Central States Anthropological Society 2014 Annual Meeting Abstracts April 10-12, 2014 Bloomington-Normal Marriot Hotel and Conference Center and Illinois State University Normal, Illinois 1 Session Abstracts (in order of schedule) 1-04, 1-06 Urban Abandonment and the Cycle of Reinvention: Spaces and Places Lost and Found in Greater Indianapolis Session organizer: Susan Hyatt (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) Urban abandonment has recently been on the radar of academics in a range of disciplines. There is something almost seductive in the vision of contemporary cities as spaces marked by absences: the absences left by the flight of manufacturing and industry, by changing retail preferences and by predatory lending and foreclosure. In many cases, such spaces are becoming rediscovered.As downtowns become sites for gentrification, for example, old factories and warehouses are being converted into art galleries, coffee shops and trendy restaurants. In this session, students from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis share their semester-long research projects on city and small town spaces that are in the process of reinvention. In some cases, vacant lots are becoming urban gardens; long- abandoned storefronts are becoming popular restaurants. In other cases, vacant or underpopulated spaces struggle to find new uses. The students in this panel will explore a range of ethnographic studies in which they explore how and why spaces become abandoned and how they do or don’t find new life and new uses 1-07 Invisible Discrimination and Hidden Oppression Towards Persons of Asian Descent Session organizer: Nobuko Adachi (Illinois State University) Today in the United States, to be label a racist is a drastic insult. But this hardly means racism is over. Some social scientists describe this new form of more subtle discrimination as "racism without racists," "colorblind racism," or even "positive racism." Still, minorities continue to be subjected to social pressures of various kinds to varying degrees. For people of Asian descent, this sometimes takes the form of being a "model minority"—an alleged success story of smooth assimilation based on personal and economic accomplishment. By focusing on individual achievement, such narratives accomplish four tasks beneficial to the mainstream community: 1. It weakens collective consciousness, sometimes to the point that Asians themselves cannot see they are discriminated against. 2. This assuages guilt in the mainstream community, or at least lets them more easily accept their positions of privilege. 3. The Asian model minority becomes the default that all others must emulate—regardless of other ethnic groups having different histories or social conditions. 4. Pronouncing one minority as "good" means the others must be "bad," to varying degrees; this pits each group against each other, rather than unifying around common interests. Each of the papers in this panel looks at some aspect of these problems. Adachi examines how World War II and post- World War II nationalism in Brazil inexorably changed Japanese Brazilian society. Day describes the attempts to build solidarity between Japanese Americans and African Americans during World War II, and why this failed. Hartlep re-examines the model 2 minority myth and argues for the necessity of African and Asian American communities forming bounds in order to question the veracity of colorblindness and meritocracy. 1-09 Undergraduate Research in Applied Anthropology: Three Perspectives Session organizer: Christina Schneider (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) At IUPUI, anthropology majors must conduct an in-depth research project during this senior year. These projects are done under the supervision of a faculty sponsor and combine applied anthropology with the students' personal interests. In this session, we will present three different projects – one in material cultural analysis and two in sociocultural anthropology – and our perspectives as undergraduate researchers. 2-12, 2-10 Engaging with the Senses: About Privileging the Visual II Session organizer: Myrdene Anderson (Purdue University) The notion of text has long expanded beyond the written; we routinely read attitudes, conversations, advertising, with the requisite sense exploited that of sight. Indeed, our species (and at least western culture) has distinguished itself by the increasing privileging of the visual. Our reliance on the visual could render it more unmarked, less analyzed, and consequently simultaneously both transparent and opaque, often at the expense of other senses. Not so in semiotics, partially given Peirce's penchant for visual thinking evidenced in his predilection toward maps, diagrams, figures, illustrations, representations—and iconicity and indexicality. Crucial to analysis of interpretation (both multiple and inevitable) will be orientation and point of view, dealing with the exogenous and the endogenous—culture occasionally swamping other possibilities. This in no way insults language; the earliest instance of verbal language is assumed to have been nonvocal, that is, a motion-visual sign system, not unlike the visual communication systems of the deaf and of many other creatures. Gaze itself separates dog from wolf. 2-13, 2-17 Media, Ideology and Performance session organizer: Aslihan Akkaya (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) Due to the ubiquity of media throughout the globe and its embeddedness in the multiple discourses of everyday life, anthropologists encounter the production and consumption of various kinds of media and the domestication and localization of it in diverse places by diverse groups. To examine diverse media practices and performances, anthropologists draw from sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and media theories (Gershon 2010, Ginsburg et al. 2002, Hirschkind 2006, Spitulnik 1999, Spitulnik-Vidali 2010). Some anthropologists explored how media have the power to produce and reproduce reality and how they are embedded in existing socioeconomic and sociopolitical contexts (Ginsburg et al. 2002) and how people resist or reshape media messages (Spitulnik-Vidali 2010). Others explored how media have been consumed by people in different societies and how people populate media with their existing ideologies and domesticate media in their existing practices (Hirschkind 2006, Eisenlohr 2010). In this panel, we aim to bring scholars from diverse backgrounds whose work explore media, ideology, and performance to see the diversity of theories and methods employed and to exchange ideas for future research on media. 3 2-14 Reframing Ethnographic Objects in Museums: Co-curation, Object Biographies and Layered Interpretation Session organizer: Susan Frankenberg (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) In the 23 years since Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s insightful critique of ethnographic objects, museum scholars and professionals alike have struggled with how to present the constructed, fragmentary and historically fraught nature of cultural objects in museum collections. They also have debated the theory and methods underlying museum interpretive frameworks, and the effectiveness of exhibition practices and media forms for conveying the living, contingent and evolving nature of culture. Late 20th century exhibits explicitly questioned museum collecting and representation processes but received mixed reviews and often became entangled in culture wars. Museums nevertheless continue to move away from traditional representational practices, experimenting with exhibition strategies in hopes of sparking conversations and personal meaning-making in place of a single, didactic, anonymous narrative. This round-table session explores recent attempts to reframe ethnographic objects within a variety of exhibitions in University of Illinois museum exhibitions and further afield. The session consists of a 5-minute introduction (Susan Frankenberg), six 12 to 15-minute case presentations, and a 30-minute guided discussion. The cases include “The Transforming Arts of Papua New Guinea” (Janet Keller, curator) and “Inspired by …” (Kim Sheahan, curator) at the UIUC Spurlock Museum, “Encounters: The Arts of Africa” (Allyson Purpura, curator) at the UIUC Krannert Museum of Art, Tina DeLisle’s work with the Field Museum Maori house, Virginia Dominguez’s observations on the Stellenbosch University Anthropology Museum in South Africa, and Helaine Silverman’s consideration of when pre-Columbian ethnographic objects becomes archaeological antiques in Peru. The cases and discussion address a variety of curatorial, object- biographical and multiple-voice approaches. 2-16 Queer and Performance and Borderlands, Oh My: Classic Theory and Sexual Subcultures Session organizer: April Callis (Northern Kentucky University) In the United States, a variety of subcultures exist that are organized around the sexual desires, identities, and practices of their participants. Because of the pervasive sex negativity in U.S. society, these subcultures are contentious and often surrounded by misinformation. Individuals involved in non-normative sexual practices are often written about in sensationalized form, and, until recently, were ignored by social scientists. This session has two goals. The first is to illuminate the symbols and rituals of several sexuality-based subcultures. How do the individuals involved use specific practices and language to create discrete cultural groups? What discourses do individuals draw on to make sense of