Time in Kyrgyzstan

The topic of the exegesis is travel documentary photography. The exegesis is based on previous written academic work on travel documentary photography and it is related to my own experience when photographing the people and the landscapes of Kyrgyzstan. In the exegesis I argue that travel documentary photography is highly subjective and ambiguous. There is no such thing as a purely objective representation of the \u27Other\u27. Rather it is and illusion of objectivity that emerges through the eye of the photographer. In travel documentary photography I argue that we make the \u27Others\u27 seem less like us than they are because it is the difference that is interesting. Even though one wishes to photograph things just as they are one just cannot because travel documentary photograph is much more complicated than this. In addition, the exegesis looks at the concept of Orientalism. Orientalism is the key discourse in representing other cultures. Travel documentary photography mostly represents other cultures therefore the concept of Orientalism needs to be taken into account. It is what separates the East from West or as Stuart Hall (1992) calls it the \u27West\u27 from the \u27Rest\u27. In terms of my project, Kyrgyzstan could be viewed as the \u27Rest\u27 in Orientalising discourses. I then used Edward Said\u27s critique of Orientalism and argued that one cannot consider Kyrgyzstan as the \u27Rest\u27. The \u27Rest\u27 is a larger entity compared to the \u27West\u27 with different people and cultures that cannot be represented as one. Furthermore, coming from the \u27West\u27 and documenting \u27Otherness\u27 complicates documentary work because of the tourist gaze and the fact that it is a one-way representation by the photographer. As a result, power relations and ethical issues arise which a documentary photographer needs to consider as part of the research. When photographing in Kyrgyzstan I tried to represent the northern parts of the country in as balanced a manner as possible, for example by not only photographing the exotic, but also modem parts of Kyrgyzstan in the capital. Within the genre of travel documentary photography there are limited strategies of representing the \u27Other\u27. Stereotyped depictions include victims, villains or heroes. One may argue that the Kyrgyz people are victims of poverty, and are depicted as such in my photographic project, but as I experienced when traveling there people did not seem to be discontented because of this. Rather they seemed to be a people with dignity and pride, which I argue is also apparent in my photographs. In the exegesis, I argue that travel documentary photography relies on what Muecke calls contingency, or unforeseen events. By contingency Muecke (2005) means what opportunities that arise by accident, kismet. In other words, one cannot know how the photographs will tum out before one has actually been there. For example in Kyrgyzstan I never knew what people I would meet on the streets at the exact time I was there. What\u27s more, even though I wished to represent Kyrgyzstan as a romantic/exotic place it didn\u27t happen because not everything in Kyrgyzstan was romantic

Journey Of Navajo Oshley

Ak'é Nýdzin, or Navajo Oshley, was born sometime between 1879 and 1893. His oral memoir is set on the northern frontier of Navajo land, principally the San Juan River basin in southeastern Utah, and tells the story of his early life near Dennehetso and his travels, before there were roads or many towns, from Monument Valley north along Comb Ridge to Blue Mountain. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Anglos and Navajos expanded their use and settlement of lands north of the San Juan. Grazing lands and the Anglo wage economy drew many Navajos across the river. Oshley, a sheepherder, was among the first to settle there. He cared for the herds of his extended family, while also taking supplemental jobs with the growing livestock industry in the area. His narrative is woven with vivid and detailed portraits of Navajo culture: clan relationships, marriages and children, domestic life, the importance of livestock, complex relations with the natural world, ceremonies, trading, and hand trembling

Are Hospital Pharmacies More Efficient if They Employ Nurses?

This paper assesses the efficiency of utilizing nurses in Washington State hospital pharmacies. We take the perspective of a pharmacy department manager and model an input oriented hospital pharmacy production process. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to examine both scale efficiency and technical efficiency, and differences across hospital pharmacies that use and do not use nurse staffing are analyzed using cross-tabulations and nonparametric hypothesis tests. The results indicate that the use of nurse staffing does not significantly impact either scale or technical efficiency. Thus, permitting nurses to play a greater role in hospital pharmacies does not adversely affect efficiency. This paper has important policy implications for hospital administrators and pharmacists.

The Northern Navajo Frontier 1860-1900

The Navajo nation is one of the most frequently researched groups of Indians in North America. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and others have taken turns explaining their views of Navajo history and culture. A recurrent theme throughout is that the U.S. government defeated the Navajos so soundly during the early 1860s that after their return from incarceration at Bosque Redondo, they were a badly shattered and submissive people. The next thirty years saw a marked demographic boom during which the Navajo population doubled. Historians disagree as to the extent of this growth, but the position taken by many historians is that because of this growth and the rapidly expanding herds of sheep, cattle, and horses, the government beneficently gave more territory to its suffering wards. While this interpretation is partly accurate, it centers on the role of the government, the legislation that was passed, and the frustrations of the Indian agents who rotated frequently through the Navajo Agency in Fort Defiance, New Mexico, and ignores or severely limits one of the most important actors in this process of land acquisition-the Navajos themselves. Instead of being a downtrodden group of prisoners, defeated militarily in the 1860s and dependent on the U.S. government for protection and guidance in the 1870s and 80s, they were vigorously involved in defending and expanding the borders of their homelands. This was accomplished not through war and as a concerted effort, but by an aggressive defensive policy built on individual action that varied with changing circumstances. Many Navajos never made the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo. Instead they eluded capture in northern and western hinterlands and thereby pushed out their frontier. This book focuses on the events and activities in one part of the Navajo borderlands-the northern frontier-where between 1860 and 1900 the Navajos were able to secure a large portion of land that is still part of the reservation. This expansion was achieved during a period when most Native Americans were losing their lands.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1053/thumbnail.jp

“He Stood for Us Strongly”: Father H. Baxter Liebler's Mission to the Navajo

The San Juan River was still running deep that July of 1943. The cottonwood leaves trembled slightly in the midday heat, with an occasional breeze snaking its way along the dirt road that ran beside the red rock bluffs north of the river. Ada Benally remembers shading her eyes and looking across the brown, roiling water at the approaching dust cloud that billowed above the far bank. The hum of vehicle engines stopped, the opening and closing of truck doors sounded in the distance, and the dust began to settle. Ada wondered what was happening. The sights and sounds came from a section along the river where Navajos and Utes had traditionally picked sumac berries, wild spinach, and herbs. Perhaps these people had come for that purpose. She decided to wait and see, since the river was too high, too fast, and there was no boat to take her across. Had Ada been able to ford the river, she would have witnessed the establishment of the Saint Christopher’s Mission, located two miles outside of Bluff, Utah. Ada would also later be counted as one among several hundred of the mission’s future baptized members. But that was in the future. At this point, the cassocked Father H. (Harold) Baxter Liebler, the director of this Episcopalian mission, stepped out of his vehicle to begin his life-long work among the Navajo. He had come from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, leaving behind a well-established parish to pursue a boyhood vision he considered his destiny. At the age of fifty-three, Father Liebler set out to fulfill his dream of a mission to the Navajo. He selected an isolated part of their reservation known as the Utah Strip with the hope of finding a group of people least touched by earlier inroads of Christianity. Saint Christopher’s was the ideal spot for this undertaking. The site was geographically central to the Utah Navajo population living on the northern boundary of the reservation. The vast majority of the people lived in hogans south of the river and came across on horseback or in wagons occasionally to trade; a general store and a twenty-home Mormon community comprised the city of Bluff

The Journey of Navajo Oshley

Ak\u27é Nýdzin, or Navajo Oshley, was born sometime between 1879 and 1893. His oral memoir is set on the northern frontier of Navajo land, principally the San Juan River basin in southeastern Utah, and tells the story of his early life near Dennehetso and his travels, before there were roads or many towns, from Monument Valley north along Comb Ridge to Blue Mountain. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Anglos and Navajos expanded their use and settlement of lands north of the San Juan. Grazing lands and the Anglo wage economy drew many Navajos across the river. Oshley, a sheepherder, was among the first to settle there. He cared for the herds of his extended family, while also taking supplemental jobs with the growing livestock industry in the area. His narrative is woven with vivid and detailed portraits of Navajo culture: clan relationships, marriages and children, domestic life, the importance of livestock, complex relations with the natural world, ceremonies, trading, and hand trembling.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1051/thumbnail.jp