thesis

Anthropologists like George Foster have argued over the origin of Latin American hot-cold medicine since the 1950s. Some argue that it originated within the indigenous populations of Latin America while others argue that hot-cold medicine originated from European humoral medicine. In this paper, I take another look at this debate, focusing on how its practice varies from community to community and relating the debate to changes that have occurred in the discipline of anthropology in recent years. I also look at other lines of evidence, such as the linguistics used in association with hot-cold medicine and the nearly universal existence of the hot-cold dichotomy, in order to support the theory that hot-cold medicine originated within the indigenous groups of Latin America.

Spectral decomposition is a method of expressing functions as a harmonic series, and can be used for the simplification of complicated physical problems. This type of analysis requires knowledge of the function at all points on a circle or sphere. In problems where the function is known only at discreet points, regular intervals in a rectangular grid, for example, numerical methods must be employed to compute approximate coefficients for the harmonic expansion. In this paper, we investigate numerical methods for computing Fourier coefficients of a two dimensional function at a fixed radius, and spherical harmonic coefficients in three dimensions on a sphere of fixed radius.

The presidential election of 2000 was not the first United States presidential election to end with uncertainty. The contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore was not the first to introduce Americans to disputed vote tallies in crucial swing states, to the possibility of separate and competing slates of potential electors, or even to the notion that one person's vote really might matter after all. History had already born witness to many of those prospects during the 1877 presidential race between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, which Hayes ultimately won. The 2000 election was novel, however, in the sense that it inspired a series of legal battles that culminated in a landmark United States Supreme Court case. Bush v. Gore (531 U.S. 98) provoked questions concerning the legal meaning of equality, the nature of federalism, and the role the Supreme Court should play in determining how state courts should interpret state laws.

From before its independence to the present day, Haiti has had exogenous development schemes imposed upon it. These schemes stem from the development theories of Western political-economic thinkers that Western powers and Haitian elites have implemented. Yet Haiti is today the most impoverished nation of the Western hemisphere. What has gone wrong? In reply, I examine a key power-based explanation for the failure. I then examine the culturally-based practices, identity formations, and development aspirations of Haiti's popular class, and contrast these with exogenous development theory, praxis and outcomes. I show the profound "misfit" between the two and highlight conflicts that have arisen because of them. In Haiti, exogenous development forms will inevitably go awry because their starting points are and remain fundamentally flawed. An endogenous development form based upon the Haitian majority's culturally-based preferences and identities stands the best chance of bringing social justice and long-term stability to the nation.