Healthy First Year: Cultural beliefs and customs of Indian mothers affecting the health of a child in their first year of life

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Amy Drake and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Department of Anthropology Nearly a decade ago, India held one of the world’s highest rates in both infant and maternal mortality. Attention from the Indian government and the implementation of health programs have contributed to the significant improvement seen in the past ten years. While both rates have dropped […]

Millenniums and Messiahs: Literature Review in Messianic Religions in context of the Hmong Diaspora

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John Whitton and Dr. Jacob Hickman, Department of Anthropology Initially, the research proposed consisted of two sections constituting the last two semesters of my undergraduate education. The first included collecting published sources regarding millenarianism and messianism within the larger global context and organizing them into a database. The second included systematically cataloging each source in the database for […]

Prophets, Scripts, and Nations: Hmong Religious and Ethnonational Borders in Northern Thailand

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Belinda Ramirez and Dr. Jacob Hickman, Department of Anthropology As a sociocultural anthropology major, my ORCA project entailed spending three months on an ethnographic study. I chose to conduct this study in northern Thailand among the Hmong, a small hill tribe ethnic group. During my stay in a Hmong community near Pua, Nan Province, I […]

Change and Continuity in a South Indian Fishing Village

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Andrew Pieper and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Department of Anthropology Vasuvanipalem, a once isolated fishing village on the South Eastern coast of India has in recent years been absorbed in to the rapidly growing city of Visakhapatnam. The accompanying changes of urbanization and modernization within this community have changed dramatically the lives of fishermen within the […]

Do You Know How to Dance?: Mediating Identity Through Film and Dance in Visakhapatnam, India

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Kaitlin Patterson and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Department of Anthropology I went to India to study gender relations in the family, but as I spent more time there I came to know a group of striking individuals and instead focused my research on a similar topic, film as a mediator of culture, but in this case […]

A Modern Ethnohistorical Understanding of Ancient Plant Use, Emphasis on the Fremont Near Goshen, Utah, Insight into Diet and Medicine

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Madison Mercer and Dr. Michael Searcy, Department of Anthropology The research for this project began in August 2011 and finished in April 2012. The goal was to understand how plants were anciently used for food or medicine. To determine this, archaeological data would have to be coupled with more modern ethnographic data of living peoples. […]

To Stand on Their Own Legs: Independence and Other Motivations for Women’s Pursuit of Post- Graduate Studies, and Their Parents’ Influence on Them, in Vishakhapatnam India

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Colleen McDermott and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Department of Anthropology In recent years, there have been countless studies on the benefits of educating women. Though there is a general consensus on the positive results of women’s education, their access to education is still rather limited in many areas of the world. One such area is India, […]

Short-Distance Cultural Remittances of Shakti among Domestic Workers in Vizag, India

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Kirk Hepburn and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Department of Anthropology The project under question has taken turns dramatic enough to make it nearly unrecognizable and its title almost entirely inapplicable. Problems, faced early in research but insurmountable, make it necessary that the collected data be used for purposes beside my original intent. While I originally planned […]