05/11/2020
In addition to congratulating all SIMA alum who have graduated this spring - SIMA wanted to share that SIMA alum Emily Buhrow Rogers successfully defended her dissertation this month. Long-term SIMA visiting faculty Jason Jackson (Emily's co-chair) reports that "Emily did wonderfully during the defense. Her dissertation is an important contribution both to the anthropology of making and to understanding Choctaw lifeways today. Her SIMA friends all knew that she was an adept collections researcher. "Choctaw Arts and the Meaning of Making" reveals her to be an engaged and sensitive ethnographer as well." Pictured in the attached image are members of Emily's committee Anya Peterson Royce,
Eduardo Brondizio, Pravina Shukla and Jason Jackson, as well as Dr. Emily Buhrow Rogers.
Below is a summary of Emily's defense, and dissertation.
Choctaw Arts and the Meaning of Making
Drawing upon twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with members of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, I present the many methods and meanings that animate the production of Choctaw arts. I offer my perspective on what I learned from weavers, sewers, beaders, and carvers about how they go about creating items of material culture—many of which they consider to be traditional expressions of community and social life. I provide an exploration of some of the myriad ways that the makers with whom I worked approached and shaped their projects. While each of their beliefs and experiences were unique and personal, the many themes and commonalities they shared provide the basis for this dissertation and its structure.
By focusing on process, I center Choctaw makers’ beliefs about making within the realm of what is possible, and what they and their community deem socially valuable and meaningful. In my examination of material gathering processes, I demonstrate how makers are advocates for their materials, and that overcoming significant barriers to accessing these materials is a fundamental task that any maker must take on, regardless of the material forms that they seek to construct. I also focus on the makers themselves, highlighting the unique combination of group and personal factors that are conducive to an individual’s emergence as an creator of a particular art genre. Moreover, I center the role that a maker’s personal creativity, style, and innovation plays in material culture change through time. Lastly, I contextualize making practices as actions that are generative of, and generated by, the important individual, communal, and intergenerational rhythms of Choctaw life.