The Effects of South Korean Pop Culture on the Country’s Standards of Beauty and Success

Oral presentation abstract

Gun owners, ethics, and the problem of evil: A response to the Las Vegas shooting

This article examines the ways in which American gun owners deploy a particular ethical system in their responses to instances of mass gun violence. I argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to provide a better understanding of how this ethical system is produced, thereby allowing us to move beyond the falsely dichotomous terms of the gun control debate. Recently returned from a period of fieldwork with a gun rights activist community in San Diego, California, I use ethnographic data to show that owning a firearm brings with it an ethical system that makes the prospect of giving up guns in the aftermath of a mass shooting even less attractive to my informants. Furthermore, this article focuses on what has been called “the problem of evil” by demonstrating how my informants order the world into “good guys” and “bad guys.” This opposition becomes personified into a more general notion of good versus evil, thereby placing particular people in the category of the human and others in the category of the inhuman, or monstrous

Open Fire: Understanding Global Gun Cultures

Guns are everywhere: three quarters of a billion guns - from pistols to machine guns - exist in the world today. And guns are everything: a hard-won symbol of individual freedom, an index of crime and disorder, a whole industry legitimately contributing to an economy, a popular piece of sports equipment, and an object of desire, endlessly duplicated by toys, video games and films. Open Fire presents a broad analysis of the social, cultural and political significance of firearms and the worlds they create. Illustrated with a wide range of case material - from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa - Open Fire explores and questions this global icon of our times. Why do guns proliferate? What does it mean to shoot or to be shot? Who owns guns and who does not? How is a firearm, a manufactured thing, very different from any other object? Is there such a thing as a gun psychology ? How are firearms regarded in places where they are largely non-existent? Is a gun a different thing when held by a white man? Content Provided by Syndetics.https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/bookshelf/1029/thumbnail.jp

From Cooperstown to Dyersville: Spatial and historical practices of baseball nostalgia

This dissertation incorporates a broad disciplinary spectrum, encompassing interpretive and symbolic anthropology, cultural studies and critical theory, political economy, history, and geography. Based upon eight months of fieldwork, the project is a "multi-locale" ethnography, as advocated by George Marcus, of two small towns, Cooperstown, New York and Dyersville, Iowa, each of whose main attraction is a tourist site constructed within the discourse of baseball nostalgia. I focus upon how--at each of these tourist sites--a gendered, hegemonic social order is reproduced via the production and consumption of tourist space. The historical and cultural meaning of these two sites is explored in so far as each dialogically articulates with symbols of pastoralism, nation, and family. Beginning with what are considered to be tourist sites animated by conservative discourses of "America," the project encapsulates a cultural critique in which the final chapter is dedicated to analyzing how various radical feminist works challenge the masculinely gendered foundations of baseball.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio

''I'm indian too !'' : claiming native american identity, crafting, authority in mascots debates

Comment, dans les débats actuels sur les mascottes indiennes, l'identité indienne peut être revendiquée aussi par les américains non-indiens, pour justifier la récupération de la symbolique culturelle indienne par le monde du sport. Ce détournement, sans être nouveau, prend ici une dimension politique visant à obscurcir le propre discours des indiens