This dissertation explores some of the ways the African American community in Western Orange County, Virginia adapted to life after emancipation. The interpretation relies upon intersectional materialism, which is rooted in the intellectual legacy of Black Left Feminists. Intersectional materialism rejects the dualities and dichotomies common in dialectical thinking and embraces a polylectical framework that has emerged following the influences of postmodern theorists in the mid to late 20th-century. Polylectical analysis requires the inclusion of a wide array of voices from people positioned across a complex matrix of domination to better understand the structure of that matrix and the possible futures that could be produced from it. This has enabled an understanding of African American material culture that links directly to the ideas of generations of Black intellectuals.

Coal company towns are defined by the experiences of the men who owned and the men who worked in the mines, broadly ignoring the women and families who also inhabited and toiled in these spaces. In the Northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite region, women undertook a variety of methods to change their social positions through the renegotiation of their gender, ethnic, and class identities. Performing ‘proper’ middle class American gender expressions, including through the adoption of culturally-coded objects, provided working class women with greater social power and cultural autonomy within the context of systemic worker deprivation and ubiquitous corporate domination. Drawing on identity performance theories, material culture theories related to gender, class, and migration, and theories of the built environment, I examine how women established identities based in and reinforced by material culture and spatial organization.

This dissertation seeks to ethnographically understand the role of cultural heritage in climate change adaptation decision-making, and the mechanisms by which heritage is used to shape adaptation pathways for responding to climate-induced socio-ecological changes. Cultural heritage can broadly be understood as the practice of engaging with change through an ongoing social processing of the past.

In the last few decades, computational models have become an essential component of our understanding of complex environmental processes. In addition, they are increasingly used as tools for the management of large-scale environmental problems like climate change. As a result, understanding the role that these models play in the socioecological process of environmental management is an important area of inquiry for an environmental anthropology concerned with understanding human-environment interactions. In this dissertation, I examine these roles through an ethnographic study of computational environmental modeling in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

This dissertation develops the concept of joint culture by analyzing the experiences of military service personnel who served in joint assignments through the perspectives of organizational and cognitive anthropology and the application of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and schema analysis grounded in interviewee narratives. This dissertation uses a logical framework to organize and conduct interviews and guide the analysis of interviewee narratives. Concepts and themes from interviews are systematically examined following the logical framework to posit a set of cognitive structures associated with joint culture.

Global projections for climate change impacts produce a startling picture of the future for low-lying coastal communities. The United States’ Chesapeake Bay region and especially marginalized and rural communities will be severely impacted by sea level rise and other changes over the next one hundred years. The concept of resilience has been theorized as a measure of social-ecological system health and as a unifying framework under which people can work together towards climate change adaptation. But it has also been critiqued for the way in which it does not adequately take into account local perspective and experiences, bringing into question the value of this concept as a tool for local communities. We must be sure that the concerns, weaknesses, and strengths of particular local communities are part of the climate change adaptation, decision-making, and planning process in which communities participate.

The goal of this study was to understand how and whether policy and practice relating to violence against women in Uganda, especially Uganda’s Domestic Violence Act of 2010, have had an effect on women’s beliefs and practices, as well as on support and justice for women who experience abuse by their male partners. Research used multi-sited ethnography at transnational, national, and local levels to understand the context that affects what policies are developed, how they are implemented, and how, and whether, women benefit from these.

This dissertation draws on literature and theoretical frameworks of gardening and social ordering that examine early Euro-American and African-American material culture as they came together on the plantation landscape at Wye House. Located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the plantation was home to the Welsh Lloyd family and hundreds of enslaved Africans and African-Americans. Using archaeological and archeobotanical remains of garden related buildings and slave dwellings, this project acknowledges the different possible interactions and understandings of nature at Wye House and how this gave shape to a dynamic, culturally-based, and entangled landscape of imposed and hidden meanings, colonization and resistance.

Twenty years of conflict in northern Uganda has resulted in high rates of gender-based violence, unintended pregnancy and a generation exposed to a lifetime of violence. Understanding gender socialization is critical because gender role differentiation intensifies during adolescence, and hierarchies of power in intimate relationships are established.

This dissertation explores the intersections of race and class within African American communities of the 19th and early 20th centuries in order to expand our understanding of the diversity within this group. By examining materials recovered from archaeological sites in Annapolis, Maryland, this dissertation uses choices in material culture to demonstrate that there were at least two classes present within the African American community in Annapolis between 1850 and 1930.