Wom(b)anism: Reading Relationships Between the Community and the Womb in Sankofa, The Women of Brewster Place, and Corregidora

This project attempts to contribute to the various discourses within the black womanist tradition. In 1983, Alice Walker published her landmark collection of essays entitled In Search of Our Mother Gardens: Womanist Prose. At the outset of the volume, Walker defines the core concept of womanism. After a poetic four-part definition of the term womanist, Walker concludes by stating, 'womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender' (Phillips 19). Although this analogy is critically engaged, the scholarly discourse that emerged in response to Walker's proposition shapes the intellectual inner workings of this project. Certain established concepts (such as ancestral mediation or the laying on of hands) work in conjunction with my own concepts of 'wom(b)anism' and 'the communal womb' to frame the interpretive discussions throughout these pages. Wom(b)anism and the communal womb both emerge from the black feminist and womanist traditions, especially via the role of ancestral mediation but also within the contested discourses on womanism itself. I apply the two concepts (wom(b)anism and the communal womb) to my readings of Haile Gerima's Sankofa, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Gayl Jones' Corregidora. The relationship between the community and women's wombs across each of these texts construct a narrative that features ancestral mediation (or intervention), various acts of violence committed against women's bodies, and the complicated circumstances through which women heal themselves andtheir communities.

Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus apella) Fail to Be Equitable in an Ultimatum Game

The ultimatum game is a commonly used economics game testing humans' sense of fairness. In the game, a "proposer" is given a sum of money and is told they can split it however they want with another human partner. The partner can then either accept the division and both proposer and responder receive the proposed amounts, or the responder can reject the offer and neither player will get anything. Human subjects from most western cultures typically share almost half of an allotted amount, but it remains unknown whether our close primate relatives share this generosity. Recent attempts to present chimpanzees with the ultimatum game have provided inconclusive results, with some studies finding the animals share humans' disposition to behave 'fairly' and others concluding that chimpanzees act selfishly to maximize their own rewards. Capuchin monkeys are known to share many human and chimpanzee social and cooperative behaviors, and this study was the first to present capuchin monkeys with a version of the ultimatum game. Subjects were presented with two differently colored tokens representing different qualitative reward contingencies, one equitable and the other inequitable in favor of the subject proposer. Subjects could select and place one of the tokens in a transfer container. The capuchins were first tested with a "dictator game" where, after the subject monkey selected a token, the rewards (equitable or inequitable) were distributed to the subject and a nearby partner monkey that was not an active participant. The capuchins were then tested on an ultimatum game in which after the subject selected and placed a token in the container, the container was moved to the partner. The partner needed to remove the token and transfer it back to the experimenter for the rewards to be distributed. As such, the partner could reject the subject's offer by refusing to participate and neither would receive a reward. The experiment was conducted to determine if the subject monkey would select the equitable reward option rather than the selfish option in order to maintain the partner's cooperation in the task. Capuchin subjects behaved selfishly and selected the inequitable token significantly more often than the equitable token in both the dictator and ultimatum game with no significant difference in preference between the two games. Interestingly, despite the occasional occurrence of rejection by the partner monkeys (resulting in no reward for the subject), subjects never altered their strategy, continuing to prefer the selfish token. The study may indicate that capuchin monkeys have an inability to judge the effect of their behavior on a conspecific's reward outcome, or an indifference to the outcome if there is an individual cost associated with behaving prosocially.

Assessment of Alcohol Reward in Prairie Voles (Microtus ochrogaster)

The purpose of our study was to assess whether prairie voles find alcohol rewarding. Prairie voles have recently become a species of interest for alcohol studies, which have traditionally used other rodent model species including several different strains of mice and rats. The prairie vole is one of only two known rodent species that readily administers high levels of unsweetened alcohol, implicating it as a potentially effective animal model for studying alcohol abuse. However, voluntary consumption does not necessarily imply that prairie voles find it rewarding. Therefore the purpose of our study was to investigate if alcohol has rewarding properties for prairie voles using three different approaches: place conditioning, flavor conditioning, and immunohistochemistry. Furthermore, we sought to characterize their reward profile and compare it to other commonly used rodent models ¿ C57BL/6 mice, DBA/2J mice, and Sprague-Dawley rats. Place and flavor conditioning are behavioral methods that rely on the learned association between a stimulus and the effects of a drug; the drug of interest in these studies is alcohol. To assess whether prairie voles will demonstrate a conditioned preference for alcohol-paired stimuli, seven place conditioning studies were run that investigated a range of different doses, individual conditioning session durations, and trial durations. Video analysis revealed no difference in the amount of time spent on the alcohol-paired floor, suggesting no conditioned place preference for alcohol. Two flavor conditioning tests were conducted to assess whether voles would demonstrate a preference for an alcohol-paired flavored saccharin solution. Voles demonstrated reduced consumption of the alcohol-paired flavored saccharin solution, regardless of dose or flavor, when alcohol administration occurred after conditioning sessions (p=<0.001). When alcohol was administered before conditioning sessions, no difference in consumption of the alcohol-paired and saline-paired flavored saccharin solutions was seen (p=0.545). Previous studies that have documented similar behavior have hypothesized that this is an example of an anticipatory contrast effect. This theory proposes that prairie voles reduce their intake of a hedonic solution (flavored saccharin solution) in anticipation of later drug administration (alcohol). However, conditioning-based behavioral methods of studying alcohol reward are highly sensitive to the parameters of the conditioned stimulus, thus it is possible that voles will not show preference for alcohol-related stimuli, even if they do find alcohol rewarding. Immunohistochemical analysis supplemented this behavioral data by allowing us to identify specific neural regions that were directly activated in response to the acute administration of alcohol. No difference in the number of activated c-Fos neurons in the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc) core or shell was seen (p=0.3364; p=0.6698) in animals that received an acute injection of alcohol or saline. There was a significant increase in the number of activated c-Fos neurons in the Paraventricular Nucleus of the Hypothalamus (PVN) in alcohol-treated animals compared to saline-treated animals (p=0.0034). There was no difference in the pixel count of activated c-Fos neurons or in the % area activated in the Arcuate Nucleus between alcohol and saline-treated animals (p=0.4523; p=0.3304). In conclusion, the place conditioning studies that were conducted in this thesis suggest that prairie voles do not demonstrate preference or aversion towards alcohol-paired stimuli. The flavor conditioning studies suggest that prairie voles do not demonstrate aversion but rather avoidance of the alcohol-paired flavor in anticipation of future alcohol administration. The preliminary immunohistochemical data collected is inconclusive but cannot rule out the possibility of neuronal activation patterns indicative of reward. Taken together, our data indicate that prairie voles hav

The Importance of Place Names in the Search for Ecosystem-Like Concepts in Indigenous Societies: An Example from the Bolivian Andes

This paper aims to deepen the search for ecosystem-like concepts in indigenous societies by highlighting the importance of place names used by Quechua indigenous farmers from the central Bolivian Andes. Villagers from two communities in the Tunari Mountain Range were asked to list, describe, map and categorize the places they knew on their community’s territory. Results show that place names capture spatially explicit units which integrate biotic and abiotic nature and humans, and that there is an emphasis on topographic terms, highlighting the importance of geodiversity. Farmers’ perspectives differ from the classical view of ecosystems because they ‘humanize’ places, considering them as living beings with agency. Consequently, they do not make a distinction between natural and cultural heritage. Their perspective of the environment is that of a personalized, dynamic relationship with the elements of the natural world that are perceived as living entities. A practical implication of the findings for sustainable development is that since places names make the links between people and the elements of the landscape, toponymy is a tool for ecosystem management rooted in indigenous knowledge. Because place names refer to holistic units linked with people’s experience and spatially explicit, they can be used as an entry point to implement an intercultural dialogue for more sustainable land management.