Images of Native Americans

This article summarizes a background study conducted for museum staff planning the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Through interviews we identified attitudes of Smithsonian visitors toward Native Americans. Three results stand out: First, although most visitors have had some minimal contact with contemporary Native Americans, imagery of the past dominated their responses. This past is characterized as a period in which Native Americans had freedom of movement, had control over their destiny, and lived in harmony with nature. This peaceful existence was destroyed with the arrival of the Europeans. Second, current Indian life is seen as grim, except in those cases where Native Americans have fully assimilated into urban environments. Implicit is an assumption that traditional life and values can only be maintained on reservations. At the same time, reservations are associated with poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, and poor health care. Third, visitors would like the new museum to emphasize aspects of Native life and culture that are unique or different from their own. Overall, visitors have only a cursory familiarity with Native philosophy, history, or current conditions. Very few express strongly held beliefs or positions about Native Americans.     

Race in “The Race”: Mark McGwire,Sammy Sosa,and Heroic Constructions of Whiteness

News media in the United States often present sports figures as ideal representations of heroism. In the U.S., heroism has long been linked to frontier mythology, which celebrates the rugged individualist. This figure privileges a construction of heroism based on strength, masculinity, and a white ideal associated with American exceptionalism. Accordingly, in affirming the promise of the American dream, sports media often devalue racial inclusion. To show how heroism in contemporary American culture is a mythological enactment of whiteness, I analyze news media accounts of the 1998 home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.     

Managing Masculinities: The Metrosexual Moment

In this essay, I explore the historical moment of metrosexuality in popular culture that, I argue, rather than simply a fad, constituted a logical premise vital to assuaging the “crisis” in masculinity engendered by the phenomenon of commercial masculinity. I trace the ways in which the fleeting trend of metrosexuality was articulated rhetorically in US popular culture in such a way as to rationalise commercial masculinity in targeted, explicit ways. I argue that metrosexuality served a crucial rhetorical function for the reconciliation of commercial masculinity with normative masculinity by organising homosociality in strategic ways. Accordingly, I suggest that apparently transient popular cultural trends might best be understood in terms of their location in—and strategic rhetorical function for—broader cultural discourses.     

Information on Native Americans in U.S. Government Publications

Abstract

This article is a selective annotated list of print and electronic sources that provide information on Native Americans and the United States Government. While most of these are issued by the federal agencies, there are also some commercially published works that cover government resources or describe and interpret federal activities. The bibliography is arranged in broad subject areas; headings include finding tools, federal policy, federal laws and regulations, treaties, statistics, history and culture, and contemporary issues.     

窥探欲望互联网:中国网络空间的色情文化变迁史

本文通过对色情网络公共话语实践的分析,检视了中国网络色情文化的变迁史,描摹了作为当代社会意识形态重要症候的色情文化,如何参与到中国政治、经济、文化的社会整体性变迁之中。“色情”在互联网的话语建构中,是信息自由流动、绝对自由市场的象征,是分享文化、兄弟情谊的载体,是被征用成为政治反对的话语工具、互联网新经济发展的欲望引擎,也是形塑支配性男性气质的文化力量。以高知青年男性为代表的新中间阶层既在掌握数字技术的过程中培育了群体意识与媒介表达能力,成为了网络集体行动的重要力量;也沉浸在“信息自由流动”的赛博迷思之中,试图接管文化生产与阐释权的同时摒弃了性别平等的文化政治安排。当被新经济所征用的软色情消费文化蔓延之时、“性别战争”泛起之刻、“裸贷”激发剧烈争议之际,中国社会亟需新的文化政治以促成新的社会共识。     

Professional minutia and their consequences: provenance, context, original identification, and anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois

Historical settings structure how archivists and museum staff understand their work and how they apply relevant professional principles including the three core principles of provenance, context, and original identification. Their professional practices shape how the public understands or reads “original” artifacts and records. In helping to define what originals (artifacts and documents) are at a particular point in time, archivists and museum staff reinforce, support, or contradict theoretical paradigms, discourses, and social narratives on ethnicity, empire/internal colonialism, class, and gender among others. The article discusses two exemplary cases from the museum world that illustrate how the application of the three core principles is influenced by historical conditions and theoretical concepts and how these contingent applications influence what originals come to signify. In the first example, the theoretical concept of social evolution and the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago informed the founding, collecting, describing, and displaying of American Indian objects at the Field Museum of Natural History in 1894. Reflecting this, provenance, context, and original identifications were defined to mean different things for Euro-American versus American Indian objects and records, and Native Americans and others challenged these definitions and practices at the time. In the second example, the 1929–1933 making and displaying of the Hall of Races, a specific race anthropological understanding of race created unambiguous race anthropological provenance, context and original titles (identifications) for both the exhibit and individual race sculptures. By altering information concerning the three principles over the next 60 years, the Field Museum consciously destroyed the integrity of the originals and their meanings. The exhibit had become a political liability and the museum wanted to erase any trace of the race anthropological roots of the project and its sculptures. The article ends by asserting the contingency and importance of the three core principles for archivists and museum staff regardless of the format of the material involved and adds a few related observations for our contemporary hybrid, that means physical and digital, work world.     

“Everybody’s hard times are different”: country as a political investment in white masculine precarity

Recognizing the complex interplay between country music, lifestyle, and identity, and the disparate nature of these texts and their producers, we center our analysis of the politics of contemporary “country” in the accounts of country music listeners. Through this lens, “country” foregrounds a portrait of precarious labor and white rural economies. Precarity is held up as aspirational, facilitated by the relative structural support of whiteness and masculinity that simultaneously leverages economic hardship to obfuscate these privileged positions. “Country” elides experiences of class marginalization, white rurality, and masculinized labor with mythologized narratives that position simplicity and work as “the good life.”     

The wounded man: Foxcatcher and the incoherence of white masculine victimhood

American cinema has recently favored representations of white men as victims of socioeconomic and political change. Recent scholarship on white masculinity suggests that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow that hegemonic white masculinity still fundamentally structures society. This essay argues that Hollywood’s wounded man similarly provides white masculinity with stable footing. I illustrate how the unintelligibility of screen masculinity evades criticism and, further, how melancholic male dramas nurture a traumatic attachment to victimhood. Examining the film Foxcatcher (2014), I show how unmasked portraits of white male victimhood function as counterparts to the hard-bodied action hero. The filmmaker’s effort to parse the distinction between material and superficial wounds reifies the experience of noble suffering as a superlative expression of aggrieved white manhood. Foxcatcher’s fragmented portrayal of white masculinity illustrates the elasticity of victimhood even where “crisis” suggests that white masculinity is open to revision.     

Boys Don't Cry and female masculinity: reclaiming a life & dismantling the politics of normative heterosexuality

–This analysis argues that Kimberly Peirce's film Boys Don't Cry can be read as a liberatory narrative that queers the centers of heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity by privileging female masculinity and celebrating its differences from heterosexual norms. My critique emphasizes how the narrative strategically challenges heteronormativity and, in turn, “narrative's heteroideology” (Roof, 1996), in four ways: 1) by dismantling the myth of “America's heartland”; 2) by problematizing heteromasculinity; 3) by centering female masculinity; and 4) by blurring the boundaries of female masculinity. I argue that the articulation of each subversive strategy within the narratives of Boys Don't Cry can serve a liberatory function, whereby the privileged subjectivities of heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity are dismantled and, simultaneously, female masculinity and gender fluidity are privileged and normalized. I conclude that the narrative structure of Boys Don't Cry not only privileges gender diversity, but also exposes the inherent sexual bigotry of heteroideology and the brutal and deadly consequences of society's failure to eradicate such prejudice. I just keep on laughing Hiding the tears in my eyes Because boys don't cry. Boys don't cry. (Smith, Tolhurst, & Dempsey, 1988)     

Native American health: traditional healing and culturally competent health care internet resources

Health disparities between Native Americans and the general population of the United States are a major health concern. Traditional healing and culturally competent health care offer much promise in raising the health status of Native Americans. Traditional healing, although uniquely practiced by each indigenous culture, is generally a system of medicine based on the inseparability of mind, body, and spirit. Culturally competent health care, care that is congruent with the culture and language of the patient, is a growing initiative in western medicine. This article outlines Internet sites and online resources relevant to the study and practice of traditional healing and culturally competent health care.     

“I Am Who I Am”: Black Masculinity and the Interpretation of Individualism in the Film Barbershop

This essay will provide further insight into how Black audiences interpret a popular culture text by focusing upon how a group of young black men construct Black masculinity as depicted in the film Barbershop. Interestingly, a rhetorical community of young Black men discussed the representations of the characters in the film from a perspective of Black individualism rather than reaffirming identity through a collective orientation toward the culture. This reading contrasts with much of the “ghettocentric” film literature by highlighting how a Black audience's interpretation of a text can focus on individualism rather than on cultural representations and stereotypes.     

It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club,Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony

Offering a critical interrogation of white masculinity within David Fincher's Fight Club (1999), this essay uncovers a key strategy through which hegemonic systems persist, positing the abject body as a trope for understanding the life of hegemonic ideological formations. Adopting the “interspace” of abjection allows hegemonic masculinity to become everything and nothing at the same time and is a “dangerous” strategy that must be denied at all costs. Insofar as hegemony requires its abjection to remain invisible, this essay names hegemonic masculinity “abject” in order to offer critical prophylaxis against white masculinity's attempts to reproduce its cultural privilege.     

Curating and Controlling Zuni Photographic Images

This article explores the history of photography in Zuni and provides a context for the forthcoming request from Zuni religious leaders that they be allowed to exercise some control over sensitive images held by museums. This request is part of the debate over whether Native Americans should exercise some degree of control over historic photographs of their religious ceremonies. Some Zuni community members always considered photography of religious ceremonies to be inappropriate. How it happened sheds light on how Zunis incorporated the then-new technology into their traditional beliefs and social organization. Similarly, existing museum policy toward sensitive images is a result of the way photography has been incorporated into European and American legal and ethical thinking. In addition to lending weight to the contention that forthcoming requests from Native Americans are based on long-held beliefs rather than simply contemporary political expediency, history also suggests the parameters for an equitable solution to this issue.     

Representations of Race in Television Commercials: A Content Analysis of Prime-Time Advertising

Given the paucity of contemporary examinations of racial/ethnic minority portrayals in television advertisements, this study analyzed the frequency, context, and quality of 2,3 15 speaking characters in a one-week sample of prime-time television commercials. Results reveal different patterns of portrayals when African American, Asian American, Latino, Native American, and White characters are featured in television advertisements. The implications of these images are examined from the perspective of social cognitive theory to provide insights into their possible impact on audience members' self-perceptions.     

欧美媒介购买公司的发展、影响及对策分析

本文重点阐述欧美媒介购买公司兴起的市场背景,深入分析欧美媒介购买公司全球市场运作策略及其在中国的发展战略和深层影响,并提出我国传媒业和广告业的应对策略。     

Gender differences in the communication values of mature adults

Contrary to the “different cultures” view of men's and women's communication, prior research on communication values has found only small sex differences in the value placed on various affective and instrumental skills. However, this research has been criticized because college students' values may not reflect those of older individuals, and because it has failed to examine the influence of psychological gender (femininity and masculinity). In the current study, 153 men and 151 women over the age of 40 completed the Communication Functions Questionnaire (a measure of value for eight communication skills), as well as the Bern Sex Role Inventory (a measure of femininity and masculinity). Consistent with past research, sex differences in communication values were few and small. Femininity and masculinity were positively associated with most communication values, and mediatedmost of the observed sex differences.     

Meeting Nontraditional Medical Information Needs for the Unique Populations and Geographically Remote Locations of Alaska

ABSTRACT

The types of information required by hospital and clinical staff can be greatly influenced by the geography and culture of the area in which they operate. In some situations, information must be acquired from sources that fall outside the traditional provisions of a medical or reference library. This article provides examples of the unique information needs of clinical staff serving a primarily Native Alaskan and Native American clientele in Alaska. It also presents sources and personnel utilized to meet those information needs outside of traditional reference sources.     

Producing soldier boy: sperm donation discourse and militarism in Israeli media culture

In this paper I examine the ways in which public discourse about the sperm donation industry in Israel, as appearing in mass media and advertising culture, bridges militarist, pro-natalist, and neoliberal ideologies. In constructing the sperm produced by combat soldiers as superior and in emphasizing the potential dangers of inferior sperm or the lack of enough sperm to meet demand, mainstream media and sperm banks adopt, utilize, and exploit a culture of fear that is linked to Israel’s perceived existential threat in order to serve their own commercial goals. At the same time, the tensions between national-collective and individual perceptions of gender and body occasionally rise to the surface, with media simultaneously embracing and questioning dominant cultural narratives concerning masculinity and militarism. Implications of the relations between media discourses of blood, sacrifice, and death, and those of sperm, reproduction, and cultural regeneration are discussed.     

当代媒介文化的后现代性分析

本文对当代媒介文化所表现出来的后现代特征进行了分析,探讨了媒介文化与当代审美观念转变之间的联系。     

Archipelagic rhetoric: remapping the Marianas and challenging militarization from “A Stirring Place”

Engaging critical rhetorical fieldwork in the Mariana Islands archipelago, this article destabilizes colonial naming projects and US federal control that dispossess island places from Indigenous peoples. On Euro-American and military maps, archipelagoes are depicted as distant, tiny, empty, or merely (is)lands for US geostrategic control. I argue for a remapping of the Marianas as expansive, oceanic sites of resistance to colonial cartographic violence and US militarization. Fieldwork in the Marianas demonstrates how Indigenous epistemologies function as archipelagic rhetoric enacted through a Chamoru sense of place. I examine these fluid relational connections to place and their implications for decolonization.