Papers by Chad Huddleston
The negotiation of Takapuneke: conflicting notions of value of atapusite
Social Identities, Apr 18, 2012
Struggles over indigeneity in Aotearoa/New Zealand have their roots in events that occurred befor... more Struggles over indigeneity in Aotearoa/New Zealand have their roots in events that occurred before the creation of the nation. Ten years before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of relations between Māori and colonial Britain, there was a massacre at the site of Takapuneke. The event helped to give birth to the nation and immediately started the struggle of Māori indigeneity against the increasingly politically dominant colonials. There are parallel struggles in contemporary New Zealand, as the country debates and attempts to rectify the concept of a bi-cultural society. These on-going struggles can help us understand how Māori are able to exercise agency and engage in practices that allow them to promote their indigeneity. The contemporary events around the site of the massacre at Takapuneke will illustrate such a struggle between the local Māori at Onuku and three bureaucratic and civic organizations.
Table o f Contents iii Chapter 1 : Introduction to the Question 1 Examples o f North American Sub... more Table o f Contents iii Chapter 1 : Introduction to the Question 1 Examples o f North American Subsistence 2 Hunting Emergence o f the "Sport Hunter" 5 Significance o f the Problem to Public Policy Statement o f Research Problem Chapter 2: Methods Chapter 3: Results o f the Interviews and Readings Chapter 4: Conclusion Bibliography III
The negotiation of Takapuneke: conflicting notions of value of a tapu site
Social Identities, 2012
Struggles over indigeneity in Aotearoa/New Zealand have their roots in events that occurred befor... more Struggles over indigeneity in Aotearoa/New Zealand have their roots in events that occurred before the creation of the nation. Ten years before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of relations between Māori and colonial Britain, there was a massacre at the site of Takapuneke. The event helped to give birth to the nation and immediately started the struggle of Māori indigeneity against the increasingly politically dominant colonials. There are parallel struggles in contemporary New Zealand, as the country debates and attempts to rectify the concept of a bi-cultural society. These on-going struggles can help us understand how Māori are able to exercise agency and engage in practices that allow them to promote their indigeneity. The contemporary events around the site of the massacre at Takapuneke will illustrate such a struggle between the local Māori at Onuku and three bureaucratic and civic organizations.
Table o f Contents iii Chapter 1 : Introduction to the Question 1 Examples o f North American Sub... more Table o f Contents iii Chapter 1 : Introduction to the Question 1 Examples o f North American Subsistence 2 Hunting Emergence o f the "Sport Hunter" 5 Significance o f the Problem to Public Policy Statement o f Research Problem Chapter 2: Methods Chapter 3: Results o f the Interviews and Readings Chapter 4: Conclusion Bibliography III
This thesis focuses on the contested nature of landscape in New Zealand and on the complex relati... more This thesis focuses on the contested nature of landscape in New Zealand and on the complex relationships and social processes that are associated with that contest. This includes relationships between people as well as relationships between people and land. A landscape may be seen as a culmination of lived daily experience that acts as a repository for our memories of events and experiences to which we are connected. As we remember or forget our experiences or events, we construct narratives relating how we are tied to our landscape and what that may mean. This becomes a compounded process as more than one group adds different stories that are vying to be told. Even though New Zealand is a post-colonial nation, neither the groups involved, nor their stories can be divided between primordial categories like colonial or Indigenous. Following this, the anthropology of the State informs us that the State is not a unified organization, but rather is imagined as such through our daily exp...
“Prepper” as Resilient Citizen
Responses to Disasters and Climate Change, 2016
“Prepper” as Resilient Citizen
Responses to Disasters and Climate Change, 2016
For Preppers, the Apocalypse is Just Another Disaster
See the article at Sapiens:
https://www.sapiens.org/culture/prepping-anthropology/
“Prepper” as resilient citizen: what preppers can teach us about surviving disasters
“Prepping” is a social movement of individuals and small groups that are attempting to build resi... more “Prepping” is a social movement of individuals and small groups that are attempting to build resiliency at micro levels within their communities. Their aim is to learn how to effectively survive potential disasters and long-term change within their locale. Preppers choose to prepare for potential disaster through self-education, training, and the gathering of necessary materials to meet their own individual/familial needs. Keenly aware of community vulnerabilities, they also avidly support organizational attempts at building resiliencies. By building small, linked cells of micro-resiliency, communities are able to construct a stronger web that acts to support the larger community when disaster strikes. This allows prepared individuals to become responders instead of victims. This study introduces preppers and gives a brief history of the movement, followed by specific ethnographic examples to illustrate their efforts at resiliency construction.
Social Identities, 2012
Struggles over indigeneity in Aotearoa/New Zealand have their roots in events that occurred befor... more Struggles over indigeneity in Aotearoa/New Zealand have their roots in events that occurred before the creation of the nation. Ten years before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of relations between Māori and colonial Britain, there was a massacre at the site of Takapuneke. The event helped to give birth to the nation and immediately started the struggle of Māori indigeneity against the increasingly politically dominant colonials. There are parallel struggles in contemporary New Zealand, as the country debates and attempts to rectify the concept of a bi-cultural society. These on-going struggles can help us understand how Māori are able to exercise agency and engage in practices that allow them to promote their indigeneity. The contemporary events around the site of the massacre at Takapuneke will illustrate such a struggle between the local Māori at Onuku and three bureaucratic and civic organizations.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social Identities on 18 Apr 2012, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13504630.2012.673875
Conference Presentations by Chad Huddleston
Fitting it all in: teaching anthropology or training anthropologists.
As part of a developing three-field (cultural, archaeology, physical) Anthropology program, the i... more As part of a developing three-field (cultural, archaeology, physical) Anthropology program, the issue of what and how to teach our students has been a concern in two corresponding aspects. First, are we teaching anthropology or are we training anthropologists. I used to teach every intro class like I was training first year anthropologists, introducing them to methods and field techniques, but then I realized that the majority of introductory students do not go on in anthropology. With this realization, I switched my teaching for introductory courses to truly reflect an introduction to anthropology with more examples of world cultures and practice in effort to introduce to ideas of diversity and social understanding. As a result, my upper division classes switched to a stronger focus on method and theory. The second concern, following from the first, was: how do you fit it all in? As the sole cultural anthropologist in a very small program, I am finding it difficult to ensure that students are getting 'all of it' - theory, methods, field experiences, ethics and most importantly a sense of the history of the discipline and classic studies. There is so much to teach and we all feel the time crunch on turning out well rounded, burgeoning anthropologists by the end of our program.
Zombie Squad to the rescue: Recreating survivalists in America
Survivalists in American culture have been portrayed as political or religious extremists in both... more Survivalists in American culture have been portrayed as political or religious extremists in both academic and popular literature. They are usually characterized as extreme, right wing, white supremacist, millennialist, gun carrying, ‘wackos’ (Stewart and Harding 1999; Berry 1999; Weeber and Rodeheaver 2003; Mason 2005; Hill et al 2001). However, I will argue that the meaning of preparing for a crisis or disaster has changed since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I posit that this definition of survivalist is no longer working for the majority of survival-based behavior that is present in the US. While it may still be applicable to some extreme groups, there is another subset of behaviors that fit a broader definition of survivalist and new groups with these behaviors that claim the label for themselves. This paper will flesh out this new category of survivalist, using Zombie Squad, a disaster preparedness group that uses a zombie apocalypse as a mythos, as an example.
Prepper or Prepared Citizen: the perception of prepping behavior in media and policy
Through my fieldwork over the past two years with prepper groups in the midwestern US, I have fou... more Through my fieldwork over the past two years with prepper groups in the midwestern US, I have found that their preparations for dangerous potentialities are informed by two things: current events and their created mythologies. While current events help to give a visceral reality and rationalization to their prepping behavior, the mythology that they create and share amongst themselves helps to support those ideas. Further, the stories are instructive in that they help preppers to know how to prepare to engage and/or mitigate possible dangerous events, people and situations. Furthermore, preppers have burst onto the media scene as a new category of potential danger given the recent spate of violent incidents in the US that have been attributed to people that engage in prepping activities. Those activities that help them to be prepared are now being viewed as suspicious. Thus, not only are preppers centers for gauging and preparing for potential risks, but they have also become an object of potential danger within society. My paper will discuss how preppers and some of their behaviors are being (re)constructed as dangerous by media discourse and policy, as well as how preppers have begun to react to this shift in the social landscape
Instructive Mythologies for Survivors in a Post-Zombie Apocalypse Society: what to do and what to have to survive.
Mythology, in the form of stories, can teach valuable lessons that influence behaviors, such as r... more Mythology, in the form of stories, can teach valuable lessons that influence behaviors, such as resource choice and use. These behaviors can ultimately lead to patterns of material consumption and caching. While much of this material might not survive drastic societal change, some scenarios would allow for those material remains to be discovered at later times or be used by surviving populations.
Contemporary survivalists avidly construct and relate different and complex versions of post- collapse futures based on theories of societal changing and how those changes might ultimately affect the population, built environment and the landscape. The lessons included in these myths instruct on best practices and materials given the version of survival myth. The process is active in that participants react to those choices in real time, based on their experience with similar contexts or stories, thus creating a possibility of a new instructive experience and a recreated discourse. This often has direct consequences in terms of material culture, emphasizing ways to build shelters and design effective weapons or tools to deal with the collapse scenario.
To ground these ideas, I have analyzed the mythology of one survivalist group called Zombie Squad. I will show that the survival lessons in their myths can be linked to patterns in their material consumption/culture, as has also been argued for other cultures such as the Klamath. Further, I will show how these patterns are tied to specific reconfigurations of potential taskscapes that feeds back to their construction of post-collapse society.
“Government on Our Side?”: Conceptions of Nature, Sacredness and Power on Banks Peninsula, New Zealand
n Aotearoa/New Zealand, Maori conceptualizations of nature have become an issue of national impor... more n Aotearoa/New Zealand, Maori conceptualizations of nature have become an issue of national importance with the passing of the Resource Management Amendment Act 2003. How Maori and non-Maori reckon nature is divergent and complicated, with multiple layers of meaning. In this national context of biculturalism both sides are working to bridge that gap. In particular, the concept of tapu (sacredness), as it applies to land, has become the focus of a case on the South Island. The site, called Takapuneke, was the place of a massacre in 1830 and has recently been protected as reserve land. How the land is perceived as tapu will play into the management plans that are now being created for the future of the site by local bureaucratic authorities, local Maori, and other invested parties. One particular issue is the difference between the local Maori version of tapu, which is fluid, and the policy-bound version of wahi tapu (sacred place) that is partially static in its application. My paper will answer the following questions in relation to these issues: Is the Crown co-opting the concept of tapu as a continuation of its past colonial policy on land in a utilitarian form or is it genuinely attempting to include this important Maori concept into its management policies? Additionally, how are Maori altering their view of nature as tapu given this opportunity to protect their lands? I will show that power-sharing and the transition of different types of capital play a key role in mediating these issues.
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Papers by Chad Huddleston
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social Identities on 18 Apr 2012, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13504630.2012.673875
Conference Presentations by Chad Huddleston
Contemporary survivalists avidly construct and relate different and complex versions of post- collapse futures based on theories of societal changing and how those changes might ultimately affect the population, built environment and the landscape. The lessons included in these myths instruct on best practices and materials given the version of survival myth. The process is active in that participants react to those choices in real time, based on their experience with similar contexts or stories, thus creating a possibility of a new instructive experience and a recreated discourse. This often has direct consequences in terms of material culture, emphasizing ways to build shelters and design effective weapons or tools to deal with the collapse scenario.
To ground these ideas, I have analyzed the mythology of one survivalist group called Zombie Squad. I will show that the survival lessons in their myths can be linked to patterns in their material consumption/culture, as has also been argued for other cultures such as the Klamath. Further, I will show how these patterns are tied to specific reconfigurations of potential taskscapes that feeds back to their construction of post-collapse society.