Biography and Project Interest Statements

BIO I enter ANTH258: Visualizing/Peopling the Past as a Cultural Anthropology major with minors in Science, Technology and Society and Theater Arts. My research foci over the past few years have been performativity and the anthropological significance of theater, semiotics and space, the anthropology of modern/postmodern/global cities, and the cultural impact of new technologies, particularly new media. I have tended towards the examination of contemporary cultures, so this project encourages relatively new modes of analysis and research for me (read: my research subjects are not usually dead). My interest in performance comes from my experience in theater, film and drumming; in theater, I have spent a lot of time on both sides of the curtain doing technical work (including using Sketch-Up as a designing tool for sets) as well as acting. I enjoy the methodology of cultural anthropology (participant observation, interviewing, surveying), which I had the opportunity to employ over the summer in conducting ethnographic fieldwork for my thesis on the effects/implications of the experimentation with small media by big media as a means of coping with uncertainty in the field of journalism in the age of Web 2.0. I speak Spanish and would often rather decode theoretical texts than read a novel. With this background, I hope that I will be able to add value to our final project as an observer, analyzer and transposer (or translator) of performative and technological phenomena past and present.

PROJECT INTEREST Having been influenced and informed by the work of Lawrence Coben, I am interested in looking at the way specific huaca sites and architectural loci of ritual and theatrical performance in and around Cuzco transmitted semiotic cues to and guided the activities of the people, helping maintain order and strengthen the Inca empire. The spatial configuration of the huacas, both in their grand schematic placement within the ceque system and as individual sites, has multiple functions. The theatrics enacted about, within and around these sites, like the structures themselves, convey messages that carry meanings, which are decoded and interpreted by the citizens of the empire. I hope to examine one or two specific rituals that are situated within specific sites along the ceque system, paying special attention to the symbolic/semiotic messages that are constructed there and the interpretations that can be drawn from them. While my technical capabilities are not nearly as developed as my analytical/theoretical capabilities, I would like to contribute to the visual reconstruction of the sites using Sketch-Up and perhaps even Maya (albeit if only elementarily). I am particularly interested in collaborating with a technically gifted member of the class to reconstruct and bring to life some of the physical movements enacted in rituals, utilizing the motion capture technologies available to us through Penn/Digital Media Design department. As Coben discusses in his brief article about digital reconstruction, the drama that results from the combination of the spatial features of the environment and the performance of the ritual itself is heightened by the interplay of the two and carries important meanings for the empire. The more impressive these spectacles are, the more impact they have on the society at large. If there’s time, it might be interesting to examine present-day rituals in light of the rituals of the past (using other media such as video of recent rituals or interviews of people who have taken part) and chronologically superimpose layers of ritual over specific huacas or places along the ceque system.

Capac Hucha

I am at once viscerally unsettled and strangely captivated by McEwan and van de Guchte's description of the capac hucha ritual in "Ancestral Time and Sacred Space in Inca State Ritual." The image on page 362 of a petrified mummy of a child huddled in blankets, wearing ribbons/adornments in his hair and surrounded by ceremonial artifacts, is particularly disturbing yet feeds my scopophilia. The image seems almost like a violation, the flipside of something like CNN's turning away of the camera 'out of respect' when suspected weather balloon boy was about to make impact. But this reaction is culturally inflected; the portrayal of a dead child might be inappropriate and distasteful to us, but for the Inca the deaths of these children were not tragedies but noble and important sacrifices. While the technologies of representation were obviously limited for the Inca, I wonder what they would have thought of an image like the one in McEwan and van de Guchte.

I wonder how I might incorporate the capac hucha ritual into my final project. The burials themselves seem too detailed for my technical capabilities; perhaps I could look through the records of burials and find one that is near a suspected huaca site and model that. I'm apprehensive about mapping out all the ceques and the huaca sites along them; I'd rather focus on one smaller thing that I could model in SketchUp. I'm interested in learning how to model irregular terrain and better use textures in addition to just becoming more proficient in the program. I'll spend hours and hours working in SketchUp and have no idea that so much time has passed. It's a complete departure from all the other work I normally do and I really relish the opportunity to incorporate it into the project.

Project Thoughts

After reading Protzen's "Inca Stonemasonry" piece, I was thinking that it would be really cool to do some sort of video demonstration of one of the techniques the Inca used in constructing their buildings or making their day-to-day objects... perhaps not stonemasonry (given our lack of indigenous rock and, most likely, my lack of the requisite strength), but maybe something else like thatching. We could post the video along with renderings of the buildings/features/objects that were made using that technique.

It's a lofty project, I suppose, but I think using multiple forms of media on the website we create will make it more interesting and unique. In doing some preliminary work on Assignment 3, I came across a fantastic kids' website about a farmstead in what is now West Virginia. The site's use of multimedia was really spectacular, albeit a little cheesy... I'd love to analyze the site for the assignment. As silly as it is, I think the creators did a wonderful job of presenting a lot of information about archaeology in a very accessible and understandable way, as well as making the site interactive and fun.

Trent de Boer

"The Archaeological Zine Shovel Bum" by Trent de Boer

• fanzine, usually defined as 'magazine for fans,' for de Boer became a fanatic magazine
• started in 1997, while doing CRM (cultural resource management) with wife Betty at Oachita National Forest in Arkansas
• Shovel Bum = " a periodical geared toward fanatical archaeological field technicians"
• inspired by Porcellino's King-Cat and Other Stories to write "comix" (comics for adults) about the day-to-day life of the CRM archaeologist
• target audience in the beginning: family and friends
• at the start, the fanzine was about methods, reasons for methods, and about dispelling stereotypes about archaeology (pyramids, fossils and mummies) by explaining things like orienteering and site recordation
• the use of humor was an important element in all the comix
• Shovel Bum was a way for de Boer to show people the joys of being an archaeologist
• with more popularity, Shovel Bum became about the lifestyle of the archaeologist and incorporated stories and content from other archaeologists
• zine structured by themes: food, bad motels, field vehicles, e.g.
• miscellaneous content made it into the zines as well: recipes, letters to the editor, games, poetry
• because the CRM community is small, the zine helps bring members together and help others feel like a part of the community
• CRM sites = Shovel Bum reunions
• collection of Shovel Bum comix published by AltaMira Press
• at the end of the article, de Boer solicits submissions/contributions to Shovel Bum: even YOU can be a shovel bum...

The Timeless Vision of Teotihuacan

The article I chose to write about for my National Geographic critique, "The Timeless Vision of Teotihuacan" (Vol. 188, No. 6), skirts the line between actualizing Gero and Root's harsh characterization of the magazine's underlying ideologies and debunking it. As I promised in a footnote of my essay, I will include some scans from the article here so that they may be viewed at a higher resolution. What Gero and Root have gleaned from a careful, systematic reading of National Geographic lies much deeper than an average reader will venture, and, while we might too examine our articles critically and find glimpses of what Gero and Root were talking about, we are not the typical audience.

Nonetheless, here are the pictures.

National Geographic Through the Ages

I asked my dad to send me a random sample of old National Geographics from our collection at home. My grandfather started collecting them when he was in his twenties and my dad has continued the tradition: there are three or four bookshelves devoted entirely to National Geographic at our house in Boston.

Here are some scans of covers from some of the earlier issues he sent. It is interesting to note the progression in contents, from more America-centric at the beginning to more other-world-centric later on, as well as the change in the layout of the cover, from just a hand-drawn frame to a photo with the frame to a photo with just a hint of the frame at the top. The price has, unsurprisingly, changed too, from "$8.00 a year/$1.00 a copy" to $15 for a subscription today.

(Also, there's a long story on cats in the 1964 issue (Vol. 125, No. 4), complete with adorable photographs of kittens. Don't quite know what to make of that one.)

1959


1964


1970


And for the animal lovers out there: