Honors BA Thesis Projects

Marion R. & Adolph J. Lichtstern Prize: Awarded by the Department of Anthropology for the most distinguished Bachelor’s papers in the areas of Social, Cultural, and Linguistic Anthropology

In Pursuit of "Clean Water": An analysis of counterculture, diet, and escapism on a commune in Hawai'i. 

This paper is an ethnography of the diet and growing practices of a majority white commune located in Puna, Hawai’i. Puna is a district in the Big Island of Hawai’i with ten recognized communes and intentional communities populated mostly by American hippies that moved from the mainland U.S. Most of these communities are off-grid, supplying the majority of their own food, plumbing, and electricity and practice sustainable growing. This paper presents an ethnography of the diet and farming practices of members of 'ĀinaKarma Gardens, a commune located in Puna, Hawai’i through two main focuses: firstly, an analysis of how members of 'ĀinaKarma conceptualize their choices around food and secondly, a contextualization of 'ĀinaKarma’s existence and conceptualizations of food within the history of American colonization of Hawai’i. In pairing this historicization with my ethnographic findings from interviews with current and former members of 'ĀinaKarma and an analysis of 'ĀinaKarma’s website, this paper ultimately aims to provide an anthropological consideration of the appeal which attracts members to 'ĀinaKarma, which I argue is inextricably linked to colonial imaginaries of Hawai’i and escapism. In this analysis, I examine escapism as an increasingly relevant phenomenon and consider its role in society and potential as a method of fostering countercultural and revolutionary ideals.

Albert A. Dahlberg Prize: Awarded by the Department of Anthropology for the most distinguished Bachelor’s paper in the areas of Archaeology or Physical Anthropology

Tillya Tepe: Constructing Indentities on Cultural Crossroads 

In 1978, a Soviet-Afghan joint archaeology team stumbled upon a nomadic necropolis five kilometers to the north of Sheberghan. Six fully excavated tombs yielded a magnificent collection of more than twenty thousand artifacts, mostly made of gold, hence the name Tillya Tepe (Golden Mound). Numismatic evidence provides a date between early and mid-first century A.D. Located on the cultural crossroads between east and west, the Tillya Tepe tombs and their grave goods with hybridized styles provide ideal conditions for an archaeological study of identities. Informed by anthropological, sociological, and psychological models of identity formation, this thesis approaches identity by stressing its multivalent nature, and identity is understood as being constructed by the very people who possess them. One can construct many overlapping identities, each can be emphasized or suppressed by oneself or by others as the social context dictates. Turning to the internal construction of identities, this thesis questions who the deceased thought they were and how the livings used their tombs to display and modify the deceased’s identities. By identifying markers of gender, age, socioeconomic status, social roles, and ideology, this thesis argues that the six Tillya Tepe tomb owners possessed different identities that did not always overlap, and these individual aspects of identity were furthermore masked by a more visible, overarching group identity shared by their burials. Processes of tomb construction and coffin furnishing were highly standardized and used during the funeral as visual instruments stimulating identifications of sameness and perceptions of belonging. Markers of gender, socioeconomic status, and age were incorporated into a coherent, hierarchical system that suggested not only a shared group identity but also the internal differentiation of wealth, power, and social roles. Personal items and ornaments – jewelries, clothes, toiletries, tools, and weapons – were manipulated to lay down categorical distinctions that assign each individual a specific place within the group identity. This Tillya Tepe group identity was carefully maintained in mortuary practice, and decisions regarding the inclusion and exclusion of the deceased from this group identity were actively controlled by the living through deliberate manipulations of the material culture.

Acts of Kindness and Shrugs: How the Discourse of Rights Shapes Perceptions of Self and Society

My thesis examines how the discourse of rights in the United States has shifted away from protecting human dignity and has instead become synonymous with individual self-interest regardless of social consequences or protecting the liberty we desire. I was inspired to begin this  project during the Covid-19 lockdowns because I saw so many people using rights to justify not wearing a mask or not getting vaccinated. Beyond health regulations, I also witnessed many people prioritizing gun rights over gun control in the aftermath of countless mass shootings. To investigate this issue, I draw on texts that define liberalism and natural rights theory and incorporate them with my own interview data from participants in Kankakee, IL and around the country. I found that our use of rights to oppose health regulations or protect gun rights can be attributed to the individualistic and competitive ideology of neoliberalism. Solutions to our socioeconomic problems becomes framed in the context of rights, and the reverence for the free market becomes intertwined with the idolization of the free individual. In the end, I open the door to reframing how we perceive our freedoms. We may see liberty as a responsibility that we must uphold for ourselves and each other rather than a rigid right. Consequently, we can ensure our rules of liberty protect the needs of everyone rather than consecrating the concept of a right alone.

Reconceptualizing Ambiguities in Sex Estimation: A Case Study of the Society for American Archaeology Annual Conference Trends

Accurate sex estimation is critical for bioarchaeologists when recreating the demographics of past individuals. Yet, ambiguous results are not uncommon. While the current sex estimation methods do create a space for the uncertainty by marking individuals as probable male, probable female, or ambiguous, we are often trained to treat these individuals as data outliers and hence, to remove them prior to the stage of analysis. Drawing heavily from second- and third-wave feminisms, an increasing number of bioarchaeologists have challenged this binary bias inherent to our analytical schemes. Yet, theoretical advancements do not always lead to a timely formation of the corresponding methodological interface. It remains largely unexplored to what extent the field of bioarchaeology has integrated and responded to these theoretical discourses. My thesis focuses on how feminist critiques and gender/queer theories have impacted bioarchaeological research (or not), by exploring thematic shifts in presentations given at the Society for American Archaeology annual conferences between 2005 and 2022. Upon the findings, I argue that while ambiguous identities have received certain theoretical acceptance, ambiguity in the data itself continued to be sidelined. A few published case studies from this period were also selected for in-depth analysis. By observing how these scholars branded their works as sensitive to the plurality of sex/gender identities and experiences, I seek to answer how we may reconceptualize the ambiguity in sex estimation and how we could potentially translate the theoretical insights into field practices and training of students.

Anthropology and Religious Studies

Marion R. & Adolph J. Lichtstern Prize: Awarded by the Department of Anthropology for the most distinguished Bachelor’s papers in the areas of Social, Cultural, and Linguistic Anthropology

Queering Nearness to God: An Ethnography of Queer Religious Lives

The Catholic Church and most contemporary Islamic jurisprudence declare that same-sex acts are impermissible; that they harm the relationship one has with God. For queer individuals who grew up in religious traditions that affirm this belief, it can be difficult to imagine a mode of operating in the world where the pursuit of sex and love does not lead one astray. In this thesis, I explore how queer people who participate in or have participated in Christian and Islamic traditions have navigated doubts on the relationship between queerness and religion. Their narratives illustrate the various ways in which they have understood themselves to be subjects who maintain a relationship with God through, or despite, their queerness, disrupting heteronormative claims that the two are mutually exclusive. The main questions I seek to answer are: how does the negotiation between desire and duty constitute the self? And how can the duties that shape my interlocutors’ sense of self challenge heteropatriarchal norms on the relationship between religion and sexuality? I argue that one's sense of self is shaped by the duties one feels bound to and that experiences with desire and pleasure offer people the opportunity to affirm or critique those duties. For queerness, then, to be a means to draw near to God, one must reflect on, question, and reimagine the duties that define obedience to God so that queer acts have the potential of fulfilling those duties.

Anthropology (BA/MA)

Medieval Past, Multicultural Present: The Politics of Jewish and Muslim Heritage in Palermo, Sicily

My thesis examines multiculturalism in Palermo, the capital of Sicily in Italy. Characterized by the coexistence of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in the Middle Ages, Palermo has been recently conceived of and marketed as a ‘multicultural mosaic.’ The city’s tourism office relies on this medieval history to craft an alluring narrative about Palermo as an innately cosmopolitan city. This narrative commodifies multiculturalism to attract tourism and frames modern migration as a tool to restore an idealized past, folding contemporary migrants into Palermo’s branding strategy. However, commemorating the past does not necessarily translate into multi-religious coexistence in the present. While the historical presence of Islam and Judaism in Palermo is celebrated and capitalized on, contemporary Muslim and Jewish communities struggle to negotiate their place in the city’s urban space. How does the notion of multiculturalism come into focus in this tension between Palermo’s medieval past and its present? After examining the construction of Palermo and its medieval heritage as multicultural, I attempt to move beyond the bidimensional nature of the mosaic image associated with the city. Instead, I posit that Palermo’s past is best understood as a stratigraphic record: the city’s historical layers are stratified on one another and are made visible, according to the present’s needs. I explore this by looking at the renovation of Palermo’s first present-day mosque and synagogue. Both established in former churches, these two places of worship retain pre-existing Christian features, and thus exist in a state of chronological pollution. This state limits the Muslim and Jewish communities’ claims to the city, since their places of worship exist in the shadow of earlier churches. However, I argue that this attention to the stratification of Palermo’s built environment also enables the establishment of a Muslim and Jewish right to the city. In a process of continuous negotiation with the past, the newly established mosque and synagogue are framed in relation to Palermo’s Muslim and Jewish medieval history. The mosque’s fortuitous orientation towards Mecca is said to index the existence of an earlier medieval mosque in the same area. Similarly, the contemporary synagogue is believed to be where the medieval synagogue used to stand in Palermo’s medieval Jewish quarter. Attending to the coexistence of various material temporalities in Palermo’s present ultimately allows us to understand how historical narratives are mobilized to legitimize the presence of Islam and Judaism in the urban space. Far from being a recent phenomenon, the rebirth of these two religions in Palermo is imagined as a return.

Anthropology and Creative Writing

Beyond 1811: Articulating the 'Hidden Transcript' of Labor on Woodland Plantation

On January 8, 1811, enslaved people revolted at Woodland Plantation in Louisiana against their masters and marched towards New Orleans with the intention of overthrowing the government there. With up to 25% of the enslaved population of each plantation between today's LaPlace, LA and Kenner, LA joining the army, it's estimated that as many as 500 enslaved people fought in the Revolt, making it the largest enslaved rebellion in United States history. Woodland Plantation, as the Revolt's origin point, has obtained increasing relevance in Louisiana and US history. However, Woodland Plantation operated for about 150 years as a plantation after 1811, and the legacy of 1811 stretched long fingers through oral histories of the Black people in Louisiana. Through examination of the 2025 Woodland Plantation collection, my thesis interrogates the signs of resistance and explores the possibilities that arise when domestic routine and resistance are taken seriously as modes of operation for domestic laborers pre-and post-Emancipation. Borrowing from Saidiya Hartman’s idea of critical fabulation, I interrogate the possibility of routine and resistance within Woodland’s big house to uncover new possibilities for the “hidden transcripts” of resistance within Woodland’s Black household workers. In my thesis, I examine four main time periods in relation to the collection excavated behind the big house of Woodland. In each time period, I examine the types of labor and their laborers to identify the “routine” and the potential for resistance inherent in each era.

Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies

Of Avians and Augurs: Human-Bird Relationships of Subsistence and Symbol at Türkmen-Karahöyük, South-Central Anatolia

My thesis is an examination of the ways in which bird-human relationships were enacted in south-central Anatolia between the Bronze Age and Hellenistic period. Focusing mainly on avian osteological remains of birds and iconographic finds depicting birds at the archaeological site of Türkmen-Karahöyük, I investigate how and why the relationships between humans and birds changed over time in the region. For this work, I utilize two major categories of human-bird relationships: subsistence relationships and symbolic relationships. Subsistence relationships are practical food-driven relationships that are expressed either through hunting birds or raising them, whereas in symbolic relationships birds take on a role as a mediator between humans and the divine. Türkmen-Karahöyük is one of the largest archaeological sites in the region throughout its multiple phases of occupation and excavations at the site began in 2024. By using primary archaeological data from a newly excavated site, I am able to set the groundwork for further study of human-bird relationships at Türkmen-Karahöyük. From my research, I argue that during the Middle and Late Bronze Age symbolic human-bird relationships held greater social significance than subsistence relationships, but during the Hellenistic and Roman periods at the site human-bird subsistence relationships were greatly favored to symbolic ones. I claim that this inversion stems from changes in which human-bird relationships involved direct contact between humans and live birds, as well as a societal division between subsistence birds and symbolic birds.

Anthropology and Art History

Albert A. Dahlberg Prize: Awarded by the Department of Anthropology for the Most Distinguished Bachelor’s Paper in the Areas of Archaeology or Physical Anthropology

Reframing Civilization and Barbarism: Chinese Women in Japanese Nanban Screen Paintings

Produced in Japan between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Nanban (“Southern Barbarian”) screens emerged in response to encounters with Europeans and the expansion of early modern global maritime trade. Among the figures of different ethnicities depicted in these screens, those identifiable as Chinese women recur alongside Japanese and European merchants, despite the absence of any historical evidence that Chinese women participated in the Nanban trade as traders. Therefore, their persistent presence raises questions about how China and Chinese femininity—a familiar “other” that had occupied the Japanese imagination for centuries—were reimagined in Japan at this historical moment when established understandings of the world were being expanded and transformed.

Informed by the theories of Victor Turner, Erving Goffman, and Wu Hung, my thesis approaches Nanban screens as constructing visual and social spaces in which understandings of self and other are staged, negotiated, and reconfigured. By comparing Nanban screens with earlier Japanese paintings depicting Chinese women, I examine how inherited conventions associated with Chinese femininity were transformed under conditions of intensified foreign contact. I argue that Chinese women became critical sites through which established distinctions between “civilization” and “barbarism” were challenged and reconfigured, and through which China itself, traditionally imagined as a paradigm of cultural authority and elite elegance, was reimagined. Whereas earlier images situated Chinese women within enclosed spaces associated with refinement and moral order, Nanban screens reposition them within commercial settings, open streets, and scenes of interaction with Western figures. Their changing placement, entanglement with foreign presences, and exposure to intrusive outward gazes undermine established pictorial hierarchies and reveal the increasingly materialized and contested status of China in Japanese visual representations. Through these transformations, Nanban screens present civilization and barbarism not as fixed opposites, but as fluid and performative categories continually redefined through acts of representation and viewing.