Anthropology, 1961-2026

Authenticity, as it’s perceived and respected in society implies the genuine portrayal of one's self. While this definition does not change in the context of Anthropology, the implications of authenticity reveal an inherent misunderstanding of the concept itself. Rather than a static set of ideals, authenticity is constantly evolving through societal structures and institutions. Nowhere are the merits of one's authenticity more policed than in the Black community. Membership and identity with the collective comes with a certain set of norms and expectations. By virtue, there exists a divisive dichotomy between the authenticism of the individual juxtaposed with the collective, proving detrimental to the group at large. This paper uses the institution of Black Fraternalism - particularly the National Pan-Hellenic Council- as a case study to examine the inner workings of this paradox of authenticity. In doing so, I ground the idea that deviance from the cultural norm is not only the truest form of authenticity, but it is this variety of authentic experience that constructs the identity of the collective, inspiring the potential for institutional change.

This senior thesis uses digital ethnography and object studies to explore the socialities inaugurated and facilitated by Haitian contemporary art and artists which challenge the limits imposed by “The Art World.” The introduction outlines narratives of disaster that occupy Haiti in the global imaginary and establishes a framework for thinking about Haitian art. The first chapter examines perceptions of Haitian art as fragile and ephemeral, but insists upon its contemporaneity by offering digital and physical gathering spaces centering Haitian art. The second chapter discusses the communicative labor performed by Haitian artists whose depictions of Haiti creates or affirms affective ties by evoking nostalgia and History. The third and final chapter explores the narration of violence. It begins with an exploration of how Haitian artists challenge narrative authority by depicting Historical instances of violence done onto Haiti. It then presents the iconicity of revolutionary violence and its ubiquity in Haitian art as another effort to draft counternarratives to redeem Haitian History from the narrative violence that haunts it. The chapter ends by pursuing the ways the visual narration of violence can be generative for Haitian contemporary artists (re)imaging the temporality of the Haitian everyday and futurity beyond violence.

Resident doctors of the British National Health Service have gone on strike fifteen times in the last three years, leading to over 1.5 million patient appointment cancellations and a loss of billions of pounds. Public debate has cast these strikes as a moral crisis, asking whether doctors, bound by centuries of moral exceptionalism, can ever ethically withdraw their labor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in London, including interviews with physicians and patients, participant observation in public and private medical settings, and an analysis of media coverage, this thesis offers a two-part intervention. Currently in the UK, approximately 40,980 doctors will apply for the mere 12,833 Specialty Training (ST) posts available to match into this year. Given this reality, the doctors I spoke with treated the ethical question of strikes as secondary to navigating their precarious job realities. Through additional shadowing with two South Asian physicians, with one excluded from clinical roles and the other running his own private medical practice, I came to learn that even this understanding is incomplete as it collapses doctors into a single, uniform category and obscures how the NHS's demands fall unevenly across different bodies, especially in a system where 40% of doctors are non-UK nationals. Taken together, this thesis argues that the British media produces and spreads a specific moral panic, in addition to obscuring how the burdens of the NHS manifest differently along lines of race and identity. Drawing on anthropologies of labor and medicine, this thesis demonstrates how the failures of the British healthcare system are ultimately misdiagnosed and misattributed.

My thesis examines experiences of citizenship in contemporary South Korean society using an anthropological lens. Through ethnographic methods such as participant observation and semi-formal interviews, I analyze how individuals of different legal statuses understand and negotiate their citizenship and the conditions of belonging. Situating this study within the context of a globalizing Korea, I consider how citizenship is shaped by overlapping histories of developmental, militarized, and neoliberal governance. I explore citizenship through themes of temporality, hospitality, and neoliberalism, tracing how people make sense of their national identities. In doing so, I examine how they come to terms with not just their legal status, but the greater underlying social and emotional realities of navigating these conditions.

This thesis presents a narrative ethnography that details revitalization in Damascus, Virginia, a small rural Appalachian trail town devastated by Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters. It accomplishes this by drawing upon lived experience, community engagement, and anthropological analysis. This thesis works to examine what it means to attempt to contribute to the recovery of a place from a position of partial outsiderness. The method of this thesis relies upon the anthropological mechanism of firsthand research and ethnography in which centers my own individual efforts to aid a community I myself claim, yet naively approach. For decades, Damascus, Virginia has organized its economy almost entirely around the Virginia Creeper Trail, a 34-mile-long recreational trail that serves as the town’s primary source of economic revenue. When Hurricane Helene’s flood destroyed local infrastructure, the true vulnerability of the community became exposed, raising broader questions around revitalization efforts in rural Appalachia. This thesis traces those questions that arose and follows my own personal journey into crafting a nonprofit looking to simply bridge what I consider my “two worlds.” This is completed through examining extractive industries, cultural stereotypes, and tourist development dependences. Lastly, this thesis is not designed as a roadmap or a solution to how revitalization in Appalachia should be practiced, but rather offers an honest account of what happens when the distance between two distinct worlds collapses, and what that collapse reveals about the true nature of identity, power, and revitalization in Appalachia.

This thesis examines how care is practiced, produced, and constrained within the Mercy Center, a Catholic-based Day Center that serves individuals experiencing homelessness in Detroit, Michigan. I explore how care and dignity are defined vis-à-vis a population rendered invisible by structural neglect by focusing on the daily interpersonal interactions and institutional frameworks that constitute this space. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I center the perspectives of three groups: unhoused guests, staff members, and volunteers. Through participant-observation, I rotate between various volunteer stations such as food service, laundry, and the front distribution desk to show how dignity emerges amidst the social abandonment that necessitates the center’s very existence. This fieldwork excavates how care is a response, refusal, and product of structural neglect, exposing how the possibilities and new imaginations of care are constrained by the same institution they seek to address.

My ethnography traces four key ways care and dignity take shape within the St. Mercy Center. First, it explores how guests define care through relational presence. Second, it highlights how staff and volunteers make sense of the care they provide, revealing how institutional and interpersonal forms of care are not separate from each other. Third, it analyzes how gender mediates the experience and accessibility of dignity, demonstrating the ways in which care is not experienced the same for all guests. Fourth, it interrogates prevailing definitions of surveillance by showing how being watched can function not only as a disciplinary mechanism but also can serve as a practice of recognition. This thesis poses a central question: what does it mean to restore dignity that has been systematically taken away, and whose responsibility is it to respond?

Keywords: care, dignity, social neglect, structural violence, gender, surveillance, recognition

This thesis, "Beyond 'Cool Japan': explores the global phenomenon of Japanese popular media through an anthropological lens. This project explores ways that members of the global audience engage with their experiences of Japanese media. The methodology utilized for this research involves a multi-sited ethnography that has followed the circulation, appropriation, and re-signification of Japanese media both digitally and physically. Chapter 4, "The Personal Cultural Project," provides an in-depth examination of how participants have adapted mass-produced media content into personally meaningful cultural resources to form communities and develop their individual identities. Chapter 5, "Digital Mediascapes and Infrastructure," explores the fan-created structures that enable these personal cultural projects. The chapter also highlights the cultural labor performed by fans in localizing content and creating transnational communities. The central argument presented in this thesis is that the global success of Cool Japan is mediated through the unpredictable agency of fans and challenges cultural imperialism. This thesis provides ethnographic evidence for the glocalization of the Cool Japan phenomenon. This research calls for re-examining notions of soft power and for considering the conceptual fluidity of culture, as well as the importance of informal grassroots initiatives in shaping global cultural influence.

This thesis investigates instructor and student experiences in two higher education in prison programs, Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative and Bard’s Prison Teaching Initiative. For the first two chapters, I draw on semi-structured interviews with current and former instructors at PTI and participant-observation from PTI’s training and course planning meetings. For the last chapter, I conduct a close-reading of the film College Behind Bars as an archive of student-prisoner experience. In the first chapter, I explore common narratives from PTI instructors which attribute empowerment and agency as results of PTI classwork. I break these down into three categories: agency within the classroom, agency through critical thinking, and agency through trauma-informed education. In the next chapter, I explore instructor narratives who differ from these common ones in the ways that they connect with students and also admit to a failure to empathise with their students. Finally, I highlight the perspectives of students in College Behind Bars to emphasize the precariousness of higher education in prison and the ways that students use their classes to escape prisonization, find redemption, and to navigate the difficulties of carceral citizenship. Overall, I argue that higher education in prison, at these two sites, as sites which empower students through connection and acceptance.

Disability circulates through and informs the socio-politico-relational realms that we are placed into or become part of. Beginning with the Transatlantic slave trade, colonialism trafficked unsubstantiated claims of biological and intellectual deficiencies amongst Black enslaved people to the Americas, to justify the colonial apparatus. As a result, Black Disability Studies scholars affirm that categorizations of race and disability have become co-constituted and nearly inseparable. In this thesis, I seek to analyze the intersections of race and disability, foregrounded by colonial histories and legacies, to implicate healthcare systems’ role in the lives of Black disabled people. Black (disabled) people have had a tenuous and callous relationship with medical institutions, wrought with unethical experimentations and procedures, biological determinisms, and blatant disregard as patients. I conducted my fieldwork at Advocating for COGI Culture (AFTCC), an annual event hosted by The Color of Gastrointestinal Illnesses (COGI), an organization serving those with chronic GI illnesses. I will present qualitative Rapid Ethnographic research specified through Focused Ethnography, employing field site visits, field observations, and semi-structured interviews with COGI members. This thesis argues that colonialism offers insight into modern interpretations of disability and race; community-based health organizations and health service providers, like COGI, focused on Black people promote healthcare that differs from a highly medicalized and clinical perception of disability as a colonial aftermath; and, there may be generative and renewed translations about disability for Black people in spaces like COGI. My findings conclude that COGI, as an organization and its membership, endorse disability expertise, health promotion, and health education of chronic digestive illnesses, even though some do not identify with disability categorization. And, disability labels are not necessarily indexed as such; rather, it is filed under more disease or illness-specific descriptions by members due to the intense historical stigmatization of Black people’s bodies.

What happens when one experiences violence so immense and so destructive that they lose their sense of self? What happens when, in a society focused on political negotiations and administrative responses, these processes overshadow the lived experiences of those most affected? What happens to those who can no longer speak for themselves, not because they do not want to, but because they no longer know how to? And what happens when words themselves seem insufficient to account for suffering? This paper attempts to answer these questions by examining the role of speech, art, and communal practices in contexts of prolonged violence. Drawing on ethnographic research with the Goma Slam Session in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, I investigate how spoken word poetry is used not only as a form of expression, but as a means of expressing, holding, and navigating trauma. I analyze how this collective of artists and activists uses what is conceptualized as slam therapy to help traumatized individuals regain and rebuild a sense of self. In a setting of deep state failure such as the DRC, where formal infrastructures of care are limited, this thesis argues that artistic practices create alternative spaces where individuals can gradually relearn how to narrate themselves, resocialize, and reaffirm a sense of personhood that violence attempts to destroy.

This thesis examines autism as a biocultural phenomenon shaped by both neurobiological realities and the structural and cultural environments in which they unfold. Drawing on eight months of comparative ethnographic fieldwork across the United States, Armenia, and South Korea, and on interviews with clinicians, therapists, and educators working in autism care, I argue that dominant frameworks of disability scholarship—namely the biomedical and social models—inadequately account for the lived realities of autistic individuals across divergent national contexts. In their place, I propose the biocultural model of disability, which holds neurological difference, cultural variation, and structural context together as mutually constitutive. Through an ethnographic analysis of diagnostic infrastructure, cultural logics of inclusion and homogeneity, kinship arrangements, and the gap between policy and implementation, I demonstrate how the same neurological profiles yield vastly different developmental trajectories depending on the environment into which they are received. The biocultural model renders these differences legible as structural conditions, and therefore as conditions that can be changed.

Keywords: autism; disability anthropology; biocultural model; Armenia; South Korea

This is an anthropological exploration of health measured by degrees of connection. It is situated within a particular cultural moment of a felt epidemic of social disconnection and a parallel epidemic of psychiatric conditions — depression, anxiety, and PTSD, among others. The observed social phenomena are not merely correlated; they share a root. This paper argues that the root of psychiatric suffering, of the conditions mentioned, is sociosomatic, the result of a subjective felt disconnection from community and the visceral aftermath of prolonged unbelonging. Because of the especially pronounced rates of the conditions mentioned that are present within military communities, the veteran serves as a subject and metonym to explore the tension in a human need for belonging, an inherently social imperative, embedded within a Western medical system structured to treat only an individual body. In pathologizing the responses to disconnection, the same system obscures the illness and its cure. Through the framework of re-membering — the process of reintegration into and reconnection with the social body — this paper examines how altered states of consciousness induced by entheogenic substances within ceremonial contexts dissolve the boundaries of separation. Drawing on thirty-seven qualitative interviews conducted in partnership with Heroic Hearts Project UK and King's College London, this thesis traces how entheogenic ‘medicines’ function toward that end. A computational linguistic analysis, applying Natural Language Processing to the aggregate corpus of veteran interviews, extends the subjective narratives grounding the arguments into the quantitative register to measure how the semantic themes of healing organize around agency and community. This exploration is in service of an expanded definition of health and where it can happen, beyond the individual body, nor as an individual feat, but realized between bodies and as something cocreated, continuously, becoming.

This thesis examines how cultural kīpuka – sites of cultural strongholds as identified by Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor – are a form of and formed by the Hawaiian identities of Kanaka who exist within and move through them. Drawing upon the life history and philosophies of Robert “Bobby” Alcain – a homestead farmer, practitioner of lāʻau lapaʻau, and native of Molokai – I disrupt the notions of unchanged culture within these kīpuka. By building upon the work of McGregor, I argue that cultural kīpuka are not passive refuges preserved by geographic isolation but active sites of world-building through conscious practice. Complicating the cultural kīpuka allows us to understand that the space produces the conditions for a Hawaiian identity but does not produce that identity automatically. I draw upon Emalani Case’s theorization of Kahiki – that is, our ancestral homelands and the exploration of life beyond our shores – in which she asserts that it is a place of sanctuary and discomfort. I operate at the hyper-local scale of cultural kīpuka to say that Kahiki is all places outside of the kīpuka, even places that exist within Hawaiʻi, to demonstrate the recontextualization of identity that takes place as Kanaka Hawaiʻi move throughout the islands and beyond. I argue that it is our encounters with Kahiki that make the kīpuka visible and allow for a commitment to be made to the project of being Hawaiian. The formation of the kīpuka as a physical and cultural space, and the formation of Kanaka identities are co-constructed. Ultimately, I articulate that the cultural kīpuka is not a static refuge, but a reference point for engaging the past, present and future to answer the question of who are we as we recontextualize our identities with each journey beyond our shores.

The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) eliminated the largest funder of humanitarian and development aid worldwide. Drawing on fifteen semi-structured interviews with former USAID staff members and contractors, this thesis documents the lived experiences of individuals through the dismantling. Former staff shared a professional ethos, a drive to make an impact through a commitment to the international development community. Despite experiencing the dismantling as an intentionally cruel and chaotic process, this professional ethos persisted. Staff turned inward to support colleagues and preserve institutional capacity, even at personal risk. Now, a flooded job market, the withdrawal of global partners, and the contraction of the broader field of international development have left the professional ethos of former staff without an institutional home. This thesis raises an enduring question of whether their professional ethos can persist amid the continued contraction of the international development field.

Building on three weeks of ethnographic research in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, this thesis explores how discursive practices reproduce moral understandings of the world, starting with the practice of housework. While the household is a well-documented subject for the reproduction of social norms, divisions of labor, and gender inequalities, this thesis examines not only how "doing" housework begets "doing" gender, but also how discursive practices function as discursive “borders,” emphasize the moral weight of discursive practices in their production of particular “truths.” In Chapter 1, I introduce the concept of legibility to better understand how morality is discursively communicated, specifically through housework. Chapter 2 draws on the work of the imaginary to understand how discursive borders themselves are an exercise of the imagination, working to produce gendered ideal subjectivities, i.e. a normative argument for who should do housework. Chapter 3 continues the work of the imaginary to better understand how interlocutors theorize and mobilize notions of “the local,” “the global,” and what flows of moral assumption are relayed between these socio-spatial discourses. In Chapter 4, I attend to the perhaps surprising ways in which housework and other landscapes enable productive formations of discursive borders and meaningful fulfillment. Ultimately, this thesis builds on queer and feminist interventions in anthropology while seeking to address how borders take on an active form in border-ing, addressing transnational anxieties on normative notions of gender, citizenship, and belonging.

This thesis asks a deceptively simple question: What is a game developer? Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at three playtesting spaces in New York City (an institutional game design program, a nonprofit game development collective, and a community barcade), I argue that "game developer" is not a description of who makes games, but a mechanism through which the industry organizes labor visibility and manufactures dependency. In Chapter 2, I show how hyperspecialization and institutional frameworks produce a particular kind of developer, rendering most game-makers invisible. Chapter 3 traces how even those who resist industry logic cannot escape its framework and their work is defined by refusal. But Chapter 4 reveals something else: people who never reference the industry at all are already making games. They make them with friends, for slowness, for embodied experience, for creating games that the industry cannot contain or commodify. The thesis destabilizes the category across four chapters from locked gate to broken bars to bypassed entirely, ultimately asking: if the label only had power because people believed they needed it, what happens when they stop asking for permission? This work contributes to game studies scholarship on labor, institutionalization, and creative practice outside profit-driven frameworks.

This senior thesis considers how African and Caribbean language course offerings function as a site of community building and identity formation for heritage language students at Princeton University. Heritage language students are loosely defined as students who have a personal relationship to a language other than the dominant one of the societies in which they live (Fishman, Valdes 2001), and in this case, English. Princeton offers two spoken African languages, Twi and Swahili, and recently, Haitian Kreyól as its first Caribbean language. Heritage language students at Princeton are not always enrolled students of these courses given they are limited in number but are at once students at the University and still heritage language speakers regardless of fluency. The terms ‘heritage language’ and ‘student’ therefore index special relationships between certain academic and extracurricular spaces, namely the language classrooms and language tables, and how these students form relationships and understand their heritage identities during their time at Princeton. Through fieldwork conducted at multi-modal fieldsites at Princeton, including the TWI 107 spring course, the Twi and Wolof Language Tables, and the Fifth International Conference on Heritage and Community Languages at University of California, Los Angeles, this thesis is situated within a broader interdisciplinary context of heritage language studies, African studies, and anthropology. By conducting semi-structured interviews with students of diverse linguistic backgrounds, some enrolled in the offered courses and others who still forge communities built around language in lieu of an offered course, this thesis argues for a broader understanding and adoption of heritage language learning pedagogy as central to the cultivation of a sense of belonging at Princeton for students.

This thesis examines how child health, adversity, and resilience are understood and lived within the Jicarilla Apache Nation in Dulce, New Mexico, through community-engaged ethnographic fieldwork. This project also critically evaluates the limitations of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as a standardized model of risk. While ACE frameworks quantify exposure to adversity, they often detach experience from the historical, structural, and relational conditions that produce it. Drawing on bio-ethnography, this thesis integrates anthropological methods with developmental science to show how stress becomes biologically embedded through ongoing interactions between environment, caregiving, and history. At the same time, it highlights how resilience emerges through everyday practices of care, including kinship networks, storytelling, land-based relationships, and community-designed systems of support. Rather than treating adversity as a fixed predictor of health outcomes, this work aims to reframe child health as a dynamic developmental process shaped by both constraints and possibilities. With this combined research, this thesis concludes by proposing a community-centered home visiting module for JAFHVP that moves beyond deficit-based models towards a relational, culturally-grounded, and biologically-informed approach to healing.

This thesis explores the question of what the birth control pill represents for young liberal women today. Drawing on ethnographic interviews of Princeton students with liberal and feminist views of the pill, I illustrate how young liberal women characterize their experiences and perceptions of contraceptive decision-making with ambivalence and uncertainty. I argue that while they maintain the historical legacy of the pill as a symbol of women’s independence and believe in the importance of women’s right to choose, the hesitations and frustrations that emerge in their discussions of their personal use illustrate how this framing of the pill as a liberatory and individual choice does not fully reflect the contradictions that they encounter. My interlocutors value the ways in which the pill helps them prevent pregnancy and exert control over their reproductive health, but they also articulate how in choosing the pill, they are often choosing compromise. Moreover, I illustrate how my interlocutors rely on networks of knowledge and guidance from their friends and family members to make their contraceptive-decisions and find space to openly voice their frustrations.

This thesis investigates the practice of child language brokering (CLB) within medical settings, exploring the tension between its practical necessity and the ethical risks it poses to immigrant families and healthcare systems. While Western paradigms often frame childhood as a period of passive dependence, this research utilizes an anthropological lens to position CLB as a sophisticated form of caregiving and "systemic labor" that children perform to bridge institutional gaps in language access. The research is grounded in ethnographic interviews with nine individuals, including physicians, parents, and former child language brokers. For the children involved, the experience is characterized by a duality of outcomes: while it can foster a robust sense of self-efficacy and agency, it also imposes significant cognitive and emotional burdens, particularly when navigating "adult-like" topics such as terminal diagnoses or reproductive health. Ultimately, this thesis argues that CLB should be understood not as a moral failing of individual families, but as a pragmatic community adaptation to structural exclusion. The study concludes by advocating for a model of care that expands professional interpretation services while acknowledging and supporting the unique contributions of young bilingual mediators.