Sample SURPS Abstracts, Summaries and Creative Statements

Language: The Space Creating Religion
By Jonathan Gabrio

The short film “Language: The Space Creating Religion” explores the way we create spatial relationships for our own benefit. Its main premise is that language itself is responsible for organizing space. Language shields us from the recognition of the postmodern distributed self by creating space where it is nonexistent.

The film acts as a gallery (art hung in space) and collage (an artist’s dissemblance of space). Its docent is seemingly a camera which pans and zooms over pieces of “self-produced” artwork, never allowing the viewer to see an entire piece. The audience is forced to create spatial relationships between works in the gallery while interpreting the accompanying language (voiceovers). No video camera was used in the making of the film, emphasizing that the film exists in a flat space.

Artworks are scanned and simulated by pixels, music is simulated (not in present time) as it’s recorded. Language is simulated most obviously with the computer-spoken quotes. Space in this video is created entirely by the viewer using thinking based on language in order to internalize and extract meaning from the film. The viewer actively puts things understood by his side and puts things not understood far away. The film argues that in order to preserve sanity, language must be saved and used to our advantage.

To create space using language is not only human expression, but to be human. We work towards ostensible individuality to combat the fear of being everything. We need only to recognize that the fragments of ourselves we cannot merge do not make us nothing, but a whole.

Advisor: Renee Courey, Undergraduate Research Programs

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Neuropeptides and Social Behavior:
Arginine Vasotocin Localization in Haplochromis burtoni, A Fish with Alternative Reproductive Tactics
by Abigail R. Shaw

Neuropeptides are known to be important mediators of social behavior among vertebrates. In particular, arginine vasotocin (AVT — the equivalent of vasopressin in mammals), is implicated in divergence of reproductive behaviors among species that assume several different reproductive tactics.

In the African cichlid fish Haplochromis burtoni, males display two distinct and reversible social and reproductive phenotypes. The two states are marked by dramatic changes in appearance and internal physiology as well as in behavioral patterns including social, reproductive and aggressive behaviors. We hypothesize that AVT plays a role in mediating the behavioral and physiological differences observed in these two classes.

To address this question, we investigated the localization of cells that express AVT and its receptor within the brain. Fragments of cDNA encoding AVT and its receptor were amplified from Haplochromis burtoni using degenerate oligonucleotides. Full-length sequence was obtained using Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends (RACE).

A riboprobe specific to the untranslated regions of each gene was generated for in situ hybridization studies. It was used to determine which cells (and brain regions) express mRNA transcripts for these genes. Neurons producing AVT were found in the parvocellular, magnocellular and gigantocellular portions of the preoptic area of the hypothalamus. This is an area of the brain known to be important in reproductive behavior and also directly implicated in controlling reproductive states in these fish. Experiments determining the expression of the AVT receptor are currently underway.

Advisor: Russell D. Fernald

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World Health Organization Public-Private Partnerships
By Andrada Tomoaia-Cotisel

This past winter break, I spent six weeks working at the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva Switzerland. I spent my time working with public-private partnerships (PPPs) and exploring the following:

• Studying  the WHO VISION 2020 program and how it works at the international level
• Researching methods of comprehensively evaluating PPPs
• Working to form a PPP between the WHO InfoBase program and various entities in the private sector

This experience has prepared me for the work that I am now undertaking for my Honors Thesis research. It has given me background for understanding the entities I am dealing with and the methods I should use to produce a PPP Creation Strategy.

Advisor: Renee Courey, Undergraduate Research Programs

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The Potato Goblin
Irony and Taboo in the Northern Ecuadorian Highland Quechua Joke-Narrative:
A Contribution to the Anthropology of Humor
By Avi Tuschman

This work examines humorous ironies and their tabooed subject matters in the Ecuadorian Quechua joke-narrative. Much like a fable, this form of oral literature transmits cultural values to the younger generation. However, the stories contain highly symbolic and implicitly risqué jokes.
While the humorous narratives (which skilled storytellers relate in poetic style) entertain and educate, they also inform the anthropologist a great deal for two reasons:

• Because all humor has an element of irony, a Quechua-speaking group’s expectations and ideas about the world can be inferred by each ironic violation of these expectations
• Humor concerns subjects that are taboo in normal conversation, such as sexuality, inter-ethnic relations, and death, to name a few. This study reveals the expression of this Quechua people’s unique cultural anxieties surrounding problematic and absurd topics common to human societies.

By synthesizing several twentieth-century theories of humor, taboo and new ideas, this paper endeavors to build a theoretical base and methodological framework for other ethnographers to use in anthropological studies of humor.
Special subtopics include the following:

• A discussion of universal taboo categories and unique Quechua taboos
• Introducing a justification for the new Quechua orthography
• Notes on various levels of translation, poetics, and transcription issues
• Grammatical structures peculiar to oral literature
• Explications of allegories and word symbolism
• A detailed list of Quechua insults with commentaries on their relation to humor
• Interviews that contextualize the Quechua joke in relation to generations of natives and the gaps between them
• Irony, taboo and humor in the semantics of Quechua morphology.

Advisor: James Fox, Professor of Anthropological Sciences

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Other SURP Projects and Abstracts 2002 to 2005

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