My doctoral research has treated about the description of more than one hundred types of pollens of endemic plants from the Balearic Islands (Spain), giving me the opportunity to reveal that among the pollen of the Shroud, there is a copy, difficult to classify and recognize, which belongs to the Asteraceae family that may have been key in preparing the body during the funeral ritual. Other des...

Caves used in antiquity had multiple functions and often long use histories. While many were employed for shelter, some became ritual sites. Revitalized interest in caves in Mesoamerica combines archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, epigraphy, and osteology. The current, general anthropological study of caves offers exceptional insights into early Mesoamerican customs, ceremonies, and beliefs...

Network measurement practitioners increasingly focus their interest on understanding and debugging home networks. The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technology holds promise as a highly efficient way to collect and leverage measurement data and configuration settings available from UPnP-enabled devices found in home networks. Unfortunately, UPnP proves less available and reliable than one would...

This essay provides an outline and a history of the theory of performance. This new macro-sociological theory reconfigures the concept of ritual into a more complex model of social action as lying in the continuum between the analytic poles of successful and failed performances. I argue that the more complex and segmented social and cultural structures become, the more the elements of performan...

Ethnicity belongs to the most important types of differentiation in Laos. Among the means to establish such differences is the ascription of bodies of knowledge to various ethnicities. Ritual healing knowledge is often associated with the foreign and the culturally different. The attribution of differentiated categories of foreignness thus supports the emergence and reproduction of ethnic diffe...

This article traces the effects of modern commercial ritual spaces and new crematoriums on the meaning and structure of contemporary Japanese funerals. The widening physical separation between the mourning family and the corpse throughout the death process parallels an increase in the ritual authority of the professional funeral industry, which has led to several notable variations in funeral s...