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In recent years, a series of Indigenous protest movements have emerged across North America in response to contemporaneous settler-colonial violence, including the #NoDAPL movement and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis. These movements are responses to political, societal, environmental, and philosophical incongruities with governments and their non-Indigenous citizenry. Music has been at the heart of these political causes, social protests, and cultural movements. Plains-style powwow vocal music, which emerged as the dominant intertribal performative style in the 20th century, has played a crucial role in contemporary protests as mechanisms for articulating messages of resistance through symbolic embodiments and as intertribal expressions of solidarity directed primarily towards Indigenous people for cultural and spiritual uplift. This style also has a long-standing tradition in Indigenous cultures and has been employed in relation to historic external and internal protest/movements. This paper seeks to understand how Plains-style music articulates messages of protest through the use of semiotics and how music has been employed in protest environments. We will draw upon historic and recent examples to demonstrate the long-standing tradition of Indigenous Plains-style protest music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes advantage of the current context of superdiversity to define a form of hybrid heuristics between North American anthropology and research-creation "in" the arts. In an attempt to alleviate the epistemological disaster described by Gregory Bateson as the loss of the unity of the biosphere and humanity, I position myself within a nomothetic perspective of Boasian anthropology and a postqualitative approach to research-creation. My research-creation proposes clay as an epistemic object and develops a creative methodology in the form of an experimental system that borrows from the following two types of change observable in living organisms: static and schismatic changes. The artistic activities, presented as two heuristic cycles, seek to broaden the self-reflexivity inherent in the use of clay by human groups. They provoke decentring leading to a loss of control where a new identity has to be defined. This reveals itself in terms of system thinking as the reconstruction of a new reality that is defined neither entirely by my artistic practice nor entirely by my theoretical framework derived from anthropology. It is a "place of passage" between both. It is a new identity that can be defined by the "change of change" that I call "creative anthropology". This transdisciplinary approach introduces a "second glance" into anthropological research and opens up breaches through research-creation. It works to develop new narratives and test posthumanism in the field of my artistic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this letter, the authors present archeological evidence of the presence of cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. During years 2016 and 2017, the authors visited 5 anthropology museums in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, in search for pre-Hispanic archeological evidence of CLP, and 16 anthropomorphic figurines with evidence of CLP were identified; 9 at the Anahuacalli Museum, 6 at the National Anthropology Museum of Mexico, and 1 at the National Anthropology Museum of El Salvador. Fifteen of these ceramics originated from the shaft tombs (pre-Hispanic culture from western Mexico, Jalisco, Colima, and Nayarit; dating from 200 bc -600 ad), and 1 ceramic originated from the Cotzumalguapa (a pre-Hispanic culture from western El Salvador dating from 200 ad -900 ad). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]