Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Miskitos'

Grisi Siknis est le calque miskito de l’anglais "crazy sickness". Au-dessous de cette étiquette opaque se cachent une série de crises de transe de masse se reproduisant depuis plus de cinquante ans dans la région de la Moskitia, entre le Nicaragua et le Honduras orientaux. La grisi siknis est un raptus de transe involontaire qui atteint de préférence les jeunes femmes miskitos, une ethnie afro-indigène de langue Misumalpa. Au cours de la transe, les attaqués de grisi siknis (lasa praprukra) tombent en proie à un comportement agressif et/ou auto-agressif associé à des hallucinations récurrentes, ce qui est généralement interprété comme l'attaque d'un esprit maléfique. La diffusion de la maladie est perçue par les affectés comme une épidémie contagieuse redoutable aux thérapies controversées. Néanmoins, le comportement des lasa praprukra présente un certain degré de ritualisation. L’objectif primaire de cette étude, qui s'est appuyée sur une année de recherches ethnographiques au Nicaragua, est de décrire la force de propagation de la grisi siknis, en analysant sa dynamique interactionnelle et la constitution de l'imaginaire qui l'impulse. L’imaginaire iconique lié aux hallucinations de la grisi siknis a été étudié en proposant aux attaqués de dessiner leurs contenus hallucinatoires. Cette pratique, en analogie avec certains traitement chamaniques locaux, a été appréhendée comme une forme de thérapie. Le corpus iconographique produit est analysé dans son double statut de représentation et d’imaginaire incarné doté d’agentivité. En deuxième lieu, la thèse décrit les soubassements neurocognitifs de la crise de transe en esquissant un modèle bayésien de l'induction d'hallucinations sans prise de psychotropes dans des sujets sains. Enfin, le statut social des attaqués de grisi siknis est comparé à ceux de spécialistes rituels tels que les chamanes et des guérisseurs. Une place importante est accordée à la nature ontologiquement instable des esprits impliqués et au rôle de la métacognition dans les modifications psycho-physiologiques qui en favorisent l’expérience et la croyance
Grisi siknis is a Miskito calque of the English expression « crazy sickness ». Behind this secretive label lies a series of mass trance seizures that have been happening for more than fifty years in the Moskitia region, between Eastern Nicaragua and Honduras. Grisi siknis is an involuntary trance attack, mainly affecting young Miskito women, an afro-indigenous population whose language belongs to the Misumalpa family. During the trance, those attacked by grisi siknis (lasa praprukra) show an aggressive/auto-aggressive behaviour associated with repeated hallucinations, which is generally interpreted as the attack of an evil spirit. The spread of the disease is seen by those affected as a dangerous epidemic which therapies are still controversial. Nevertheless, the lasa praprukra behaviour presents a certain degree of ritualization. The main goal of this study, which relies on one year of ethnographic research in Nicaragua, is to describe grisi siknis propagation by analysing its interactional dynamics and the constitution of the imagery impulsing its spread. The iconic imagery of grisi siknis has been studied by proposing to patients to draw their hallucinatory contents. As it shares some analogies with local shamanic treatment, this practice has been apprehended as a form of therapy. The iconographic corpus of grisi siknis drawings is analysed both in representation and in agentive embodied imagery terms. Secondly, this thesis describes the neurocognitive processes behind the seizure by sketching a Bayesian model of the induction of hallucinations in healthy subjects without psychotropic intake.Finally, the social status of lasa praprukra is compared to those of some local ritual specialists as shamans and healers. An important place is accorded to the fluctuating ontology of the spirits mobilized during the trance, as well as to the role held by metacognition in the psycho-physiological modifications encouraging spirits experience and belief

This thesis is concerned with local concepts of kinship and personhood in a small Miskitu village named Kakabila in eastern Nicaragua, and examines how gender identities are organised around a culturally specific variant of the set of practices which anthropologists have glossed as 'brideservice'. Personhood in Kakabila is focussed on the establishment of a stable conjugal partnership. Men usually attach themselves to the households of their conjugal partners, and attempt to legitimate their claims to their wives by uxorilocal postnuptial residence and the practice of long term brideservice. The central concern of many Kakabila men therefore is with demonstrating that they conduct themselves with their affines harmoniously in accordance with village ideals. For many men, however, the eventual objective is to detach their wives from the influence of consanguineal kin, and this produces a tension between the need to project affinal harmony and the concern that actions may be construed in terms of elopement. Kakabila women, however, tend to be much more concerned with constructing networks of symbolic exchange and mutual assistance among themselves, particularly with their consanguineal kinswomen. In many cases, therefore, women resist the attempts of husbands and sons-in-law to disrupt these networks, and organise their actions around ensuring that errant husbands and junior male affines adequately supply them with sufficient symbolic capital to adequately maintain and cultivate these networks. This thesis, therefore, suggests a very specific formulation of the logic of gender identities in Kakabila, where brideservice is as much a style of distribution as it is a 'style of consumption' (Collier and Rosaldo 1981: 275), based on a particular disjunction between men's and women's motivations. This thesis also considers the changes in Miskitu kinship in terms of changes which have taken place among the Miskitu during the last three hundred years, particularly the marked trading and political imbalances brought about by long term contact with the English speaking Caribbean countries. The disappearance of the historically attested distinction between cross and parallel cousins and the serial exchange of offspring and siblings, and the emergence of uxorilocal postnuptial residence, are analysed in terms of a gradual historical reformulation of Miskitu notions of affinity which owes a great deal to these regional contacts. An ethnographically and historically informed analysis for these transformations is considered, which in turn is used to shed light on gender identities and the practice of brideservice in present day Kakabila.

In 1742, the settlement of Augusta was established as an outpost of English royalization on Roatán Island, Honduras. This military camp housed a mix of English soldiers, English colonists, and local indigenous Miskitu peoples. While the settlement was occupied for only a brief span of seven years, the material record of the community provides insight into Miskitu-English interactions during the royalization process. Royalization encompassed strategies deployed by the English Crown to bring about loyalty to the state. In this dissertation, I discuss the concept of royalization from an agent-centered perspective to consider the intentions behind the occupants' usage of objects and spaces in everyday practice. This interdisciplinary research integrates documentary evidence with the results of four field seasons of archaeological investigations, which have unearthed mixed deposits of English and Miskitu material culture. I contend that such deposits indicate that Augusta's occupants were participants in the royalization process, but that these strategies were not fluid or enforced. The royalization of Augusta was complicated by a number of factors including the settlement's distance from the Crown, its local environment, and the diversity of its occupants. By considering the historical and archaeological evidence, I contend that elements of English lifestyles were integrated into Miskitu identity, and that this integration reveals some of the ways in which the process of royalization was adapted to the unique social and natural landscape of the western Caribbean.

Šiame darbe pateiktas vabalų įvairovės tyrimas, kuris buvo vykdytas Ylių kaime (Raseinių rajone, Nemakščių seniūnijoje), mišriame miške. Darbo tikslas buvo nustatyti Ylių kaimo miško paklotėje aptinkamų vabalų įvairovę ir rūšių santykinį gausumą, o darbo uždaviniai, įvertinti miško paklotėje gyvenančių vabalų rūšių įvairovę, santykinį gausumą, nustatyti, kokiuose biotopuose kokios rūšys aptinkamos ir patikrinti ar vabalų aktyvumas priklauso nuo meteorologinių veiksnių.
In this final thesis we present the research of bugs’ diversity, which was performed in mixed forest in Yliai village (region of Raseiniai, Nemakščiai township). The purpose of the work was to estimate the diversity and comparative richness of bugs species, living in forest’s litter of Yliai village, and the main tasks of the work were to evaluate the diversity types, relationship and comparative richness of bugs and in what biotopes what species of bugs actually live and to check whether bugs activity depends on metrological factors.

This dissertation examines the military occupation of the Afro-Indigenous Moskitia region of Central America in the context of the “War on Drugs.” Despite the ideological differences professed by the regimes that have clung to power in Nicaragua and Honduras from the late 2000s to 2020, both governments have channeled “anti-narcotics” military assistance from the United States to install Army and Navy outposts in practically every Caribbean Afro-Indigenous coastal village during the last decade. For the first time in history, Miskitu male soldiers have been systematically recruited and deployed to these new posts. While the War on Drugs is often theorized as a “thanatopolitical” intervention enforced by disembedded, sovereign state forces, this dissertation focuses instead on the everyday life of petty sovereignty: soldiers working in contexts where state and market infrastructure is rudimentary, and where they typically turn to local villagers for labor, supplies, and logistical support. Violating military rules, Nicaraguan and Honduran soldiers habitually find sexual and romantic companionship in Miskitu villages. Ricocheting between the vantage point of soldiers, their lovers and former lovers, occasional and dedicated drug merchants, and other residents of Miskitu villages across the Nicaragua-Honduras border, the dissertation interrogates Central American security regimes not only in relation to the history of war and extractivism in Afro-Indigenous regions, but also vis-à-vis Afro-Indigenous kinship and gender norms, property forms and economic practices, and overlapping jurisdictions of regional governance. Based on 27 months of participant-observation research in occupied Miskitu villages between 2014 and 2018, the dissertation compares the operations of the national armed forces of Nicaragua and Honduras to those of the United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). In 2012, the DEA launched a 90-day, drug-interdiction “pilot program” code-named Operation Anvil in Miskitu land under Honduran jurisdiction. The operation manifested differentiated practices of articulation and disarticulation across various spatial scales: a peculiar form of articulation to the Honduran central government –which DEA saw as a corrupt but corrigible ally in the fight against drug trafficking— and a radical form of disarticulation vis-à-vis Miskitu regional authorities—who were perceived, alternatingly and contradictorily, as 1) inexistent, 2) irrelevant, 3) nomadic, 4) foreign to the region, or 5) hopelessly corrupt. This imaginary gave shape to a governmental intervention that relegated indigenous criminalization to a discourse of last resort, but that upheld nation-state sovereignty over the Moskitia and elided all the questions of indigenous economic and political autonomy which have been central to the Moskitia’s regional politics since the 1980s. DEA agents disavowed relationships with regional authorities and residents on an a priori basis. In combination with the privileged forms of legal immunity protecting US law enforcement and military officials, such disavowal carried homicidal consequences. The Nicaraguan and Honduran militaries, on the other hand, interact closely with local residents, Afro-Indigenous authorities, and drug merchants. These relationships represent both resources and risks for Nicaragua and Honduras as geopolitically subordinate states. The risks largely derive from the contradictory demands of superordinate geopolitical entities that Nicaragua and Honduras “respect indigenous human rights” and simultaneously participate in the hemispheric “war on drugs.” Nicaragua and Honduras have addressed this contradiction by organizing multiculturalism and militarization on the basis of indirect rule. Indirect rule involves the limited incorporation of indigenous forms of socioeconomic and political organization into state governance, as well as the appointment of regional intermediaries such as Miskitu soldiers. These intermediaries act as lightning rods onto whom state institutions might displace responsibility. More than a “hearts and minds” strategy of counterinsurgency, military indirect rule fosters displacement and sublimation: displacement of risk towards the lower, racialized levels of governance; sublimation of refusal of the occupation towards questions of sex, love, and parental abandonment.

This thesis examines the concept of self-determination, as defined by competent international agencies. Analyzing the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement and the Estatuto de Ia Autonomia de las Regiones de Ia Costa Atlantica de Nicaragua (Autonomy Statute for the Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua), this work proposes that these two laws of legislation do provide a starting point for the Inuit and the Miskitu-nani to definitely begin to work towards achieving a degree of self-determination within the nation-states in which these peoples live. After analyzing the historic development of the concept of self-determination and placing the Inuit and the Miskitu-nani in a theoretical framework of internal colonization, this work looks at the history and background of both peoples as well as at the final documents: the Law of Autonomy, the Nunavut Final Agreement and the Nunavut Law. Following a comparison and an analysis of these agreements, it is proposed that they represent an initial political step that, by providing some self- administration, potentially opens a road to self-determination for these Aboriginal nations —self-determination as defined by international agencies and accepted by most member states of the United Nations.