D M Nelson
Biographic Data
| ID | 67138 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D M Nelson |
| GIVEN NAMES | D M |
| FAMILY NAME | Nelson |
| SIGNATURE | NELSON D M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lewis & Clark College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3659-8422 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 157 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1947 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Making Visible: Mathematics and Transitional Justice
This chapter expounds on the correlation between mathematics and transitional justice. The central techniques of transitional justice call on survivors and their allies to make visible something that most testimony-takers, judges, adjudicators, and auditors did not themselves experience. Numbers and mathematics are ways of seeing and of creating, so thinking with numbers reminds people of transitional justice’s debts to others and limitations by …
Hydroelectric Chimeras and "Our" Mayan Rivers: De-inscribing Security in Guatemala
This essay is written in the wake of Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war, grounded in the Cold War-Doctrine of National Security which understood Indigenous people as "internal enemy." People who joined social movements were also seeking security: bodily integrity, land, a living wage. For Indigenous people, it was security to be who they are: speaking their languages, practicing their spirituality and lifeways. Before, during, and after the wa…
“We Most Certainly Do Have a Language”
This article proposes that languages should be embraced by the field of extinction studies while at the same time being mindful of the imbrication of colonialism in both the assignation and terminology of extinction and attempts to revive or reclaim endangered and extinct languages. It thus argues for a decolonizing approach to discourses of both language extinction and reclamation. The article starts by contextualizing the complementary extincti…
Chapter Five. Anthropologist Discovers Legendary Two-Faced Indian
A retomada da língua Kariri-Xocó
Desde 1989, a comunidade indígena Kariri-Xocó do estado de Alagoas, Brasil, se envolve em um processo singular de revitalização cultural. Trabalhamos para recuperar nossa língua ancestral, aproveitando as memórias da comunidade por meio de músicas, histórias e rituais, preenchendo assim lacunas em nosso vocabulário. Alguns de nós distribuímos listas de palavras para jovens e adultos da comunidade via WhatsApp, enquanto outros abriram uma escola p…
Effects of Animacy in Grammar and Cognition: Introduction to Special Issue
Most, if not all, languages exhibit “animacy effects”: grammatical structures interact with the relative animacy of noun referents, as represented on various versions of animacy scales, with human discourse participants at one end and inanimate objects at the other. Cross-linguistic evidence attests to a range of linguistic phenomena conditioned by animacy, with complex effects requiring (a) subtler distinctions than a binary contrast [± animate]…
The Gender of the Number
Low Intensities
This essay opens with one of hundreds of massacres carried out in the early 1980s in Guatemala by agents of the military state. The killing was meant to depopulate the Rio Negro valley to make way for a hydroelectric dam. Like much of the violence of the 36-year conflict, it was low-tech and carried out by civil patrollers, which is perhaps why the Guatemalan civil war was considered a "low intensity conflict" by US Army definitions: "below conve…
Animacy Distinctions Arise from Iterated Learning
Linguistic animacy reflects a particular construal of biological distinctions encountered in the world, passed through cultural and cognitive filters. This study explores the process by which our construal of animacy becomes encoded in the grammars of human languages. We ran an iterated learning experiment investigating the effect of animacy on language transmission. Participants engaged in a simple artificial language learning task in which they…
Shifting perspective: Noun classes, voice, and animacy type shifts
Bringing the toys to life: Animacy, reference, and anthropomorphism in Toy Story
In the children’s film Toy Story , toys spring to life when their human owners are away, creating an alternative world of transferred animacy relations signalled by visual and linguistic cues. The storylines and characters explore the nature of animacy and relationships between conspecifics and ‘others’. Our analysis focuses on the use of referring expressions over the course of the narrative, as they reflect the animacy of their referents. We re…
Family-friendly work perceptions: A cross country analysis
Purpose An international archival data set resulting from a survey of workers in 27 countries is studied, examining certain individual factors affecting family-friendly work perceptions (FFWP) beginning within the USA and, then, studying FFWP across a select group of six countries, specifically comparing the USA to Bulgaria, Denmark, Japan, Russia and South Africa. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews studies on gender differences affect…
Bonesetting: The algebra of genocide
Genocide rulings should not care about numbers. Legally, proving the intent to destroy a people in whole or in part is what counts. Yet numbers are vital actants in the often decades-long lead-up to trials. Aggregate numbers give weight to the specificity of individual testimony, statistical estimates can transform missing people into cold, hard facts, and algorithms can reveal ‘excess death’, even when forensic anthropologists cannot find all th…
Guatemala’s genocide trial and the nexus of racism and counterinsurgency
An elderly man sits accused in a cavernous courtroom in Guatemala City wearing noise-blocking headphones. Before him are three Guatemalan judges, two of them women, from the Special Tribunal for Hi
Percent Omnilife: Health, Economy, and the End/s of War
Pirates, Robbers, and Mayan Shamans: The Terrible and Fine Allure of the Spirits of Capital
Diane Nelson, Pirates, Robbers, and Mayan Shamans: The Terrible and Fine Allure of the Spirits of Capital, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3, Science Fiction and Globalization (November 2012), pp. 437-458
Banal, Familiar, and Enrapturing: Financial Enchantment After Guatemala's Genocide
Banal, Familiar, and Enrapturing:Financial Enchantment After Guatemala's Genocide Diane M. Nelson (bio) Maybe I should start with the world that has made conspiracy theory not only possible (and popular) but ever present, unavoidable, pervasive, compulsive, fun, frightening, and fascinating. . . . The networked world of system and power. . . . The burgeoning new world order of starkly divided camps where haves and have-nots have become, more simp…
Cultural Anthropology Playlists
Introduction: Number as Inventive Frontier
Reckoning the after/math of war in Guatemala
Working from multiple meanings of reckoning (to count, to settle rewards or penalties, to pay a bill, to measure possibilities for the future), this essay explores the post-war in Guatemala and the work of, and struggles over, number in making different people and experiences count. The peace treaty signed in 1996 instituted a truth commission and efforts to bring justice to the victims. The commission's quantifications of 250,000 dead, 93 percen…
Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala
Anthropologist Discovers Legendary Two-Faced Indian
Changes in fire regimes since the Last Glacial Maximum: An assessment based on a global synthesis and analysis of charcoal data
The Cultural Agency of Wounded Bodies Politic: Ethnicity and Gender as Prosthetic Support in Postwar Guatemala
Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia. Joanne Rappaport
Introduction: Number as Inventive Frontier
Stumped Identities: Body Image, Bodies Politic, and the Mujer Maya as Prosthetic
Maya Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala
Indian Giver or Nobel Savage: Duping, Assumptions of Identity, and Other Double Entendres in Rigoberta Menchú Turn's Stoll/En Past
I address the emotional debate over David Stoll's claims that parts of Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Turn's testimonial are untrue. Rather than arguing for or against either "side", I negotiate the double entendre of "Indian giver" and the assumptions that structure the arguments that make up the debate. I track how such assumptions of identity involve a detour through gendered, ethnic, and transnational difference. Transactions such as gifting…
Reckoning the after/math of war in Guatemala
Working from multiple meanings of reckoning (to count, to settle rewards or penalties, to pay a bill, to measure possibilities for the future), this essay explores the post-war in Guatemala and the work of, and struggles over, number in making different people and experiences count. The peace treaty signed in 1996 instituted a truth commission and efforts to bring justice to the victims. The commission's quantifications of 250,000 dead, 93 percen…
Phantom Limbs and Invisible Hands: Bodies, Prosthetics, and Late Capitalist Identifications
pros-the-sis (pras'tho sis) n. 1. [NL. fr. Gr. addition, fr. prostithenai to add to, fr. pros in addition to, +tithenai to place, DO] Med. a) the replacement of a missing part of the body, as a limb, eye, or tooth, by an artificial substitute Corp. b) tool, support, phantasmatic structures Cyb. c) Hooked on technology, able to send a whole part of myself out, an extension of my will, of my instrumentality Fem. d) overcoming a lack of presence, th…
Gendering the Ethnic-National Question: Rigoberta Menchu Jokes and the Out-Skirts of Fashioning Identity
Low Intensities
This essay opens with one of hundreds of massacres carried out in the early 1980s in Guatemala by agents of the military state. The killing was meant to depopulate the Rio Negro valley to make way for a hydroelectric dam. Like much of the violence of the 36-year conflict, it was low-tech and carried out by civil patrollers, which is perhaps why the Guatemalan civil war was considered a "low intensity conflict" by US Army definitions: "below conve…
Guatemala’s genocide trial and the nexus of racism and counterinsurgency
An elderly man sits accused in a cavernous courtroom in Guatemala City wearing noise-blocking headphones. Before him are three Guatemalan judges, two of them women, from the Special Tribunal for Hi
A retomada da língua Kariri-Xocó
Desde 1989, a comunidade indígena Kariri-Xocó do estado de Alagoas, Brasil, se envolve em um processo singular de revitalização cultural. Trabalhamos para recuperar nossa língua ancestral, aproveitando as memórias da comunidade por meio de músicas, histórias e rituais, preenchendo assim lacunas em nosso vocabulário. Alguns de nós distribuímos listas de palavras para jovens e adultos da comunidade via WhatsApp, enquanto outros abriram uma escola p…
Banal, Familiar, and Enrapturing: Financial Enchantment After Guatemala's Genocide
Banal, Familiar, and Enrapturing:Financial Enchantment After Guatemala's Genocide Diane M. Nelson (bio) Maybe I should start with the world that has made conspiracy theory not only possible (and popular) but ever present, unavoidable, pervasive, compulsive, fun, frightening, and fascinating. . . . The networked world of system and power. . . . The burgeoning new world order of starkly divided camps where haves and have-nots have become, more simp…
Crucifixion stories, the 1869 Caste War of Chiapas, and negative consciousness: A Disruptive Subaltern Study
In this article I apply the methodology of the Subaltern Studies group, especially Ranajit Guha's theory of negative consciousness, to an instance of indigenous insurgency in Mesoamerica. During the Caste War of Chiapas, 1867-69, the Maya apparently crucified a boy and, emboldened by this "Indian Christ," they swept out of the hills killing non-Indians indiscriminately. I argue not only that Guha's "elementary aspects of peasant insurgency" (1983…
Hydroelectric Chimeras and "Our" Mayan Rivers: De-inscribing Security in Guatemala
This essay is written in the wake of Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war, grounded in the Cold War-Doctrine of National Security which understood Indigenous people as "internal enemy." People who joined social movements were also seeking security: bodily integrity, land, a living wage. For Indigenous people, it was security to be who they are: speaking their languages, practicing their spirituality and lifeways. Before, during, and after the wa…
The Gender of the Number
Family-friendly work perceptions: A cross country analysis
Purpose An international archival data set resulting from a survey of workers in 27 countries is studied, examining certain individual factors affecting family-friendly work perceptions (FFWP) beginning within the USA and, then, studying FFWP across a select group of six countries, specifically comparing the USA to Bulgaria, Denmark, Japan, Russia and South Africa. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews studies on gender differences affect…
Bonesetting: The algebra of genocide
Genocide rulings should not care about numbers. Legally, proving the intent to destroy a people in whole or in part is what counts. Yet numbers are vital actants in the often decades-long lead-up to trials. Aggregate numbers give weight to the specificity of individual testimony, statistical estimates can transform missing people into cold, hard facts, and algorithms can reveal ‘excess death’, even when forensic anthropologists cannot find all th…
A Social Science Fiction of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery: The Calcutta Chromosome , the Colonial Laboratory, and the Postcolonial New Human
Using critical studes of technology, medicine, and empire to analyze Europe’s colonies as laboratories of modernity where both work (labor) and slippage (labi) occur, this essay explores the phenomenon of social science fiction by examining the novel The Calcutta Chromosome, written by social scientist Amitav Ghosh. The Calcutta Chromosome is a mystery thriller in the guise of sf and alternative history that explores a range of human/technology i…
The Horror: The Subject of Desire in Postcolonial Studies
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Anne McClintock. New York: Routledge, 1995. 449 pp.Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 238 pp.Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. Robert J. C. Young. London: Routledge, 1995.236 pp
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Elizabeth Grosz
Lead poisoning among migrant children in New York State
Potentially hazardous painted surfaces were found in 40% of 166 dwelling units surveyed in 97 upstate New York migrant labor camps, a figure substantially lower than comparable surveys in upstate New York high risk urban areas. Blood samples obtained from 79 migrant children in 1972 revealed only one child with blood lead level above 40 mug per 100 ml as compared to a 21.6% yield from 5,733 high risk urban area children. A second screening progra…
The Independent Producer
A POOR juggler once joined a monastic order-so the story goesand grew very sad because he had none of the talents with which his learned brother friars so easily and obviously won the friendship of God. Finally, he determined to make an offering of the only thing he had, his skill at juggling. The friars were horrified to find him on his knees performing his lowly art before the altar in the chapel. They were about to stop him when they beheld an…
The Independent Producer
A POOR juggler once joined a monastic order-so the story goesand grew very sad because he had none of the talents with which his learned brother friars so easily and obviously won the friendship of God. Finally, he determined to make an offering of the only thing he had, his skill at juggling. The friars were horrified to find him on his knees performing his lowly art before the altar in the chapel. They were about to stop him when they beheld an…
Lead poisoning among migrant children in New York State
Potentially hazardous painted surfaces were found in 40% of 166 dwelling units surveyed in 97 upstate New York migrant labor camps, a figure substantially lower than comparable surveys in upstate New York high risk urban areas. Blood samples obtained from 79 migrant children in 1972 revealed only one child with blood lead level above 40 mug per 100 ml as compared to a 21.6% yield from 5,733 high risk urban area children. A second screening progra…
Imagery of the archetypal feminine in the works of six women filmmakers
Bronze "Ming-ch'i" Vessels with Painted Decoration: A Regional Study in Han Pictorialism
Gendering the Ethnic-National Question: Rigoberta Menchu Jokes and the Out-Skirts of Fashioning Identity
Maya Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Elizabeth Grosz
Crucifixion stories, the 1869 Caste War of Chiapas, and negative consciousness: A Disruptive Subaltern Study
In this article I apply the methodology of the Subaltern Studies group, especially Ranajit Guha's theory of negative consciousness, to an instance of indigenous insurgency in Mesoamerica. During the Caste War of Chiapas, 1867-69, the Maya apparently crucified a boy and, emboldened by this "Indian Christ," they swept out of the hills killing non-Indians indiscriminately. I argue not only that Guha's "elementary aspects of peasant insurgency" (1983…
The Horror: The Subject of Desire in Postcolonial Studies
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Anne McClintock. New York: Routledge, 1995. 449 pp.Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 238 pp.Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. Robert J. C. Young. London: Routledge, 1995.236 pp
Case Competition in Finnish
In this article, the traditional analysis of grammatical case in Finnish - in which the form of the object depends on the presence of an overt subject — is reworked within a formal syntactic framework. Within the Case competition model adopted here, the role of argument structure in case assignment, captured by Burzio's Generalization, plays a vital role in the underlying mechanisms of the case system: only when a verb governs two arguments, one …
Perpetual Creation and Decomposition: Bodies, Gender, and Desire in The Assumptions Of A Guatemalan Discourse of Mestizaje
Assumptions about bodies, gender, and desire are explored in an examination of Marta Casaus Arzú's book Guatemala: Linaje y Racismo. Widely discussed in a historic moment marked by the Columbus Quincentennial, the Christian millenium, and the U.N. timetable for implementing peace accords signed in 1996, the book looks critically at the way racism and kinship work together to maintain unequal class relations. She argues against racist discourses w…
Perpetual Creation and Decomposition: Bodies, Gender, and Desire in The Assumptions Of A Guatemalan Discourse of Mestizaje
Love in a Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in Latin America
Love in. Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in Latin America. Nancy Caro Hollander. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. xi. 271 pp., notes, index
Stumped Identities: Body Image, Bodies Politic, and the Mujer Maya as Prosthetic
Phantom Limbs and Invisible Hands: Bodies, Prosthetics, and Late Capitalist Identifications
pros-the-sis (pras'tho sis) n. 1. [NL. fr. Gr. addition, fr. prostithenai to add to, fr. pros in addition to, +tithenai to place, DO] Med. a) the replacement of a missing part of the body, as a limb, eye, or tooth, by an artificial substitute Corp. b) tool, support, phantasmatic structures Cyb. c) Hooked on technology, able to send a whole part of myself out, an extension of my will, of my instrumentality Fem. d) overcoming a lack of presence, th…
Indian Giver or Nobel Savage: Duping, Assumptions of Identity, and Other Double Entendres in Rigoberta Menchú Turn's Stoll/En Past
I address the emotional debate over David Stoll's claims that parts of Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Turn's testimonial are untrue. Rather than arguing for or against either "side", I negotiate the double entendre of "Indian giver" and the assumptions that structure the arguments that make up the debate. I track how such assumptions of identity involve a detour through gendered, ethnic, and transnational difference. Transactions such as gifting…
“The More You Kill the More You Will Live”: The Maya, “Race,” and Biopolitical Hopes for Peace in Guatemala
A Social Science Fiction of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery: The Calcutta Chromosome , the Colonial Laboratory, and the Postcolonial New Human
Using critical studes of technology, medicine, and empire to analyze Europe’s colonies as laboratories of modernity where both work (labor) and slippage (labi) occur, this essay explores the phenomenon of social science fiction by examining the novel The Calcutta Chromosome, written by social scientist Amitav Ghosh. The Calcutta Chromosome is a mystery thriller in the guise of sf and alternative history that explores a range of human/technology i…
Chiapas: Ombligo del mundo/Navel of the Neoliberal Militarized World
The Cultural Agency of Wounded Bodies Politic: Ethnicity and Gender as Prosthetic Support in Postwar Guatemala
Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia. Joanne Rappaport
Changes in fire regimes since the Last Glacial Maximum: An assessment based on a global synthesis and analysis of charcoal data
Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala
Anthropologist Discovers Legendary Two-Faced Indian
Introduction: Number as Inventive Frontier
Sociology (25 works) · Art (17 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · History (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Gender Studies (9 works)