This dissertation presents an intersubjective ethnography of repatriation in Rapa Nui. The central problem addressed in this study arises by recognizing that the debates around repatriation and the “reburial issue” are grounded in an epistemological friction. Throughout this dissertation I contend that Rapanui understandings of ivi tupuna or ancestral remains conflict dramatically with the widespread understanding held by non-indigenous, both scientists and beyond. As this study demonstrates, the Rapanui people have their own ontology, according to which they perceive being and beings in the world very differently than those of us influenced by Western worldviews. They understand the ancestors and other beings they co-exist with as persons. For the Rapanui, ivi tupuna have thus an ontological status: they are the ancestors, with whom they relate by haka ara, genealogy. As persons, they are capable of sharing their distinctive knowledges and mana with other beings, humans included. This genealogical and epistemological relation connects the living and the dead with their history, land, and knowledges. Scholars have very often ignored this distinctive ontology promoting a scholarly tradition that objectifies Rapanui systems of knowing and relating. In doing so, they dehumanize relations between a people and their heritage. The repatriation debate eloquently demonstrates the dramatic consequences of this epistemological conflict. First, repatriation activists have been particularly eloquent in asserting the destructive consequences of Western misinterpretation and appropriation of indigenous ancestors and knowledges. Second, the repatriation of the ancestors and ceremonial materials have helped indigenous communities around the globe maintain and revitalize their traditional systems of knowing and relating, re-connecting peoples with their histories and self-knowledges. Third, the repatriation movement has urged a new paradigm for the careful dealing of indigenous ancestors and living materials, rethinking the scientific endeavor and opening a space for a new generation of collaboration based on greater understanding and respect. This conflict between ontological and objectifying views expands to the broader field of indigenous studies, the repatriation lens working here as a microcosm revealing its grave consequences to indigenous peoples and their cultures.

This doctoral dissertation traces the relational intersections of art, land, and culture to demonstrate a continuum of Lakota intellectual traditions. Methodologically and theoretically, Indigenous articulations of relationality are the primary tool I use to communicate Lakota kinship values' interrelatedness. I illustrate a Lakota relationality through Lakota cultural connections to other-than-human beings and the use of creative practices as established through storytelling, poetry, and material culture that is represented within an accessible articulation of Oč�ti Šak�wiŋ (Northern Plains tribal) communities. My analysis applies Lakota concepts of ikč�, the everyday, and w�wayupike, ingenuity, to reify a continuum of Oč�ti Šak�wiŋ artistic engagements. I concentrate on Lakota culture, which I know intimately, and employ self-reflexivity to articulate a Lakota relationality in present-day terms. My research engages Indigenous feminist praxis, autoethnographic and ethnographic methods with family members, regional Lakota artists, local Lakota culture bearers, and Lakota community organizers working and creating in the Northern Plains region. I analyze everyday examples of creative Lakota culture not confined by formal institutions like popular art galleries or non-native museums. W�wayupike: Relational Practices Between Art, Land, and Culture contributes to ongoing conversations about how Indigenous communities continue to adapt, evolve, and find joy—as they have always done—in the face of settler colonialism, structural racism, and the long historical trajectory of oppression in what is now the United States.

This ethnography presents a study of Rapanui worldviews and examines land-being relations in Rapa Nui from both ontological and historical perspectives. Informed by Rapanui oral traditions, I provide a preliminary exploration of Rapanui ontological concepts in relation to the land in order to explain how they are fundamental to understand the political history of this South Pacific Island and its problematic relation with the Chilean nation-state. I present this exploration from an intersubjective approach that integrates Rapanui hermeneutics into the scholarly discourse. In doing so, this ethnography problematizes the primitivization of indigenous peoples by a scholarly tradition that has often depersonalized land as well as dichotomized social realities through the imposition of its own modernist ontological assumptions. By asserting the validity and complexity of Rapanui forms of knowledge, this ethnography aims to contribute to the Rapanui work of decolonization by articulating Rapanui arguments on land-being relations beyond simplistic representations of Rapanui "spirituality" and more as efficacious discourses of resistance.

The Indigenous Wixárika community, from Western México, commonly known as the “Huichol,” continues to practice ancestral traditions despite the numerous families who have left their motherland to re-establish communities in urban areas in the state of Nayarit, México. As a direct result of these moves, Wixárika families have adopted mestizo ways of living, in regards to education and modes of production. This thesis explores how they implement forms of resistance in urban communities, allowing them to continue practicing Wixárika rituals and ceremonies. Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate how Wixárika women transform their urban space to cultural knowledge. I include a discussion on how women use physical labor to transmit cultural identity in urban areas in practices that include preparation of corn-based meals and art production such as beading or weaving. In addition, the use of poetics in traditional Wixárika names provides the metaphors to link children and youth to cultural identity. This thesis serves as a case study to illustrate how Indigenous women empower children by providing the skills to continue the practice community-based knowledge.

A New Peasant Question exposes how the invalidation of peasant knowledge over the past two hundred years has covered over the violent dispossession and exploitation of peasant populations in the Yugoslav region. This research builds on previous work in folklore, anthropology, and performance studies, which has problematized the colonial investments of anthropology and the racism undergirding white modern artists’ infatuation with the visual cultures of colonized peoples. The dissertation extends this line of analysis to representations of Yugoslav peasants and their cultural practices (most commonly referred to as “folklore”). I consider how and why peasants in the Yugoslav region came to be widely seen as backwards, superstitious, and obstinate. To understand this process and its consequences, I examine ethnographic photography, peasant painting, nationalist folklore, performance and video art, and contemporary village healing practices. Combining visual and discourse analysis with ethnographic and archival research methods, this dissertation traces the changing representations of peasants’ relationships to land in the Yugoslav region from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. As the Yugoslav region currently witnesses some of the worst air quality in the world, an unresolved waste management crisis, and the damming of the last “wild rivers” in Europe, the enduring contradictions of nineteenth and twentieth-century responses to the Peasant Question provoke us to both think critically about the peasant’s historical trajectory in the region and also find opportunities for actualizing alternative horizons.

The dissertation begins with an introduction, which sketches out the history of the Yugoslav region, the history of political and aesthetic representations of the peasant, and the convergent histories of peasant dispossession and European colonial conquest. Following the introduction, the dissertation contains five body chapters that address different structural and historical dimensions of the peasant’s aesthetic and cultural role in Yugoslav political projects over the last one hundred years. The first chapter examines ethnographic village photography produced by ethnographers from Serbia and the Habsburg metropole prior to the First World War. Ethnographic photography and related Romantic discourses on Balkan peasants of this period reveal how imperialists sought to take the peasant out of time in order to invalidate their claims to land and self-determination. The second chapter pulls apart the relationship between communist fine artists and peasant artists in interwar Croatia and analyzes the significant role of self-taught peasant artists in Yugoslav socialism. An anti-Romantic contrast to the pre-war period, the communist-peasant-artist alliances of the interwar period through the early days of socialist Yugoslavia authoritatively recognize peasants as agents of political transformation. The third chapter examines the capture of folklore by Serbian nationalists during the Yugoslav Wars. Tracing the invention of nationalist folklore back to the early-nineteenth century, I argue for the recuperation of popular traditions that have been excluded from the official oeuvre of Yugoslav folklore. The fourth chapter addresses the invocation of rural Balkan traditions by performance and video artists in the postsocialist period. The postsocialist period is characterized by contradiction, thus we see the simultaneous use of Balkan traditions as a critique of imposed austerity and the dismantling of social welfare as well as the revival of a Romantic representation of the rural subject as someone outside of time, without a political life or future. The final chapter analyzes the contemporary experiences of women and men in rural Serbia and North Macedonia, who practice ecologically-engaged forms of traditional medicine while negotiating the precarious material conditions of the village. In this chapter, I demonstrate how traditional healers’ anti-essentialist vision of bodies and the natural world provides an enduring Balkan anticapitalist model for revolutionary praxis. The conclusion reflects on all previous chapters and argues for the importance of continued research on peasant knowledges and practices in our present global context of food insecurity and climate catastrophe.

As cultural practitioners, traditional healers in Macedonia and eastern Serbia negotiate the materiality of the sick body by facilitating aesthetic encounters. Bajanje healers manipulate words, lead, plants, water, and other materials to transform their guests’ relationships to health. Within the bajanje encounter, healers create intimate, culturally-sanctioned spaces through which to materially intervene in their guests’ mental and physical health. Negotiating shame and vulnerability, bajanje healers empower individual members of rural Serbian and Macedonian villages to maintain their own health and the health of their communities. Calling upon a long traditional lineage, these healers delineate a community that extends through innumerable past and future generations. By recognizing how bajanje weaves itself into the daily, material routines of healers and their guests, I propose that we recognize bajanje as part of everyday life and by extension that we recognize bajanje as contemporary and enduring.

My thesis explores how interpersonal relationships between women healers and non-human persons (such as leluhur, or ancestral souls, and nitung, or nature/guardian beings) in the Lamaholot region of East Indonesia demonstrate sophisticated understandings of health beyond Western biomedical definitions. Building on a previous five-month study which expanded my connections with healers on the island of Lembata, I conducted a month-long oral history collaboration with a family of local healers and their diverse acquaintances on how local healing practices inform historic identity and psycho-social well-being. As Indonesia’s Ministry of Health imposes increasingly stringent laws on “wild” or unregulated medicine, local populations increasingly embrace Western, technoscientific models of health and safety. This, alongside the increased influx of affordable technologies (especially smartphones and laptops), causes kinship and identity to also transform. In 2006, the government of Lembata passed a law which prohibited all unlicensed traditional healers from providing ingestible or prescriptive treatment in any capacity. The legal discernment of 2009 between institutionalized health systems and traditional healers shifted public views on epistemologies previously upheld for centuries. My collaborators and I work to collect, and later visually depict through creative nonfiction, an archive of personal histories. This collection of microhistories will serve as a reference for Lamaholot communities who regularly discuss the value of passing down local knowledges to their youth. Throughout this thesis, I explore how local knowledge systems partially “travel” across temporal and generational boundaries within Lembata, and also how these knowledge systems endure transformation across geographic distances. I conclude that the longevity of local healing knowledge depends on how locals a) maintain practices for remembering past identities, b) adapt to adjacent knowledge systems without being overpowered by contending epistemologies, and c) contribute new or pertinent notions of the possible.