urban cosmopolitans in early 2000s Berlin, many contested conventional gender, in ways tied to class status, even as they navigated implicit understandings of gender in interface design. I argue that these technologies must be analyzed as material interfaces or surfaces through which gender is constructed discursively and materially. Feminist technology and design scholars ask how new technologies and interfaces can support alternative, non-hegemonic enactments of gendered selfhood, as a means to challenge and rework how gender is constructed in and through sociotechnical systems. But such interventions require asking what exactly gender is online, as a virtual practice that combines the material with the informational in new ways.

The Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet serves as an important religious symbol and an embodiment of Tibetan culture. Ever since Chinese troops invaded Tibet in the 1950s, the Chinese government has attempted to control Tibet, including converting the Potala Palace and its rich material culture into a secular institution on display for tourists. Now void of the Dalai Lama and most of its contents, the Potala has become a façade for public consumption of Chinese state-led narratives and a symbol of cultural oppression. Through their approaches to heritage management and tourism, and with the aid of the Potala's listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site, China is capitalizing on Tibet's cultural heritage, undermining the Tibetan people and their culture, and controlling the narrative of Tibetan history to alter the collective memory of Tibetans.

Social networks and media hosting sites have recently fostered a growing trend in meme culture: the circulation of images within strangely specific categories of pleasure such as the "oddly satisfying" and the "mildly interesting." Difficult to define but collectively recognized, what I call aesthetic category memes are made up of images of ordinary things and processes that not only exemplify such categories of pleasure, but also provoke reflection on the peculiar nature of those categories. As a result, I argue, contributors to aesthetic category memes are unwittingly engaged in a philosophical project that tests the principles of aesthetic theory. Examining the growing archive of images and comments alongside key texts in aesthetic theory, I explore how aesthetic category memes reclaim the aesthetic faculties away from the presumed passivity of sharing, consuming, and "liking" online content, thereby revealing the philosophical foundations of what it means to share and "like" at all.

The abrupt onset of the COVID -19 pandemic brought devastating consequences to society as we know it. Connected to the obvious medical, societal, and economic changes, the pandemic also ushered in a world of isolation. Within this world, both media and violence are connected to imposed quarantine and confinement. During the pandemic, many studies indicated the rise of gender-based violence. For example, Mittal and Singh (2020) study the rise of quarantine violence in India. Equally disturbing is the rise of gender-based violence in digital spaces. Anon-IB is an image-based discussion board where anonymous images are posted. However, the board has become a hotbed for revenge porn and incel activity. Dutch police shut the site down in April 2018 (Vaas, 2018), but during the pandemic Anon-IB was able to find loopholes to restart itself. Users can also post headshots of a woman on the site and then ask for "wins," which translates into nude photos. Anon-IB is location-based, and users often ask for photos of women in the surrounding area. The site also reaches aninternational audience. One example is a past thread from The University of Georgia in Tbilisi, Georgia. This paper discusses the rise of extreme online violence and revenge porn during the pandemic through a discourse analysis of Anon-IB. A discussion of incel culture will also be discussed, using the work of O'Malley et al. (2020) and others as a framework to discuss the internet's role in ideological extremism and violence.

This research explores the new tradition of creating mass murder memorials in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Using written and oral history sources in combination with memorial designs, I explore the planning processes undertaken by five different communities: Virginia Tech, Columbine, University of Texas, Oklahoma City and Edmond, OK. I analyze what these case studies reveal about how changing cultural expectations and political needs transformed commemorative practices concerning violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. By exposing how the timely interventions of national figures increasingly shaped local commemorative aspirations, my research illuminates how the brief period of national unity in the immediate aftermath has been discursively and materially foregrounded as the heart of national public memory narratives of mass murder. I argue that at the turn of the twenty-first century the memory of victims of mass murders"assuming something akin to the role that fallen soldiers have played for the bulk of American history"are now viewed by a range of political, religious and cultural actors as a highly effective means of bolstering perceptions of local, organizational and national unity. This project contributes to the interdisciplinary literature on commemoration in three ways. First, I challenge the literature on memorials built in the immediate aftermath of violence and tragedy by illustrating how these memory sites are increasingly but the first stage of the material culture of public memory. Second, my theory of a ritualized assemblage develops the existing literature by forwarding a concept well suited to analyze the relationship of between seemingly disparate memory sites. Lastly, the rhetoric of what I call the Myth of the Slaughtered Citizen contributes to the literature on nationalism and commemoration by explaining how the victims of mass murder were culturally substituted into the commemorative role traditionally held by fallen soldiers to promote a sense of local and national unity. ; Ph. D.

This paper seeks to demonstrate the historical circumstances of the Nabataean migration into southern Jordan and the political and demographic changes during the Iron Age III (539-332 B.C.). The political circumstances that prevailed in the region during the sixth century B.C. had encouraged the Nabataeans to enter the region during the second half of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth century B.C. That conclusion is based on a study of the historical circumstances of the sixth century B.C. and the limited archaeological and historical evidence available that points to trade activity in the region during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. This activity was conducted by Arabian groups, and the only Arabian groups that historical sources mention at the end of the fourth century B.C. and associate with trade are the Nabataeans. It is reasonable to conclude that the Arabian traders who were known in the region during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. were the Nabataeans themselves. That suggests dating the entrance of the Nabataeans into the region during the second half of the sixth century / the beginning of the fifth century B.C. The entrance of the Nabataeans into southern Jordan was contemporary with the migration of the Edomites to the region of the Negev in southern Palestine, as the archaeological evidence connected with the Edomites in the Negev sites shows.

Large, pre-modern complex agricultural societies faced signicant environmental and social challenges in sustaining and maintaining the intensication of agricultural production that facilitated wide-scale redistributive food systems. Yet how agricultural societies embedded in larger social and economic networks balanced the needs of non-local political entities and the necessities of everyday local life is not often explored for communities living on the margins of polities who utilized written language. The archaeological site of Dhiban in the contemporary Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has been occupied for at least 3,000 years by sedentary agricultural communities. Nevertheless, regional elites wrote little about the settlement. It is still unknown how successive communities managed to flourish despite the environmental challenges of inhabiting a semi-arid landscape with annual precipitation too low for reliable rain-fed farming. This dissertation focuses on the Byzantine (300 - 640 CE) and Mamluk (1260 - 1450 CE) empires, who oversaw two separate attempts to increase the production of agricultural goods within their respective political territories. The specific trajectories and economic prerogatives of those empires differed, and therefore provide insight into how varying political and ideological institutions affected local lifeways at Dhiban. Archaeological data derived from the excavation of the mounded archaeological site in 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013, and the high-resolution sampling, recovery, and analysis of paleoethnobotanical data, combine to explore empirically the local agricultural practices of historical farmers in Dhiban and their responses to state intervention via the agricultural economy. Contrary to perceptions of timeless and unchanging agricultural practices in southwest Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, the results of the project reveal that communities at Dhiban in these two periods exercised considerable agency in the choice of agricultural crops, the composition of agricultural fields, and the organization of agricultural labor and crop processing. Mamluk period archaeological deposits contain paleoethnobotanical evidence of an irrigated wheat and barley monocropping strategy with signicant crop-processing occurring on site, although there is also archaeological evidence of periodic site abandonment. Byzantine period deposits, in contrast, contain no evidence of abandonment, and little crop-processing occurring on site. Nevertheless new varieties of agricultural crops appear in Mamluk period deposits, such as plum and sorghum, as a result of trade or garden-plot cultivation. Therefore, although these communities faced environmental constraints in the range of crops that could be grown, and participated in the unique economic networks of each political intervention, they demonstrated choice in the kinds and proportions of agricultural goods produced. The theoretical contributions of this project thus apply both to the archaeological and general scientic community concerned with sustainability by providing a diachronic paleoethnobotanical data-set nuanced by the influence of human decision-making.

This essay analyzes the use of fire on Upland Island Wilderness Area (UIW) to examine how postindustrial wilderness sites rework operative notions of nature, wildness, and preservation within U.S. environmental thinking and politics. Postindustrial wilderness areas complicate conceptualizations of nature as pristine, unspoiled, or even beautiful, challenging us to address biodiversity and ecosystem function in ways that are less centered on human(ist) values. An intensively managed pine plantation prior to wilderness designation, UIW blatantly transgresses liberal humanist boundaries of nature and culture, ecology and industry. I draw on feminist and posthumanist theory to demonstrate how contestations surrounding the use of fire on UIW resituate ethical and epistemic implications of wilderness management, offering a critical counterpoint to the prioritization of pristine nature within U.S. environmental politics and demanding less humanist approaches to the complex forest ecologies of the plantationocene.

The fortification of wheat flour with micronutrients is a common strategy to increase vitamin and mineral intake. While wheat flour mills are often inspected by agencies affiliated with national ministries to ensure compliance with national fortification standards, few countries use data derived from these inspections to construct an external monitoring system for use in program management and evaluation. The primary objective of this paper is to assess the performance of the external monitoring system utilized in Jordan according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Updated Guidelines for Evaluating Public Health Surveillance Systems. A secondary objective is to present mill monitoring results from 2009 to 2010 in order to demonstrate the data generated by the system. The review concludes that the data required for the system is representative, simple to collect, and can be collected in a flexible manner. The external monitoring system is acceptable to participating agencies and millers and is stable due to mandatory fortification legislation which provides the legal framework for external monitoring. Data on production of fortified flour and utilization of premix can be provided in a timely manner, but on-site mill monitoring and flour sample collection are more challenging due to resource constraints. The frequent collection of a small number of indicators can provide fortification program managers with timely information with which to base decisions. Jordan's external monitoring system successfully documented the performance of each mill and the entire flour fortification program, and can serve as a model for other national fortification programs considering external monitoring approaches.

The fortification of wheat flour with micronutrients is a common strategy to increase vitamin and mineral intake. While wheat flour mills are often inspected by agencies affiliated with national ministries to ensure compliance with national fortification standards, few countries use data derived from these inspections to construct an external monitoring system for use in program management and evaluation. The primary objective of this paper is to assess the performance of the external monitoring system utilized in Jordan according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Updated Guidelines for Evaluating Public Health Surveillance Systems. A secondary objective is to present mill monitoring results from 2009 to 2010 in order to demonstrate the data generated by the system. The review concludes that the data required for the system is representative, simple to collect, and can be collected in a flexible manner. The external monitoring system is acceptable to participating agencies and millers and is stable due to mandatory fortification legislation which provides the legal framework for external monitoring. Data on production of fortified flour and utilization of premix can be provided in a timely manner, but on-site mill monitoring and flour sample collection are more challenging due to resource constraints. The frequent collection of a small number of indicators can provide fortification program managers with timely information with which to base decisions. Jordan's external monitoring system successfully documented the performance of each mill and the entire flour fortification program, and can serve as a model for other national fortification programs considering external monitoring approaches.

AbstractThis article explores the role of Islam in contemporary Jordanian charities and social welfare organizations. In what ways do these organizations relate to Islamic traditions in their work? What role do religious convictions play in the construction of modern selfhoods among their employees and volunteers? Do these constructions relate to broader, globally relevant, social imaginaries? The article tries to answer these questions by applying a novel analytical framework to qualitative data from fieldwork conducted among Jordanian charities and social welfare organizations. We treat these organizations as "social sites" for the reinterpretation of Islamic traditions in the context of global modernity as well as for the construction of meaningful forms of modern selfhoods among their members. In doing so, we argue that these specifically Islamic identity constructions can fruitfully be understood with reference to different types of globally relevant social imaginaries.