This article analyzes the origin and meaning of artistic representations of death-principally skulls and skeletons-in Mexico's Day of the Dead. It challenges stereotypes of the death-obsessed Mexican by tracing mortuary imagery in the Day of the Dead to Two separate artistic developments, the first deriving from religious and demographic imperatives of colonial times, the second from nineteenth-century politics and journalism. Now generally perceived as belonging to a single, undifferentiated iconographic tradition, cranial and skeletal images of death have become virtually synonymous with Mexico itself.

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in migration to Europe, primarily by refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia, but with significant flows of refugees and other migrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa as well. Portugal is not among the primary European destinations for refugees or immigrants; possibly, in part, because there are fewer migrants in Portugal, it is an E.U. country where new arrivals are still met with a degree of enthusiasm. Hard right, anti-immigrant parties—on the rise in other parts of the E.U.—have not gained much traction in Portugal. This work looks at the relative invisibility of immigrants in Porto, the country’s second largest city, which may make those immigrants a less visible target for intolerance and political opportunism, but may also impede a larger, more self-determinant role for immigrants and their communities in greater Portuguese society.

A major contributing factor to immigrant invisibility is the absence (outside of Lisbon and southern Portugal) of neighborhoods where African immigrants are concentrated. In Porto, communities do not form around geography; instead, communities form around institutions. The role of religious institutions in community formation is examined—institutions such as Protestant and Catholic churches, Catholic seminarian education, and one of Porto’s two mosques. Some of these institutions are attended mostly by non-Africans, but nevertheless appeal to sub-Saharan African immigrants on an aesthetic and/or affective level. Others are attended mostly or exclusively by immigrants. The roles of charismatic and well connected individuals in facilitating further connections between immigrants and their communities is also examined, as are aging shopping centers—the centros comerciais—which offer a secular space where Africans might gather together, socialize, and share information in the course of patronizing African groceries, cafés and hair salons.

Porto’s African immigrants have created or nurtured communities through common goals, interests, and beliefs. In the absence of geographic concentration, they have managed to find ways to share information, support one another, and celebrate their shared experiences.

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a transformation in national and regional Mexican politics and society. In the state of Yucatán, this transformation has taken the shape of a newfound interest in indigenous Maya culture coupled with increasing involvement by the state in public health efforts. Suicide, which in Yucatán more than doubles the national average, has captured the attention of local newspaper media, public health authorities, and the general public; it has become a symbol of indigenous Maya culture due to an often cited association with Ixtab, an ancient Maya "suicide goddess". My thesis investigates suicide as a socially produced cultural artifact. It is a study of how suicide is understood by many social actors and institutions and of how upon a close examination, suicide can be seen as a trope that illuminates the complexity of class, ethnicity, and inequality in Yucatán. In particular, my dissertation -based on extensive ethnographic and archival research in Valladolid and Mérida, Yucatán, México-- is a study of both suicide and suicide prevention efforts. As such, the first half of my dissertation focuses on how suicide is produced in public and state discourse. The second half of my dissertation considers how foreign mental health treatment models are applied in local clinical settings as part of state suicide prevention efforts. These programs, however, are entangled in a complex web of regional and national politics, very often to the detriment of the programs and the populations they purport to help. This research deconstructs the idea that suicide is due to a Maya cultural predisposition and suggests that chronic poverty, addiction, class inequality, and unique local worldviews contribute to the phenomenon in a decisive way. My thesis calls into question the viability of a Maya-centered research approach, arguing that such an approach creates a false research object and excludes a large segment of the local population from study. I conducted ethnographic research in the town of Valladolid (pop. 45,000) and the city of Mérida (pop. 1,000,000). My research methodology included "traditional" participant observation research with members of both communities as well as institutional ethnography at the Ministerio Publico or public ministry of Valladolid, and Hospital Psiquiatrico Yucatán, the regional public psychiatric hospital. I conducted extensive archival research with the Valladolid police suicide case files and studied representations of suicide in newspaper media. By studying 1) how suicide is produced in state and local discourse and 2) how suicide prevention methods are deployed, I demonstrate the production of new subjectivities in a population that continues to struggle with numerous social and economic challenges

This dissertation is a history of 500 years of resistance to violence amongst indigenous peoples in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta -SNSM, in Colombia, as practices of healing and reciprocity. It is focused on the legacy of the Kaggaba People to maintain themselves as an indigenous people, confronted by violence and domination since the Spanish invasion of their territory, until to today. The work is written from a perspective of my lasting and ongoing collaboration with those peoples. It combines Kaggaba historical memory, with written historical sources and present-day situations. The work focuses on how Kaggaba practices of reciprocity form part of processes of resistance and healing. It addresses how the Kaggaba deploy precise forms of reciprocity that link territory, people and things, all connected with “the spirit”, as what the Kaggaba call the Law of Origin, involving “paying debts” at a spiritual level. We analyze how these forms of reciprocity can have effects on the other elements along those linkages, to produce results through transformations of context centered around ancestral territory. The Kaggaba consider territory as living entity which produces responses through practices of reciprocity. To approach Kaggaba practices of resistance as reciprocity, we propose the concept of articulated assemblages in which reciprocity, articulates processes of transformation between things, people, territory and the “spirit”. Reciprocity as an assemblage engages with elements from linguistic anthropology, theories on violence, articulation and relationally produced identity, and expanded concepts of context. We address implications of Kaggaba practices of reciprocity as process of rearticulation of the self with context and power in ways that transcend subject-object divides, at the heart of healing and violence. It weaves together grounded scenarios based on the deployment of debt relations. As a history, the work starts with the colonial imposition of “encomiendas” in Kaggaba territory, as forms of domination through debt and violence, and how the indigenous people redeploy those same links of reciprocity as resistance. Then it moves into Kaggaba deployments of reciprocity as linked to the “spiritual” origin of ancestral territory as hybrid strategies of coexistence with the colonial catholic church. During most of the 20th century, colonial forms of domination and debt combined with public policies for the dissolution indigenous identity and land. These elements morphed into a “State of Exclusion”, with deplorable levels of violence against the indigenous people of the SNSM, invisibly subsisting within modern nation. The dissertation addresses how the indigenous peoples of the SNSM transform violence at personal and political levels. Especially the Kaggaba and Arhuaco, directly deploy their “Law of Origin”, embedded in the ancestral territory of the “Black Line” as processes of reciprocity based on principles of care. These practices of embodied reciprocity generate profound transformative responses from territory, enabling the indigenous people to cast off those chains of debt and violence. The Kaggaba present various forms reciprocity as practices of healing. These are ancestral” practices upon which the indigenous people have based their existence since before the arrival of the Spanish. They offer new ways of conceptualizing healing and forms reciprocity between people, things, nature and territory and expanded concepts of context.