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The article explores the se' komonil concept of living in respectful togetherness and reciprocal dignity and human-environment interdependence and sahil ch'oolej concept of holistic joy, mutual flourishing and shared upliftment for the Maya of Southern Belize amid efforts to safeguard and renew Indigenous ways of knowing, living and being. Topics discussed include the land rights movement of the Maya, threats to the culture of the group, and the meaning of joy for Maya youth.

"That Marooned Thing" mobilizes experimental and adoptive narratives for a Haudenosaunee purging stick, one of the earliest Native American objects collected in the British Museum. The artifact came to London in 1710, when the so-called Four Indian Kings visited Queen Anne, and survived in an underexamined nook of Sir Hans Sloane's curio collection. Through collaboration with Native scholars and panoramic collation of English and Dutch colonial accounts never written with the artifact in mind, this essay examines how discordant and unreliable records may yield suggestive information about the marooned stick. Beleaguering the position of the mis- and underrecorded, the article constructs speculative narratives to open up the artifact's slim official record by tracing the limits of what might be known alongside that which cannot be recovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Chinua Acebe's 1951 story "In a Village Church." It asserts that the story is an exploration of an on-going process of transforming Christianity into a crucial part of the social and cultural fabric of contemporary African societies across the continent during the mid-twentieth century. Also discussed is the story's depiction of the traditional Igbo culture through the setting, the characters, and the seating arrangement in the church.

At the height of the mid-twentieth-century domestic revival, middle-class Jewish women created forms of "leisured domesticity," marked by temporary female-only recreational spaces in their family-centered arenas. In contrast to other forms of recreation, with mahjong second-generation Jewish women gained an entitlement to peer-oriented leisure in the site of domestic labor: the home. Based on extensive oral histories, Heinz argues that consistent cultural patterns emerged around mahjong. These commonalities created a widespread culture that reached its height in the postwar years of upward mobility, experienced in particularly pronounced ways by Jewish Americans. Although the culture of mahjong could reinforce women's domestic roles as much as undermine them, the weekly mahjong ritual demanded a temporary reallocation of household labor. Understandings of postwar life have largely been shaped by a duality between what defined an idealized domesticity in theory (devoted mothers in family-centered middle-class homes) and the ways that women resisted or were excluded from these norms. In contrast, the practices of leisured domesticity illuminate a multidimensional reality. Mahjong-playing mothers neither overthrew nor fully acquiesced to the powerful norms of postwar American "model" domesticity. Creating a widely accepted rhythm of women's recreation made domesticity more livable by carving out patterns of leisure within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses a multiisotope (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and strontium) approach to examine early animal management in the Maya region. An analysis of faunal specimens across almost 2,000 years (1000 BC to AD 950) at the site of Ceibal, Guatemala, reveals the earliest evidence for live-traded dogs and possible captive-reared taxa in the Americas. These animals may have been procured for ceremonial functions based on their location in the monumental site core, suggesting that animal management and trade began in the Maya area to promote special events, activities that were critical in the development of state society. Isotopic evidence for animal captivity at Ceibal reveals that animalmanagement played a greater role in Maya communities than previously believed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Death, transition, translation and other related terms are used by various human societies to communicate the ending of all formal functions and processes in the life of a living organism. When the human individual dies, most societies consider the experience demise, loss and therefore a calamity. The Igbo of South-eastern Nigeria while mourning the dead also celebrate death as a way station to the ancestral life of spirituality. In the funeral rites that mark the burial of a deceased, the heavy presence of sounds, words, images, gestures and imagery turns the calamity of demise into a theatre of creativity. This paper scrutinized the creative inspiration and artistic deposits in the anatomy of Igbo funeral. While attempting to redraw the contours of art in these parts by challenging extant definitions, scopes and perspectives through its critical thesis, the paper also inscribes the body as the agency of these creative activities and the funeral arena as a space of multifarious negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As scientific objects, mummies were born of Europe’s encounter with two “ancient” bodily knowledges. The first is well known: the embalmed Egyptian dead who were ground into a materia medica named mumia and later were collected as “mummies” themselves. Yet mummies owe their global possibility—of ancient sciences of embalming and environmental manipulation apprehensible worldwide—to the sixteenth-century Spanish encounter with the Incas’ preserved dead, the yllapa. This article argues that their confiscation and display desecrated their sacred affect, but their recategorization as “embalmed” bodies allowed Indigenous Peruvian writers to argue for the Incas’ lost medical sophistication. European scholars then used that sophistication to establish “mummies” as a comparative category. The original yllapas decayed, blurring both Inca sovereignty and the colonial Latin American sciences that anatomized it, but their imagined resurrection in the preserved bodies of other “ancient Peruvians” turned the “Inca mummy” into a highly collectible scientific object, embodying a newly national past of ancient learning and anti-imperial indictment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Street grids commonly reflect the administration of urban populations and attempts to enhance city life. Planned grids are not typical of ancient Mesoamerican and especially Maya settlements, yet recent research at Nixtun-Ch'ich', Petén, Guatemala, has revealed a modular grid layout that is also diagrammatic. Excavations determined that the grid was constructed before 500 BC, making it the earliest currently known in Mesoamerica. Its construction accompanied the emergence of complex society in the Maya lowlands, and leaders would have used the grid to organize and control the newly urbanized population--as seen in other parts of the world. The planned city was also likely a form of governmental conceit and a proclamation of social order. At the same time, the grid and the settlement's dense population enhanced social interaction, promoting communication, exchange, and interconnectivity. Nevertheless, urban grids do not appear to have spread to other parts of the Maya world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the unprecedented series of American Jewish protests to address equality and acceptance of the American Jews and its religion in the U.S.

The article discusses efforts of Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to repatriate an Ontonagon copper (Misko-biiwaabik) boulder, which is in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution. According to the article, the boulder was used by Ojibwe tribe members as sacred object, referencing their history from the 1820s through the early 21st century. The U.S. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) states that federal agencies require to return human remains to Native communities, as the Indian communities are sovereign nations.

This article offers a case study into the reimagination of Jewish tradition to meet the intellectual demands of modernity, focusing on the adaptation of the holiday of Shavuot by nineteenth-century American Reform rabbis. Through this process Shavuot became, for a time, the most popular holiday in American Judaism through its celebration as confirmation day, a ceremony that American Reform synagogues had introduced as a replacement of the traditional Bar Mitzvah. By framing Shavuot as a child-centered holiday and incorporating appealing aspects of contemporary material culture, nineteenth-century rabbis successfully renegotiated a tradition which had fallen out of alignment with the intellectual currents of the moment, and refashioned it as a ceremony that would gain a cross-denominational appeal. The case study of Shavuot thus shows us that the positions codified in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 met with a complex and nuanced local reality in which intellectually challenging rituals could be reimagined, and not only rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exploration of rongoā Māori (a system of Māori healing based on Māori cultural traditions) was conducted to ascertain the cultural values and beliefs of Māori, the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa/New Zealand, that are related to Māori healing. A Kaupapa Māori approach utilising Māori cultural concepts throughout the research process guided the overall study design. Semistructured narrative interviews were conducted in 2009 and 2010 with 17 rongoā Māori healers. The rourou Māori method of data analysis, a 3-step process created specifically for this project, was employed to analyse healers' talk about the underlying concepts of rongoā Māori healing. Two key topics emerged: concepts of healing, and the focus of healing. The importance of acknowledging Māori cultural values and beliefs inherent within rongoā Māori healing concepts and the focus of healing is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes new insights into German-Jewish psychologist Kurt Lewin's work and its considerable influence on American Jewish educational theory and practice since the 1940s. Though he died in 1947, Lewin's theories about the emotional needs of the Jewish child and the principles of effective Jewish education continued to influence American Jewish pedagogy long after his passing. Lewin, a social psychologist who fled Hitler's Germany in 1933 and eventually landed at MIT, argued for the importance of inculcating a notion of 'group belongingness,' or attachment to the Jewish social group, in the Jewish child as a critical factor in his or her healthy emotional development. According to Lewin, positive and joyous childhood experiences with Jewish culture would shield Jewish children from debilitating feelings of inferiority and self-loathing. Rabbis and educators across the ideological spectrum relied on Lewin's work to explain to parents how a Jewish education could help nurture happy, well-integrated American Jewish children. For American Jews in search of both acceptance and ethnic preservation, Lewin offered appealing scientific evidence of the psychic benefits of Jewish education and the potential of positive Jewish experiences to produce both proud, committed Jews and loyal American citizens. The impact of Lewin's work on American Jewish life and thought is evident in the 2013 Pew Study, in which 94% of American Jews reported that they are proud to be Jewish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Christianization of Igbo-land in southeastern Nigeria, from the 1850s up to the 1920s and even beyond, occurred in a fraught atmosphere in which missionaries had encounters with forests set aside for certain sociocultural purposes and designated as “evil”/“bad.” This study dwells on these encounters and their legacies. The study uses oral, primary, and secondary sources to contribute to scholarship in social history by interrogating the relevance of the encounters and their legacies in understanding how Christian missionary works of the colonial period are remembered and captured through the experiences of indigenous people as active agents in their own history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current scholarship on music in Jewish life generally views American cantorial training as a postwar process of transplantation, translating a culture decimated by the Holocaust into a higher education program in the United States. Recently available digital repositories of historical materials, however, show at least five organized efforts to establish American cantorial schools between 1904 and 1939. I closely examine these efforts here, which reveal during this period a complicated and active negotiation surrounding the role of the cantor—and music more generally—in American Jewish life. Organizers of these schools engaged in active dialogue with cantorial colleagues in central and eastern Europe, subsequently creating institutional training models that imbued the cantor with a character, history, musical repertoire, and professional lifecycle compatible with the United States’ religious marketplace. Understanding the urge to establish these schools in the first half of the twentieth century, and the tendency to forget or minimize these efforts after World War II, offers insight into the flexibility of musical tradition as it sought to reassert itself on American soil. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article talks about the Tripp Lake Camp, which is a private, non-Orthodox, Jewish girls' seven-week sleepaway summer camp in Poland, Maine. girls who spend their summers at the Tripp LakeCamp, perform in one musical each year with their bunk. The views of the participants on the arrangements and the theme of the camp are mentioned.

Scholars have long puzzled over the ancient human use of swampy depressions (bajos) in the interior part of the Maya Lowlands. Part of this debate has centered on the reputed, but undocumented, existence of canals in the bajos of the northeastern Peten District of Guatemala. We report on the use of satellite imagery along with fieldwork to reveal numerous linear features in the Bajo de Azúcar, the largest bajo in the northeast Peten. We conducted ground-truthing and excavation at three linear features in two separate trips into the bajo. We also calculated sinuosity of channel segments using IKONOS and QuickBird satellite images. Our investigations indicate that the linear features are partly natural in origin, but some segments were either modified or are solely the product of human activity. We surmise that the canals most likely functioned principally to facilitate transportation across the bajo, though other uses are also possible, including drainage, water storage, and aquaculture. These uses were likely devised as responses to environmental change, population growth, and associated rising economic demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Anasazi Foundation, a wilderness therapy program and philosophical group founded by Ezekiel Sanchez and Larry Olson. Topics include Navajo traditions, wilderness of deserts, and philosophy behind absence. Also discussed is the lack of consciousness and positive aspects of blandness

George Whitefield's ability to enthrall audiences through a potent combination of drama, religious rhetoric, and imperial pride is well documented, as is the Hallam Theater Company's successful mid-eighteenth century tour of North America. Yet, as historian Odai Johnson recently asserted, scholars have almost always placed the two performers (and the larger movements they represented) in opposition. This article demonstrates that George Whitefield and Lewis Hallam Sr.-- lead purveyors of the pulpit and the stage in mid-eighteenth century colonial America--should be understood as mutual contributors to the development of early American performance and, ultimately, professional theater. Both rose to prominence during a specific period (the mid-eighteenth century) in a specific place (the British American colonies) for a shared reason: to use professional performance to entrance the most colonists as possible. Ultimately, Whitefield and Hallam were quite different men who, through common pursuit of fame in North America, demonstrated just how much theatricality and religion--despite imagining themselves as oppositional forces--became entangled by the mid-eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research study on intergenerational teaching within an Ojibwe community's cultural camp. It looks at how elders of the community transferred Ojibwe culture, language, and knowledge to youths. Particular attention is given to the teaching methods used as well as how Ojibwe youth interpreted elders' lessons on the clan system.

The essay explores what I call the 'lore of the judges': the collective wisdom of the Native Land Court judges on Māori custom law, especially in relation to land. It is led by a comment by F.D. Fenton, the first Chief Judge, in his Orakei judgment, that the judges' decisions should emulate those of English Common Law judges, and create a body of precedents recorded in 'Year Books' (or Minute Books). The paper examines how the judges' interpretations and remoulding of Māori custom were eventually incorporated in New Zealand common law. It concludes by asking whether the judge-made law could be considered a Mäori common law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the critical and popular reception of Chinua Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart, as an authentic text offering an "insider" perspective on Igbo culture. Drawing from small magazines and university publications in 1950s Nigeria, this paper suggests that early Nigerian authors like Achebe were educated and began writing in a culture that valued a playful exploration of meaning in Western texts. These early publications express multiple uses of the texts students read in colonial school, and I read Achebe's novel as an extension of this playfulness. Although it is generally seen as an example of the empire "writing back," I argue that Things Fall Apart actually uses ethnographic accounts of Nigerian village life--especially G. T. Basden's Niger Ibos and C. K. Meek's Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe--in an open and exploratory manner. Seeing Achebe's work in this light allows for a complex view of the novel's presentation of Igbo life, and I argue that such a reading resituates his first novel as a playful encounter with ethnography rather than as a literary response to more traditional literary texts like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over a century ago a Western observer recognized an effective morality among Navajo Indians in the American Southwest, yet could not locate its expression, except in mythology recounting contradictory behaviors. Through the 1900s scholars delineated contours of Navajo moral values, myths, and taxonomies upon which moral traditions were based, and situations in which Navajos have engaged in ethical decision-making. Recently individual Navajos have manifested their role as ethical agents, not merely as recipients of moral lore. A contemporary Navajo storyteller, Sunny Dooley, enunciates narrative ethical judgments, grounded in traditional Navajo mythology and its religious milieu, as she addresses the present conditions of her people. Thus she probes the contradictions that are inherent to life. Her stories testify to the insoluble conflicts within the human condition, ultimate and immediate conundrums that must be faced, even though they surely will not be resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the decolonization in New Zealand and its manifestation to Māori people. It mentions several notable leaders who served for the Māori community including Denis Hansen of the iwi tribal nations, Nin Tomas of the Ngāti Kahu and Te Rarawa nations, and Morvin Simon of Te Ātihaunui a Pāpārangi iwi nations. Other topics include the country's unemployment rate, sovereignty, and constitutionalism.

El artículo discurre sobre las procesiones rituales de las mayas para honrar a un santo patrono. Las procesiones incluyen música, vestimentas u ofrendas de incienso. El autor comenta sobre un manuscrito colonial yucateco y la historia de las antiguas calzadas mayas se llaman sacbeob. Se explora la vida social y las costumbres de la mayas.