6th Annual Postgraduate

Anthropology Conference

Wednesday 24th April 2013

Event Programme

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Contents

Welcome Page 2

Timetable Page 3

Session 1 Abstracts Page 4

Session 2 Abstracts Page 8

Session 3 Abstracts Page 11

Session 4 Abstracts Page 13

Poster Presentations Page 16

Feedback and Acknowledgements Page 17

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Welcome!

Dear Staff and Students,

Welcome to the 6th

Annual Postgraduate Anthropology Conference!

As a student-led conference, this is an opportunity for postgraduate students to

practice their presentation skills and gain feedback from their peers in an informal

environment. Please take advantage of our feedback forms; these are designed for the

audience to provide valuable, constructive feedback to the presenters.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to approach one of the committee

members.

We hope you find the day engaging and enjoy the wide range of research topics.

--

The Postgraduate Anthropology Conference Organising Committee 2013

Becky Hamilton

Chris Akiki

Diana Vonnak

Emily Rankin

Michelle Tetla

Rei Shimoda

Steph Morris

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Timetable

• 9:00-9:30 Coffee and registration

• 9:30-9:45 Welcome

• Session 1

1. 9:45-10:05 Beth Allen

2. 10:10-10:30 Elise Gayraud

3. 10:30-10:50 Yvonne Hornby-Turner

4. 10:55-11:15 Caroline Walters

• 11:15-11:45 Coffee break

• Session 2

5. 11:45-12:05 Kim Webb

6. 12:05-12:25 Natasha Constant

7. 12:25-12:45 Frances Thirlway

• 12:45-13:30 Lunch

• Session 3

8. 13:30-13:50 Nikola Balaš

9. 13:50-14:10 Jamie-Leigh Ruse

10. 14:10-14:30 Elena Burgos-Martínez

• 14:30-15:00 Coffee break

o Informal question time for oral and poster presenters

• Session 4

11. 15.00-15:20 Shona Jane Lee

12. 15:20-15:40 Maria Kouvarou

13. 15:40-16.00 Marius Kempe

• 16.00-16:15 Coffee break

o Informal question time for oral and poster presenters

• 16:15 Prizes and Closing

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Session 1: 9:45-10:05 Beth Allen

Opening Doors, Unlocking Resilience : Building resilience with social housing tenants

This presentation will explore the initial findings of a longitudinal qualitative study aiming to

develop a deeper understanding of family resilience in poor neighbourhoods with a

geographical focus on Kingston-Upon-Hull. The research is examining the potential of the

sustainable livelihoods approach as a means of enhancing resilience within families. Through

periodic face-to-face interviews incorporating visual tools, the research takes an in depth look at

the actual experiences of families living in poor neighbourhoods, exploring the concept of

resilience and providing a rich source of qualitative data at a household level. A pilot study

has been undertaken with a number of social housing tenants using participatory tools

associated with the sustainable livelihoods approach to offer support and advice in light of the

proposed Welfare Reforms, due to be phased in by the government over the coming months.

Sustainable Livelihoods is a recently developed holistic, asset-based framework for anti-poverty

research and practice. It diverts from the traditional perspective of viewing those living in

poverty as a vulnerable, passive and homogenous group and instead aims to build up a picture

of people’s everyday lived experiences, taking the assets and strengths of those living in poverty

as its starting point. The approach takes a broad perspective and does not focus exclusively on

financial assets, but looks at other assets, strengths and resources that are currently available to

those experiencing poverty. Based on this approach, the researcher, also a practitioner with a

Hull-based charity, has developed a unique strategy involving individually tailored support

delivered in the family home. This presentation will highlight the key findings at this stage of

the research, focusing on the primary research themes and the tools used in data collection. It

will also reflect on the challenges and ethical issues of adopting a practitioner/researcher role in

undertaking participatory research with vulnerable families.

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Session 1: 10:10-10:30 Elise Gayraud

The evolution of social interaction in contemporary folk music making in England

Even though the transmission of folk music in the modern world and the lack of involvement of

young people in traditional music can be seen as an issue, as the traditional way of transmission

seems obsolete and not adapted to the youth in the modern world, some cultures have managed

to adapt their teaching to the globalised world. The methods for transmitting folk musical

culture in England have changed substantially from interactions in close communities at regular

pub session gathering a small number of local folk musicians, to the creation of folk and world

music festivals attracting thousands of enthusiasts. These modifications have had a dramatic

impact not only on interaction between the musicians and their audience, but to a wider extent

on perceptions of folk music across society.

Moreover, new organisations, such as Ethno World, and Folkworks in Gateshead, have been

created to promote folk music to a wider audience, offering new dynamic teaching and learning

structures, while greatly influencing repertoires, playing techniques, interpretation, and

encouraging certain types of hybridisation.

Nonetheless, certain factions within the folk scene question the compatibility of these recent

developments with the folk "way of life" and what they consider to be the defining aspects of

their tradition. For them, "the way of learning the tunes" lies at the heart of the tradition.

This paper explores the differing practices and conflicting views of contemporary folk

musicians regarding cultural transmission. It is based on interviews with professional and

amateur musicians, including students specialising in folk music, but also draws from academic

publications and collections of folk tunes.

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Session 1: 10:30-10:50 Yvonne Hornby-Turner

Differences between 9-11 year old British Pakistani and White British girls’ physical activity

and sedentary behaviour

British South Asians are less physically active and may have a diet higher in fat compared with

their White British counterparts. There is self-report evidence suggesting that physical activity

levels of British Pakistani girls are particularly low. This mixed-method study aimed to provide,

objective measurements of physical activity and sedentary time, and self-reported activity

behaviour and dietary intake of British Pakistani and White British girls aged 9 to 11 years.

Eighty-two British Pakistani and 82 White British girls were recruited from seven primary

schools in North-East England. Accelerometry was used to collect objective measurements of

physical activity and sedentary time for four days. Three previous day activity recalls and

multiple pass diet recalls were used to collect self-reported activity behaviour and dietary intake.

British Pakistani girls accumulated: 148 (95% CI: 95, 201) fewer counts per minute, per day; 19

(95% CI: 11, 26) fewer minutes in moderate-to vigorous physical activity and 5% (95% CI: 3,

7) more sedentary time, compared with White British girls. According to activity recalls British

Pakistani girls accumulated: 14 (95% CI: 0.4, 28) fewer minutes, per day, in sport and exercise;

24 (95% CI: 13, 37) fewer minutes in outdoor play and 4 (95% CI: 0.1, 8.3) fewer minutes in

active modes of school transport. There was no significant difference in screen time. British

Pakistani girls gained an additional 1.7 (95% CI: 0.4, 3.3) per cent of their overall energy intake

from fat, compared with White British girls. According to dietary recalls a greater proportion of

British Pakistani girls consumed fast-food as an evening meal (p=0.034) and were more likely

to consume food that had been deep fried (p=0.04) or shallow fried (<0.001) during cooking.

British Pakistani girls were less physically active, more sedentary, and had a diet higher in fat

compared with White British girls. These differences in physical activity and dietary intake may

contribute to the greater risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease in British Pakistani

women. Interventions are needed to address this ethnic group difference.

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Session 1: 10:55-11:15 Caroline Walters

Models of cultural evolution: A mathropologist’s perspective

Mathematical reasoning is a very powerful tool which can be employed to aid our

understanding of complex systems which surround us. By creating a mathematical

representation of the world it is often possible to yield definite solutions to the problems posed

which may not have been apparent otherwise. Yet analysing a problem mathematically and

reaching a solution often requires the model constructed to be a vast over-simplification of a

very complex system and hence the results obtained may have reduced validity in the real-world

context.

By presenting mathematical models for the spread of cultural traits via social learning

mechanisms I will discuss how mathematical methods can offer an insight into human

behavioural dynamics at a population level. I will discuss models of health-related behaviours,

such as smoking or binge drinking, and also models of competing languages which originally

stem from biological models of infectious disease spread and predator-prey models respectively.

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Session 2: 11:45-12:05 Kim Webb

Battling with their past and fighting for their future: a study of the experiences and identities

of military personnel in higher education

Research in the fields of higher education policy and practice show that students who have

served in the British armed forces are a marginalised and excluded group within United

Kingdom (UK) institutions of higher education. Despite a significant number of military

personnel currently studying in universities accounts of their experiences are absent from

academic literature.

This researcher investigated the socio-cultural learning experiences of British armed forces

personnel in UK higher education. Two purposes framed this research: 1. To gain an in-depth

understanding of the opportunities and challenges that British armed forces personnel encounter

during their studies and 2. To ascertain what particular identities these students possess and how

particular experiences influence their construction.

The study is framed within a critical and emancipatory methodology that theoretically draws on

the transformative paradigm aligned to a mixed methods research design. Data sources

comprise of an internet based survey and biographical interviews conducted by telephone, face

to face and Skype.

Preliminary findings challenge hegemonic discourses that situate under-represented students

within a deficit model and reveal that for these military students their particular ideals and

values strongly influence their higher education experiences and identities.

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Session 2: 12:05-12:25 Natasha Constant

Governance, participation and perceptions towards protected areas for conservation in the

Blouberg Mountain Range, South Africa

In the Blouberg Mountain Range, South Africa, African communities’ experiences of

conservation have been shaped by the establishment of protected areas (PAs). To understand the

root causes of behaviours and perceptions towards conservation, as well as the limitations of

current and future conservation initiatives, it is necessary to investigate people’s relationships,

with how PAs govern nature. The study first investigates the impact of socio-economic and

institutional conditions on the provision of benefits to local people and their degree of

participation in PA management. Secondly, the study discusses how people’s environmental

discourses and experiences of conservation have been shaped by historical and recent

governmental regimes. Semi-structured interviews and participant observation techniques were

employed with 30 community members from 6 villages and 10 governmental officials working

for the provincial wildlife authorities and private sector, to discuss the management of PAs and

the relationship between surrounding communities and wildlife authorities. Ethnographic data

reveals that poor socio-economic conditions constrain the ability for PAs to meet basic

infrastructural development, employment opportunities and provide tangible economic benefits

for local people. Current institutional conditions fail to identify clear definitions of the

“beneficiaries” of the reserves, creating ambiguity and poor provisioning of benefits. A lack of

communication between wildlife authorities and neighbouring communities and an inability to

understand tribal institutions excludes local people from participating in PA activities.

Top-down governing structures fail to accommodate the needs of local people, because

decisions are governed by distant governmental actors that have a poor understanding of local

conditions, nor are communities given full capacity to engage in PA management. People’s

perceptions towards PAs are influenced by historical and recent experiences with governmental

regimes over conflicts of land and resource use that promote legacies of disempowerment,

marginalisation and stigmatisation, indicative of a theory of traumatic nature. The impacts of

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protected area establishment have manifested in differential forms; local people’s conservation

discourses, conflict between different user groups and resistance to PA establishment. Potential

strategies for improving relations between rural African communities and PAs in the future are

discussed.

Session 2: 12:25-12:45 Frances Thirlway

Identity, class and community in a former mining village in the North East of England

Tim Strangleman et al (1999) described miners and mining communities as ‘read dualistically -

on the one hand seen as heroic and positive, and on the other regressive and backward’.

Similarly, Joanne Bourke suggests that the term ‘working class community’ is used within two

separate discourses – backward-looking romanticism and forward-looking socialism (Bourke

1993).

I will suggest that these stereotypes are just one element of a wider literature which judges

working class communities in moral terms, usually relating to the presence or lack of

aspirations (and other ‘narratives of lack’ (Lawler 2008)), and the predominance of collective

versus individual values (Hoggart 1966; Sennett and Cobb 1972; Steedman 1987; Skeggs

1997).

I will relate these characterisations of mining settlements to my ethnographic fieldwork and

historical research in the village of Sleetburn, exploring collective versus individual values both

now and historically, the thesis of decline of community, increasing individualisation

(Goldthorpe 1969; Beck 1992; Bauman 2000) and the decline of class identity (Heath 1981). I

will argue that whilst there is not and probably never was a monolithic working-class identity in

Sleetburn, collective values continue to have currency. In the words of Beverley Skeggs, the

project of the self is a Western bourgeois concept – and one which finds limited resonance in

Sleetburn (Skeggs 1994 p. 164).

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Session 3: 13:30-13:50 Nikola Balaš

Mythology Past and Present

Modern people can and do live well without mythology. Some would even go so far as to say

that living without mythology is a necessary condition of the modern world. Nonetheless, at the

outset of the twentieth century, emerging social sciences developed an interesting framework for

an analysis of mythology. Although such frameworks were to be applied to study native cultures,

social scientists used some similes from modern societies. Once fully developed, their

conceptual frameworks can be used to study mythologies within modern societies as well. But

what constitutes modern mythology and myths? What can be described as a manifestation of

mythological experience of modern humans? Can we actually live without myths? In this paper,

I will attempt to present satisfactory answers to these questions using some ethnographic

examples from my own fieldwork.

Session 3: 13:50-14:10 Jamie-Leigh Ruse

The (dis)embodiment of displaced death and the (dis)engaged experience of counting the dead

in Menos Días Aquí, a civilian-led count of the dead of Mexico’s drugs war.

Since 2006 there have been at least 100,000 homicides in Mexico, around 300,000 people have

been disappeared and over 250,000 people have been displaced as a result of the drugs war. In this

paper, by looking at the work of the Barcelona-based association for peace in Mexico, Nuestra

Aparente Rendición (Our Apparent Surrender), I will explore how people participating in a

project which carries out a civilian-led national count of the dead in Mexico, Menos Días Aquí,

experience counting the dead as an interplay between embodiment and detachment, engagement

and distanciation. The alternation between these states affects how counters relate to and

empathise with the dead, how they comprehend the violence and seek to protect themselves from

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too much emotional hurt, and for these volunteers, form an essential way of managing the way in

which they experience their activism, and deal with the realities they encounter as a result of

counting. This paper will be an exploration of how people understand and relate to the violence

occurring in Mexico through empathetic embodiment and perspectival detachment.

Session 3: 14:10-14:30 Elena E Burgos-Martínez

'Hilang Bersama Angin’: a journey through the intertwining nature of environmental change

and language development among two Bajau Tribes of the Celebes Sea.

Indonesia is a region of the world with the highest linguistic and biological diversity. After the

2005 tsunami a wide range of international attention was brought to the ‘Sea Nomads’ throughout

Indonesia, resulting in the settlement of some groups of sea-faring Bajau by erecting pile-houses

over the shallow of the bay along the coast of Indonesia. This research aims to offer a detailed

portrait of how two different groups of Bajau (the sedentary Sama-Bajau and the nomadic Bajau

Pelao) perceive, understand and face constant changes in their environment. And to do so, I will

be focusing on their linguistics practices and how they have developed through different

generations of Bajau. Within the extensive range of language units, I will be focusing on the oral

and lexical aspects of their languages, particularly the words used to identify the different seasons

and the social function of these units within their community; each of these seasonal words relates

to specific fish species. In addition, I will attempt to provide a relevant analysis of different

accounts and discourses through which their environment is constantly constructed and

re-shaped, and the agency of the Bajau in all this. In order to achieve this goal and due to the

life-style of the communities I target, I will be conducting multi-sited and mobile ethnographic

research during the course of 14 months; initially aiming to stay with both Sama-Baja and Bajau

Pelao and also observe their defining interactions and in terms of language development. The

geographical focus of this research will be the coast of North Sulawesi and the area of the Celebes

Sea that borders the region.

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Session 4: 15:00-15:20 Shona Jane Lee

Lifecourse Determinants of Age at Menopause in the Newcastle Thousand Families Study

Understanding determinants of age at menopause is clinically important for several reasons,

given the association of earlier menopause with higher mortality risk profiles and a number of

post-menopausal health problems, while late menopause is associated with an increased risk of

ovarian and breast cancer. The factors which influence variations of age at menopause exert

their effects at various points throughout the lifespan prior to cessation of ovulation, therefore

such variations in age at menopause are best understood from a lifecourse perspective.

This study uses data from female participants in the longitudinal Newcastle Thousand Families

Study to investigate potential lifecourse factors determining age at menopause, calculated

retrospectively from over 200 individuals. Statistical analyses were carried out in order to

investigate correlations between age at menopause and a range of variables including birth

weight, age at menarche, parity, smoking behaviour, alcohol consumption, marital status, and

use of hormonal birth control. Linear regression analysis revealed some significant effects of

smoking and low socio-economic status at birth; however these associations were confounded

after adjusting for the effects of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), hysterectomy and

sterilisation, by which a large proportion of the sample were affected. However, Cox regression

analyses (whereby women falling into these categories were censored) revealed smoking status

to have a significant association with earlier menopause. Owing to the unusually high frequency

of HRT, hysterectomy, and sterilisation cases in this particular cohort of women, it cannot be

definitively concluded whether age at menopause is determined by the factors in question in this

particular sample.

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Session 4: 15:20-15:40 Maria Kouvarou

What do you mean there is no such thing as Greek rock? The development of ‘national’ rock

music and the future of popular music scenes; the case of Greece

It comes as no surprise nowadays to hear a song of any popular music genre and consider this as

a product of our indigenous popular music scene. People find it natural to hear, let’s say, a

Greek band playing a heavy metal song and consider this as ‘authentic’ Greek popular music

production, or a DJ playing a set of techno music of exclusively French production and consider

this as a product of the French national popular music scene. And indeed, both of the examples

are Greek and French popular music respectively. However, these musical developments are

parts of a larger process which needs further discussion; they represent a dialogue between local

musical idioms and certain ‘international’ musical idioms (derived primarily from the USA and

Britain) that have, through the years, gained a standard place in the popular music repertoire of

many countries. Understanding the process requires the observation of the interaction of the

local with the international, and the acknowledgment that this interaction does not operate only

superficially, but local cultures (for the sake of my argument, nations) assimilate the foreign

idioms in ways that express their culture authentically. Thus, their use should be considered in

the light of national musical ‘authenticity’. Music, as many argue, is a cultural force that defines

and is defined by ‘localities’, or, for my purposes, ‘nationalities’. My aim in this paper is to

demonstrate Greek popular music’s gradual transformation from the time of being a (debatably)

‘pure’ Greek popular music, to its current state, after almost sixty years of influence from and

constant dialogue with rock musical idioms. The observation that a major factor for this process

had been the technological development and the advancements of the communications media

will lead to some assumptions about where the popular music of Greece might be heading to

now, a time when the Internet revolution and the excessive availabilities of information defy

any kind of geographical boundaries on the one hand, while on the other hand the current state

of the world nurtures growing nationalistic sentiments.

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Session 4: 15:40-16:00 Marius Kempe

An experimental test of the effect of group size on cultural accumulation

Henrich proposed the hypothesis that in larger populations, more complex technologies can be

maintained. I report the results of an experiment designed to test this hypothesis. Students did

jigsaw puzzles in transmission chains, with two conditions: groups of three, or individuals. In

the individual condition there was no improvement, but in the group condition there was. I will

discuss the implications of this result for human evolution and technological change.

We would like to thank all of the presenters for their hard work and for

making today possible!

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Poster Presentations

Please take the time to question the presenters during the breaks and remember

use your voting slip to vote for your favourite posters! You can also provide

anonymous feedback via our feedback forms.

1 Amanda Deakin: Identifying prosocial motivations in lion tamarins and spider monkeys

using the group service method

2 Chris Howe: Investigating experiences of stress in medical students

3 Dalia Iskander: Adolescents as malaria health promoting actors in Bataraza: a school-based

health education project using Photovoice.

4 Gene Buchanan: To win or to conform. Why elite athletes take performance enhancing drugs

5 Jane Herron: Past, Present...What Future?

6 Kayleigh Carr: Investigating success-variable environments as contexts for childhood

innovation

7 Laura Juan Arroyo: Evolutionary Driving Forces: Sexual dimorphism and geographic

variation in primate species and estimation of sex from craniofacial measures

8 Lucy Frost: Stretching beyond words: An ethnographic study of practice and

professionalisation of medical interpreters in the North-East

9 Megan Wainwright : Breathing And Breathlessness: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary

Disease (COPD) In Uruguay

10 Michelle Tetla: Ethnicity and birth weight: correlating BMI and gestational weight gain

11 Nikolas Drummond: Investigating the Social and Ecological Basis of Cognitive Ability

Relating to the Neocortex, Hippocampus and Cerebellum

12 Parveen Herar: Everyday Evolutionary Medicine

13 Rob Flanagan: Power and prestige amongst internet file sharers - applying traditional

theories of gift exchange in the study of peer-to-peer computer networks

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Thank you for attending the 6th

Annual Postgraduate

Anthropology Conference!

We hope you enjoyed the day!

We would really appreciate it if you could take 2-3 minutes to fill out a feedback

questionnaire. It is a very quick multiple choice questionnaire and completing it would

be really helpful both for us and for future conference organisers. Link and QR code

below:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZYKY8TH

Thank you!

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution to the conference:

Kate Hampshire, Bob Simpson, Sandra Bell and Helen Ball for their time,

participation and providing valuable feedback to the presenters.

Collingwood College for the use of their room and catering services.

All of the staff from Collingwood College, Event Durham, and the University Staff for

their assistance.

Previous committee members for their advice and guidance.

Everyone who has attended the conference for providing insightful comments and

questions.

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http://anthropologi.st/conference/index.html

Email: durhampganthconf@gmail.com

Department of Anthropology

Durham University

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