Jeffrey G Snodgrass
Biographic Data
| ID | 6065349 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey G Snodgrass |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey G |
| FAMILY NAME | Snodgrass |
| SIGNATURE | SNODGRASS J G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Colorado State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 108 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Benefits of Using Cultural Domain Analysis in Applied Anthropology
Cultural domain analysis (CDA) is a suite of methods and analytical techniques that allow researchers to rapidly and reliably understand the ways in which people conceptualize their world. Consisting of various approaches, including free lists, pile sorts, and related interview techniques, CDA is an effective means of systematically identifying shared knowledge. This article briefly reviews the strengths of this approach, and highlights examples …
Planning to Work as an Applied Medical Anthropologist? The Advantages of a Broad and Strategic Methodological Toolkit
Applied medical anthropologists work in a variety of settings. This diversity of career paths is exciting as it allows anthropological theory and method to influence many spheres of society that impact people's everyday lived health. Success in this wide arena requires an inclusive and broad way of thinking about ethnography that incorporates multiple ways of thinking and the ability to employ a range of methodological tools. This short piece pro…
Ethnographic Methods for Identifying Cultural Concepts of Distress
We review ethnographic methods that allow researchers to assess distress in a culturally sensitive manner. We begin with an overview of standardized biomedical and psychological approaches to assessing distress cross-culturally. We then focus on literature describing the development of reliable and valid culturally sensitive assessment tools that can serve as complements or alternatives to biomedical categories and diagnostic frameworks. The meth…
Teaching Ethnographic Methods
Ethnography is a core methodology in anthropology and other disciplines. Yet, there is currently no scholarly consensus on how to teach ethnographic methods—or even what methods belong in the ethnographic toolkit. We report on a systematic analysis of syllabi to gauge how ethnographic methods are taught in the United States. We analyze 107 methods syllabi from a nationally elicited sample of university faculty who teach ethnography. Systematic co…
Adolescent Popularity
Biocultural Strategies for Measuring Psychosocial Stress Outcomes in Field-based Research
The goal of assessing psychosocial stress as a process and outcome in naturalistic (i.e., field) settings is applicable across the social, biological, and health sciences. Meaningful measurement of biology-in-context is, however, far from simple or straightforward. In this brief methods review, we introduce theoretical framings, methodological conventions, and ethical concerns around field-collection of markers of psychosocial stress that have em…
Indian Gaming Zones as Oppositional Subculture
On the basis of participant observation and questionnaire data, we consider the cultural shaping of video gaming pleasure and distress in face-to-face gaming centers in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. We analyze how and why young adult Indian gamers experience their play as both deeply satisfying and dangerously addictive. To explain this dual consciousness, we join the concept of cultural consonance (individuals' relative consistency with their cultu…
An Iterative Approach to Qualitative Data Analysis
We present a qualitative data analysis framework that integrates perspectives from theme analysis, cultural models analysis, grounded theory, and content analysis. We demonstrate how these research traditions are united in their aim to, first, uncover meaningful themes and, subsequently, to understand those themes’ relationships to each other. To illustrate our approach, we present research on video gamers’ understandings of productive and detrim…
A Formal Method for Detecting and Describing Cultural Complexity
The most widely used formal approach to culture, the cultural consensus theory (CCT) of Romney, Weller, and Batchelder, originally relied on a priori definitions of cultural groups to map their unity and diversity. Retaining key features of classical CCT, we provide techniques to identify two or more cultural subgroups in a sample, whether those groups are known in advance or not. Our method helps CCT practitioners connect to contemporary approac…
Religious Ritual Is Good Medicine for Indigenous Indian Conservation Refugees
We tested whether religious ritual lessens or increases stress and anxiety among indigenous Sahariya conservation refugees recently displaced from a wildlife sanctuary in central India. Combining ethnography with structured survey and salivary analyte data (the stress hormone cortisol), we tracked di/stress over two 9-day periods before, during, and after Sahariya celebrations of the Hindu holidays of Holi and Navratri. Results show postritual im…
Analyzing Cultural Consensus with Proportional Reduction in Error (PRE)
This article provides an alternate method to assess the fit of the cultural consensus model (CCM) of Romney and colleagues to the responses of a group of informants about a domain of knowledge, and thus also to evaluate the extent of shared knowledge within a group. Criteria for judging the existence of singular culture have been articulated previously by examining the relative size of the first versus second eigenvalue from the factor analysis u…
A vacation from your mind
Maternal exposure to hurricane destruction and fetal mortality
BACKGROUND: The majority of research documenting the public health impacts of natural disasters focuses on the well-being of adults and their living children. Negative effects may also occur in the unborn, exposed to disaster stressors when critical organ systems are developing and when the consequences of exposure are large. METHODS: We exploit spatial and temporal variation in hurricane behaviour as a quasi-experimental design to assess whether…
A Quasi-Experimental Analysis of Maternal Altitude Exposure and Infant Birth Weight
Objectives. We analyzed singleton births to determine the relationship between birth weight and altitude exposure. Methods. We analyzed 715 213 singleton births across 74 counties from the western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington from January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2000. Birth data were obtained from the Division of Vital Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics, …
Magical Flight and Monstrous Stress
Witch Hunts, Herbal Healing, and Discourses of Indigenous Ecodevelopment in North India
In this article, we examine the environmental thought and practice of indigenous peoples living in and around a wildlife sanctuary in North India. Analysis reveals that those religious specialists (such as shamans) who possess knowledge of herbal healing are more committed than other villagers to preventing or mitigating the overharvesting of natural resources. To explain these results, reference is made to a specific juncture of native tradition…
The Artists of Nathadwara
Phulwari's plant people
Venture Funambulists
This chapter presents Bhat ballads featuring linguistically talented bards who dominate and control their lords and benefactors. In shifting the focus from patrons to the insights of the author’s bardic informants and the power of linguistic representation, this chapter hopes to draw more explicit attention to the imaginative dimensions of caste hierarchies and the arbitrariness of social centers and peripheries, It also argues that Bhat poetics …
Obscene Jesters
This chapter describes Bhat relationships to the ritualized village patron-client “gift” economy found throughout northern India called jajmani. It is shown that the Bhats’ skill as bards, and their perspectives on caste relations more generally, emerge from the manner in which this social economy places value on exchanges between patrons and clients. In particular, this chapter explores Bhat understandings of virtue, and thus also of caste hiera…
The Enduring Power of Praise-Abuse
This chapter focuses on the Bhats’ tactical narration of their religious history, and specifically the manner in which they present themselves as alternately Hindu or Muslim in order to gain employment as political propagandists for both India’s secular Congress Party and Hindu-nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (B.J.P.). The chapter also examines how Bhats “cast” traditional Rajasthan in a puppet drama sponsored by a state-run bank meant to teach…
Cast of Characters
This chapter further describes the context of the author’s participant-observation fieldwork situation in the towns of Udaipur and Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It also presents the scholarly understandings of South Asian society that ground the book’s arguments. It is demonstrated how changes in caste relations in the modern colonial and postcolonial periods, and especially the decline in importance of elite bardic communities, provid…
Conclusion
This concluding chapter returns to theories of caste and to the manner in which Bhat culture and society may speak to such theories, by reflecting on the manner Bhats can be said to make their own history as opposed to simply inheriting a so-called traditional identity and profession. It points to continuities and differences between Bhats and other Indian Dalit (formerly Untouchable) communities. It engages the scholarship on Indian marginal and…
Casting Kings
Based on three years of anthropological fieldwork in the Indian state of Rajasthan, this book explores the manner that semi-nomadic performers known as Bhats understand and also subvert caste hierarchies. A number of scholars have recently contended that caste is invented and thus a fiction of a kind. Focus in these studies, however, is typically placed on the way that caste is imagined according to the agendas and desires of elite Westerners suc…
Hail to the Chief
In this paper, I examine a birth ritual practised by a community of low-status entertainers from the Indian state of Rajasthan known as Bhats. On the birth of sons, but not daughters, Bhats offer gifts to the Hindu god Bhaironji, a pan-Indian boss of the underworld. Specifically, they sacrifice a goat, extract its stomach, slice it open so that it forms a gaping slit, and pass their wailing newborn through the dripping opening seven times. This r…
Religious Ritual Is Good Medicine for Indigenous Indian Conservation Refugees
We tested whether religious ritual lessens or increases stress and anxiety among indigenous Sahariya conservation refugees recently displaced from a wildlife sanctuary in central India. Combining ethnography with structured survey and salivary analyte data (the stress hormone cortisol), we tracked di/stress over two 9-day periods before, during, and after Sahariya celebrations of the Hindu holidays of Holi and Navratri. Results show postritual im…
Beware of charitable souls
Bhats are a caste of low-status performers from the Indian state of Rajasthan. Bhat patrons, following deaths in their families, distribute 'alms' (dan) to Bhats who work as their genealogists and praise-singers. Though their patrons are generous on these occasions, Bhats typically must be coerced into taking these offerings, which they consider dangerous and even lethal. The 'poison' of Hindu transactions such as these is usually attributed to a…
Casting Kings
Based on three years of anthropological fieldwork in the Indian state of Rajasthan, this book explores the manner that semi-nomadic performers known as Bhats understand and also subvert caste hierarchies. A number of scholars have recently contended that caste is invented and thus a fiction of a kind. Focus in these studies, however, is typically placed on the way that caste is imagined according to the agendas and desires of elite Westerners suc…
Imitation Is Far More Than the Sincerest of Flattery
Witch Hunts, Herbal Healing, and Discourses of Indigenous Ecodevelopment in North India
In this article, we examine the environmental thought and practice of indigenous peoples living in and around a wildlife sanctuary in North India. Analysis reveals that those religious specialists (such as shamans) who possess knowledge of herbal healing are more committed than other villagers to preventing or mitigating the overharvesting of natural resources. To explain these results, reference is made to a specific juncture of native tradition…
A tale of goddesses, money, and other terribly wonderful things
In this article, I examine the spiritual possession of a young Indian woman'a member of a community of performers known as Bhats'by her husband's lineage goddess. The events unfold in the Rajasthani town of Udaipur where Bhats now market traditional culture to tourists. Showing how this possession responds to my informants' new exchange relations, I argue for the utility of the Marxist notion of "commodity fetishism." I contend, however, that Mar…
Biocultural Strategies for Measuring Psychosocial Stress Outcomes in Field-based Research
The goal of assessing psychosocial stress as a process and outcome in naturalistic (i.e., field) settings is applicable across the social, biological, and health sciences. Meaningful measurement of biology-in-context is, however, far from simple or straightforward. In this brief methods review, we introduce theoretical framings, methodological conventions, and ethical concerns around field-collection of markers of psychosocial stress that have em…
Ethnographic Methods for Identifying Cultural Concepts of Distress
We review ethnographic methods that allow researchers to assess distress in a culturally sensitive manner. We begin with an overview of standardized biomedical and psychological approaches to assessing distress cross-culturally. We then focus on literature describing the development of reliable and valid culturally sensitive assessment tools that can serve as complements or alternatives to biomedical categories and diagnostic frameworks. The meth…
An Iterative Approach to Qualitative Data Analysis
We present a qualitative data analysis framework that integrates perspectives from theme analysis, cultural models analysis, grounded theory, and content analysis. We demonstrate how these research traditions are united in their aim to, first, uncover meaningful themes and, subsequently, to understand those themes’ relationships to each other. To illustrate our approach, we present research on video gamers’ understandings of productive and detrim…
A Formal Method for Detecting and Describing Cultural Complexity
The most widely used formal approach to culture, the cultural consensus theory (CCT) of Romney, Weller, and Batchelder, originally relied on a priori definitions of cultural groups to map their unity and diversity. Retaining key features of classical CCT, we provide techniques to identify two or more cultural subgroups in a sample, whether those groups are known in advance or not. Our method helps CCT practitioners connect to contemporary approac…
Maternal exposure to hurricane destruction and fetal mortality
BACKGROUND: The majority of research documenting the public health impacts of natural disasters focuses on the well-being of adults and their living children. Negative effects may also occur in the unborn, exposed to disaster stressors when critical organ systems are developing and when the consequences of exposure are large. METHODS: We exploit spatial and temporal variation in hurricane behaviour as a quasi-experimental design to assess whether…
Indian Gaming Zones as Oppositional Subculture
On the basis of participant observation and questionnaire data, we consider the cultural shaping of video gaming pleasure and distress in face-to-face gaming centers in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. We analyze how and why young adult Indian gamers experience their play as both deeply satisfying and dangerously addictive. To explain this dual consciousness, we join the concept of cultural consonance (individuals' relative consistency with their cultu…
Analyzing Cultural Consensus with Proportional Reduction in Error (PRE)
This article provides an alternate method to assess the fit of the cultural consensus model (CCM) of Romney and colleagues to the responses of a group of informants about a domain of knowledge, and thus also to evaluate the extent of shared knowledge within a group. Criteria for judging the existence of singular culture have been articulated previously by examining the relative size of the first versus second eigenvalue from the factor analysis u…
Hail to the Chief
In this paper, I examine a birth ritual practised by a community of low-status entertainers from the Indian state of Rajasthan known as Bhats. On the birth of sons, but not daughters, Bhats offer gifts to the Hindu god Bhaironji, a pan-Indian boss of the underworld. Specifically, they sacrifice a goat, extract its stomach, slice it open so that it forms a gaping slit, and pass their wailing newborn through the dripping opening seven times. This r…
The centre cannot hold
In this article I examine Bhat myths and legends concerning kings and bards. Bhats are low-status praise-singers from the Indian state of Rajasthan. In exploring these tales, I examine my informants' ideas about an issue which has long been seen as a central conundrum of Indian caste theory: how best to characterize the status of those with priestly standing in relation to those classed as warriors and kings. In their stories, Bhats demonstrate t…
A Quasi-Experimental Analysis of Maternal Altitude Exposure and Infant Birth Weight
Objectives. We analyzed singleton births to determine the relationship between birth weight and altitude exposure. Methods. We analyzed 715 213 singleton births across 74 counties from the western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington from January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2000. Birth data were obtained from the Division of Vital Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics, …
Beware of charitable souls
Bhats are a caste of low-status performers from the Indian state of Rajasthan. Bhat patrons, following deaths in their families, distribute 'alms' (dan) to Bhats who work as their genealogists and praise-singers. Though their patrons are generous on these occasions, Bhats typically must be coerced into taking these offerings, which they consider dangerous and even lethal. The 'poison' of Hindu transactions such as these is usually attributed to a…
Imitation Is Far More Than the Sincerest of Flattery
A tale of goddesses, money, and other terribly wonderful things
In this article, I examine the spiritual possession of a young Indian woman'a member of a community of performers known as Bhats'by her husband's lineage goddess. The events unfold in the Rajasthani town of Udaipur where Bhats now market traditional culture to tourists. Showing how this possession responds to my informants' new exchange relations, I argue for the utility of the Marxist notion of "commodity fetishism." I contend, however, that Mar…
Hail to the Chief
In this paper, I examine a birth ritual practised by a community of low-status entertainers from the Indian state of Rajasthan known as Bhats. On the birth of sons, but not daughters, Bhats offer gifts to the Hindu god Bhaironji, a pan-Indian boss of the underworld. Specifically, they sacrifice a goat, extract its stomach, slice it open so that it forms a gaping slit, and pass their wailing newborn through the dripping opening seven times. This r…
The centre cannot hold
In this article I examine Bhat myths and legends concerning kings and bards. Bhats are low-status praise-singers from the Indian state of Rajasthan. In exploring these tales, I examine my informants' ideas about an issue which has long been seen as a central conundrum of Indian caste theory: how best to characterize the status of those with priestly standing in relation to those classed as warriors and kings. In their stories, Bhats demonstrate t…
Venture Funambulists
This chapter presents Bhat ballads featuring linguistically talented bards who dominate and control their lords and benefactors. In shifting the focus from patrons to the insights of the author’s bardic informants and the power of linguistic representation, this chapter hopes to draw more explicit attention to the imaginative dimensions of caste hierarchies and the arbitrariness of social centers and peripheries, It also argues that Bhat poetics …
Obscene Jesters
This chapter describes Bhat relationships to the ritualized village patron-client “gift” economy found throughout northern India called jajmani. It is shown that the Bhats’ skill as bards, and their perspectives on caste relations more generally, emerge from the manner in which this social economy places value on exchanges between patrons and clients. In particular, this chapter explores Bhat understandings of virtue, and thus also of caste hiera…
The Enduring Power of Praise-Abuse
This chapter focuses on the Bhats’ tactical narration of their religious history, and specifically the manner in which they present themselves as alternately Hindu or Muslim in order to gain employment as political propagandists for both India’s secular Congress Party and Hindu-nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (B.J.P.). The chapter also examines how Bhats “cast” traditional Rajasthan in a puppet drama sponsored by a state-run bank meant to teach…
Cast of Characters
This chapter further describes the context of the author’s participant-observation fieldwork situation in the towns of Udaipur and Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It also presents the scholarly understandings of South Asian society that ground the book’s arguments. It is demonstrated how changes in caste relations in the modern colonial and postcolonial periods, and especially the decline in importance of elite bardic communities, provid…
Conclusion
This concluding chapter returns to theories of caste and to the manner in which Bhat culture and society may speak to such theories, by reflecting on the manner Bhats can be said to make their own history as opposed to simply inheriting a so-called traditional identity and profession. It points to continuities and differences between Bhats and other Indian Dalit (formerly Untouchable) communities. It engages the scholarship on Indian marginal and…
Casting Kings
Based on three years of anthropological fieldwork in the Indian state of Rajasthan, this book explores the manner that semi-nomadic performers known as Bhats understand and also subvert caste hierarchies. A number of scholars have recently contended that caste is invented and thus a fiction of a kind. Focus in these studies, however, is typically placed on the way that caste is imagined according to the agendas and desires of elite Westerners suc…
Phulwari's plant people
Witch Hunts, Herbal Healing, and Discourses of Indigenous Ecodevelopment in North India
In this article, we examine the environmental thought and practice of indigenous peoples living in and around a wildlife sanctuary in North India. Analysis reveals that those religious specialists (such as shamans) who possess knowledge of herbal healing are more committed than other villagers to preventing or mitigating the overharvesting of natural resources. To explain these results, reference is made to a specific juncture of native tradition…
The Artists of Nathadwara
Magical Flight and Monstrous Stress
A vacation from your mind
Maternal exposure to hurricane destruction and fetal mortality
BACKGROUND: The majority of research documenting the public health impacts of natural disasters focuses on the well-being of adults and their living children. Negative effects may also occur in the unborn, exposed to disaster stressors when critical organ systems are developing and when the consequences of exposure are large. METHODS: We exploit spatial and temporal variation in hurricane behaviour as a quasi-experimental design to assess whether…
A Quasi-Experimental Analysis of Maternal Altitude Exposure and Infant Birth Weight
Objectives. We analyzed singleton births to determine the relationship between birth weight and altitude exposure. Methods. We analyzed 715 213 singleton births across 74 counties from the western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington from January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2000. Birth data were obtained from the Division of Vital Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics, …
Analyzing Cultural Consensus with Proportional Reduction in Error (PRE)
This article provides an alternate method to assess the fit of the cultural consensus model (CCM) of Romney and colleagues to the responses of a group of informants about a domain of knowledge, and thus also to evaluate the extent of shared knowledge within a group. Criteria for judging the existence of singular culture have been articulated previously by examining the relative size of the first versus second eigenvalue from the factor analysis u…
Religious Ritual Is Good Medicine for Indigenous Indian Conservation Refugees
We tested whether religious ritual lessens or increases stress and anxiety among indigenous Sahariya conservation refugees recently displaced from a wildlife sanctuary in central India. Combining ethnography with structured survey and salivary analyte data (the stress hormone cortisol), we tracked di/stress over two 9-day periods before, during, and after Sahariya celebrations of the Hindu holidays of Holi and Navratri. Results show postritual im…
A Formal Method for Detecting and Describing Cultural Complexity
The most widely used formal approach to culture, the cultural consensus theory (CCT) of Romney, Weller, and Batchelder, originally relied on a priori definitions of cultural groups to map their unity and diversity. Retaining key features of classical CCT, we provide techniques to identify two or more cultural subgroups in a sample, whether those groups are known in advance or not. Our method helps CCT practitioners connect to contemporary approac…
An Iterative Approach to Qualitative Data Analysis
We present a qualitative data analysis framework that integrates perspectives from theme analysis, cultural models analysis, grounded theory, and content analysis. We demonstrate how these research traditions are united in their aim to, first, uncover meaningful themes and, subsequently, to understand those themes’ relationships to each other. To illustrate our approach, we present research on video gamers’ understandings of productive and detrim…
Adolescent Popularity
Biocultural Strategies for Measuring Psychosocial Stress Outcomes in Field-based Research
The goal of assessing psychosocial stress as a process and outcome in naturalistic (i.e., field) settings is applicable across the social, biological, and health sciences. Meaningful measurement of biology-in-context is, however, far from simple or straightforward. In this brief methods review, we introduce theoretical framings, methodological conventions, and ethical concerns around field-collection of markers of psychosocial stress that have em…
Indian Gaming Zones as Oppositional Subculture
On the basis of participant observation and questionnaire data, we consider the cultural shaping of video gaming pleasure and distress in face-to-face gaming centers in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. We analyze how and why young adult Indian gamers experience their play as both deeply satisfying and dangerously addictive. To explain this dual consciousness, we join the concept of cultural consonance (individuals' relative consistency with their cultu…
Sociology (22 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (14 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · History (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works)