AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 45, no. 3 (Summer 2006)

PAINTING CULTURE: ART AND ETHNOGRAPHY AT A SCHOOL FOR NATIVE AMERICANS

Lisa K. Neuman
The University of Maine

During the mid-twentieth century in Oklahoma, young artists at a school for American Indians selectively used ethnographic accounts of Native American cultures written by anthropologists to enhance their artistic representations. While creating Indian art became an important means of preserving knowledge of tribal cultures, cultural preservation took on a larger significance in the school's goal to train professional Indian artists whose livelihoods depended on the patronage of private collectors and museums. Art students utilized anthropological accounts of Indian cultures to help them succeed, but they and their teachers ultimately rejected anthropologists as final authorities on their cultures. Through their participation in art competitions that demanded specific representations of Indianness, their use of ethnography, and their rejection of anthropologists, young Indian artists created new indigenous identities. (Native American art students, American Indian identity, using ethnography).

DEFINING A TRUE BUDDHIST: MEDITATION AND KNOWLEDGE FORMATION IN BURMA

Ingrid Jordt
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

This article considers Fredrik Barth's call to reconceptualize how anthropologists approach the study of complex societies through a study of how knowledge is differentially embodied by individuals within a population and how these bodies of knowledge are produced and sustained. Burma's lay meditation movement serves as a case study for how knowledge communities emerge. The focus is on how people who acquire meditation-derived knowledge, as contrasted with cosmological and traditional forms of Buddhist knowledge, practice, and identity, comprise a community of knowers. This membership is based on individual experiences in meditation and does not conform to membership in prior social and religious categories. The case provides an example of how knowledge is constituted, justified, and shared, within an emergent community. (Anthropology of knowledge, Burma, Buddhism, meditation).

RACIAL DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALISM IN PANAMA

Carla Guerrón-Montero
University of Delaware

In spite of having more fluid and flexible racial boundaries than other regions of the world, Latin America continues to have racially hegemonic practices. Panama has a myth of racial egalitarianism, yet an inability to perceive that racial inequality is pervasive. This is illustrated with the paradox of race relations between Afro-Antilleans and the indigenous peoples in the Archipelago of Bocas del Toro. Intermarriage in the region and the notion that there is no racial inequality contrasts with the constant recognition of differences. Race relations and ethnic identity in this region have their origins in the competition between British, North American, and Central American interests, and have been shaped in relation to Panamanian nationalism. (Panama, race relations, Afro-Antilleans, indigenous peoples, national identity).

BEHAVIORAL RELATIONS FOR COMPONENTS OF RECENT PREINDUSTRIAL MODERNIZATION: QUANTITATIVE ASSESSMENT

Trevor Denton
Independent Scholar

Murdock and Provost (1973) designed their scale to measure recent pre-industrial modernization, not cultural complexity. However, they gave no conceptual definition of modernization or any ontology for it. A conceptual definition of what their scale measures is given in such a way as to encompass both preindustrial and contemporary modernization. Conceptual and empirical evidence validating the definition is given. Using Spearman partial correlations and confirmatory factor analysis, steps are taken toward an ontology of behavioral relations interconnecting Murdock and Provost's (1973) 10 subscales. The causes and consequences of the 10 subscales are examined. For data on recent preindustrial societies the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample is used. For data on contemporary countries World Bank World Development Indicators are employed. A variety of implications are clarified, including unilinear evolution within a probabilistic framework, contemporary development as modernization, and suggestions for the conceptual lexicon of archaeologists. (Modernization, cultural complexity, ontology, Standard Cross-Cultural Sample).