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1
Polymeropoulou, Marilou. "Networked creativity : ethnographic perspectives on chipmusic." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2c16d1ac-10c8-4493-b624-ebe5be41c9f4.
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This thesis examines creativity as manifested in an online and transnational network of musicians who compose chipmusic, a kind of electronic music characteristic of 1980s early home computers and videogame sounds. The primary argument is that creativity in chipmusic worlds is networked, meaning that it is dispersed across various activities that are labelled as creative: chipmusic-making, technology-hacking practices that underpin the music, digital cultural practices such as use of social media, online releases, crowdsourcing, staged and screened performances, and any other activity related to chipmusic. The thesis examines the ways in which networked creativity is mediated in the chipscene from an interdisciplinary methodological viewpoint informed by ethnomusicology, anthropology, and sociology. Although the chipscene is geographically dispersed across more than thirty countries worldwide, the chipscene network is well-connected. Communication and music circulation practices of chipmusicians are enabled by the internet. This thesis primarily discusses chipmusic culture that suggests a rich context where creativity discourse is as intensely diverse as the chipscene itself, in which it is embedded. In looking at the creative process and performance practices, I employ a mixed methods approach based on ethnographic research methods and social network analysis, to examine how intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of chipmusic-making, such as ideology, cultural values, network infrastructure, chiptune poetics and aesthetics, distribution of creative roles, authenticity, differentiation, genre dynamics, and intellectual property issues, shape creativity.
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Panović, Ivan. "Writing practices in contemporary Egypt : an ethnographic approach." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e293353f-46d6-42ae-8f1a-37514fe549d4.
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This thesis is an ethnographically grounded description and interpretation of a variety of writing practices observable in an Arabic speaking community, primarily on the Internet. Working with, or in reaction to, the concept of diglossia, of which Arabic sociolinguistic setting is often cited as a textbook example, the majority of scholars have focused their attention on speech as a major site of language variation and mixing. Writing has been largely neglected. This thesis is a contribution to what I hope will become a growing number of works aimed at filling that lacuna. I examine linguistic features of a number of, mostly non-literary, texts in contemporary Egypt where Modern Standard Arabic (Fuṣḥa) and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ˤAmmiyya) constitute the theoretical poles of the diglossic continuum. The Egyptian sociolinguistic setting, however, is here understood as being defined and reconfigured by the increasing socio‑economic importance of yet another linguistic variety – English. The analysis of linguistic details is conducted with reference to a broader socio‑cultural context and local language ideologies surrounding the production and reception of a rapidly growing number of texts that employ a variety of features and draw on different linguistic resources, thus often defying, in the outcome, the hegemonic ideological projection that writing is the domain of Fuṣḥa. In order to offer an account of a dynamic, changing and diversified character of writing practices in present‑day Egypt, illustrative examples are drawn from a number of different texts and domains of writing, including Wikipedia Masry, Twitter, Facebook, advertisements, online campaigns for political and social causes, as well as books. The inventory of linguistic resources variously employed by various writers in various circumstances is identified to contain re-combinations across three linguistic varieties, Fuṣḥa, ˤAmmiyya and English, and two scripts, Arabic and Latin.
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Lawson, Barbara. "Collected ethnographic objects as cultural representations Rev. Robertson's collection from the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) /." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/29415579.html.
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Thesis (M.A.)--McGill University, 1909.Summary in French. "This study compares a collection of decontextualized objects in McGill's Redpath Museum." Includes bliographical references (leaves 203-227).
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Robertson, Stephen Dixon. "Shobodan : an ethnographic history of Japan's community fire brigades." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1e7d92e5-97f5-4fe4-a6d3-2953c44b62ed.
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This thesis describes Japan's modern system of community fire brigades, a federated civilian paramilitary organization dedicated to localized fire prevention and response with a current active membership of over 800,000 men and women. Auxiliary firefighting institutions in Japan have had comparatively high rates of participation vis-à-vis those of other nations, but are now facing acute recruitment difficulties in the face of increased competition from alternative venues for civic engagement since the mid-1990s. This suggests both the tractability of civil society as an extra-statal sphere of institutionalized social organization as well as the inherent pluralism of its vernacular expression. I demonstrate that the nationalization of the fire brigade system in 1894 was predicated on the existence of an autonomous and normative sphere of age-graded practices of inter-household mutual aid in the villages of Tokugawa Japan. The gradual absorption and redirection of these practices into the nation-building projects of the Meiji state and its successors realized the creation of a functional emergency service organ with universal penetration at minimal expense. Nevertheless, drawing on Maurice Bloch's theory of rebounding violence, I argue that the secular rituals and state symbolism used to achieve this encompassment have conferred a legacy of structural ambivalence between civility and uncivility that continues to inform perceptions and representations of the brigade in public discourse. It follows that the phenomenon of organizational aging and questions of recruitment and succession should be seen as ideological in nature, rather than as simple indices of wider demographics or social transformation. This thesis is based on data collected during twenty months of research in Japan between 2008 and 2010, including eleven months of continuous participant observation with a brigade in Suwa District, Nagano Prefecture. Extensive ethnographic interviews with local firefighters, community members, and town officials are supplemented with data from primary and secondary historical sources, including online discussion forums. This thesis contributes to the literature on local voluntarism in Japan, as well as to the wider anthropological project of documenting non-western models of civil society.
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Barth, Jennifer. "Taste, ethics and the market in Guatemalan coffee : an ethnographic study." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a6ab3dee-619b-450d-9942-f4aa39a988af.
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For more than two decades there has been a growing niche for ethically sourced coffees, at the same time as a revitalisation and development of sourcing models focused on indicators of coffee quality and measures of taste. Small independent and multinational buyers and roasters have become progressively interested in sourcing coffee in a way that privileges sustainable and/or high quality indicators, and are increasingly engaged in debates about solidarity versus mainstreaming, quantity versus quality, and provider of caffeine versus taste. Research on one coffee producing country, Guatemala, suggests how these debates have affected the historical evolution of the coffee market. This ethnographic study traces the qualifications of Guatemalan coffee and argues that responses to both the enactment of the technologies, as well as the perceived limitations of sourcing models have produced new articulations of ethics and taste. Producers and small entrepreneurs located in Guatemala reconfigure the practices of cultivation, processing, and selling/buying in relation to circulating market indicators. They create locally situated attachments to the coffee through skill transfer and knowledge exchange and in this way they imitate and also transform international valuations of taste, ethics and quality. This thesis works to make visible the range and diversity of processes and agencies involved in the production of markets for ethical coffee and considers coffee as vital and mobile; an active producer of public effects rather than a passive object moved through a commodity network. This view enables a more open, relational and mobile account of both coffee and of ethics, one which is capable of making clear the important and emerging role of taste. This thesis extends the qualifications of coffee to the daily enactments of cultivation and the skills and techniques that work to reveal taste. On this view, taste mediates the agency of the materials in both high quality and sustainable coffees and this expands and extends ethics to interpersonal, material and bodily relations that link producers and consumers in multiple ways.
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Dudhwala, Farzana. "Doing the self : an ethnographic analysis of the quantified self." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:34b6097e-3568-4d81-ae79-7d65d2875177.
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'Wearables' and 'self-quantifying technologies' are becoming ever more popular and normalised in society as a means of 'knowing' the self. How are these technologies implicated in this endeavour? Using insights from a four year multi-sited ethnography of the 'Quantified Self', I explore how the self is 'done' in the context of using technologies that purport to quantify the self in some way. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) sensibilities, I conduct a four- pronged investigation into 'self-making' by drawing upon, and expanding, existing theories of agency and performativity, number, data-visualisation, and enactment. I find that self-quantifying technologies are productive in the doing of the self and are implicated in the process of making boundaries around that which comes to be known as the 'self' in a particular moment. The numbers and visualisations that result from practices of self-quantification enable a new way of 'seeing' the self, and provide a way of communicating this self with others. The self is thus not a pre-existing entity that simply requires these technologies as a means to 'know' it. Rather, the self is constantly being done with these technologies and within the surrounding practices of self-quantification. In order to highlight the different parts of this process, I proffer the term 'entractment'. This term explains how these different elements come together to culminate in the production of a momentarily constant self in a particular context. It is a way of simultaneously encapsulating the processes of intra-action, extra-action and enactment with/in a community. In sum, it captures the conclusion that, in the context of self-quantification, we must understand the self as a collective enactment, achieved, at least in part, through the use of self-quantifying technologies that produce numerical data which facilitate visualisations that are imperative to the doing of the self.
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Seibert, David. "An Ethnographic Poetics of Placed-and-Found Objects and Cultural Memory in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/311534.
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Residents of the region just north of the U.S.-Mexico border experience migration and smuggling activities through constantly changing found objects on the desert landscape--a pair of shoes neatly arranged on a trail; a cross hung in a tree; a can of food balanced on a rock. Consideration of some found objects as placed objects, set down with apparent care by travelers unseen and unmet, demonstrates how the objects uniquely inform the perceptions and practices of residents who find them. Such finders speculate about the lives and movements of others by utilizing the objects as metaphoric figures of practice, tools that uniquely but only partially help them bridge knowledge gaps among multiple constantly changing variables in their everyday lives. The finding-speculating dynamic confounds a direct and easy association of found items with trash, of migrants with threat, and of a border wall with hopelessness. Residents instead craft a sophisticated and practical cultural memory of place in a region that is inhabited differently by day than by night, where tragedy, grace, danger, and hope fuse in unexpected ways. The objects and events that erupt into rural border life inspire a poetics that matches the territory. In a landscape of uncertainty, placed objects secure and extend situational understandings beyond common conceptual frames of epidemic, normalized patterns of violence and collateral damage that are often considered necessary conditions of life in the region.
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Odegaard, nancy Nell, and n/a. "Archaeological and ethnographic painted wood artifacts from the North American Southwest : the case study of a matrix approach for the conservation of cultural materials." University of Canberra. Applied Science, 1996. http://erl.canberra.edu.au./public/adt-AUC20060822.132115.
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This study examines and demonstrates the value of a matrix approach in the
discipline of conservation and the concerns specific to the conservation of
archaeological and ethnographic objects. The chapters identify the relevance of
the matrix to current conservation practices through a history of artifact
conservation and a discussion of the factors that compromise the conservators'
role in the study and preservation of material culture. The discussion evaluates
the nature of systematic research collections, the impact of legal issues, and the
ethics of including cultural context as important aspects in the development of
the matrix approach.
The matrix approach provides the conservator with a number of variables or
categories of information that may assist in the determination of an appropriate
conservation process. In this study, the matrix approach was tested on a
number of artifact objects. To provide a common link, all of the objects were
characterized by paint on some form of cellulose (wood or a wood-like
substrate). The object cases were from both ethnographic and archaeological
contexts, and the work involved both laboratory procedures and consideration
of non-laboratory (i.e. legal, cultural, ethical) aspects. The specific objects
included (1) a probable tiponi of archaeological (Anasazi culture) context, (2) a
group of coiled baskets of archaeological (Mogollon culture) context, (3) a
kachina doll of ethnographic (Hopi culture) context, (4) a group of prayer
sticks of archaeological (Puebloan and Tohono O'Odham) context, and (5) a
fiddle of ethnographic (Apache culture) context.
By recognizing the unique and diverse aspects of anthropology collections, the
conservator who uses a matrix approach is better equipped to work with
archaeologists on sites, with curators and exhibit designers in museums, and
with claimants (or the descendants of an object's maker) in carrying out the
multiple activities frequently involved in the conservation of objects as they
exist in an ever broadening and more political context.
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Denton-Calabrese, Tracey. "Shaping school culture to transform education : an ethnographic study of New Technology high schools." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dd0f4d0d-08df-4788-b7e4-f50edceaf9e7.
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There have been numerous calls for the radical transformation of public education in the United States. Reform initiatives are fuelled by the need to prepare students to meet the challenges of the networked knowledge society. This thesis examines the shaping of school culture within two public non-charter high schools, in different regions of the United States and with different socioeconomic characteristics, that are implementing the "New Technology" (or "New Tech") model of education: Pacific Coast High, a well-established New Tech school, and Midwest High, a school that recently transitioned to the model and is still in the process of culture change. This rapidly expanding school reform network includes 168 schools in the United States and 7 international sites in Australia. The New Tech Network, the organisation that provides training and support for these schools, explicitly emphasises the goal of changing the culture of education. They describe themselves as a network of schools that promotes a culture of trust, respect, and responsibility and uses project-based learning and "smart use" of technology to redefine teaching and learning. I employed an ethnographic multisite case study design to gain an understanding of the everyday experiences and practices of teachers, students and school leaders as they work through the process of implementing and maintaining the New Tech model. Fieldwork included six and a half months of participant observation of secondary classrooms, school meetings, professional development sessions, and New Tech training conferences as well as semi-structured interviews with teachers, students, and administrators. My analysis provides an understanding of the influence of local context, including historical background (local and national) and economic and political structures. The research findings indicate that a deliberate focus on 'culture-building', with particular values like trust, respect and responsibility, underpin and shape relationships, behaviours and educational practices, including the extensive use of ICTs. A multi-faceted approach to socialisation and enculturation, which includes extensive peer-to-peer support, is involved in inculcating values and shaping behaviours and practices. The New Tech model shifts the focus of education from a primarily individualist competitive endeavour (reflecting the broad cultural orientations of modern society in the United States) to a more collectivist approach, with students working in collaborative groups supported by the use of ICTs. Schools operate as learning communities with collaborative partnerships with the wider community. Pacific Coast High is an exemplar for the model in its fully implemented form, while Midwest High's transition to the model has been fraught with tensions as they navigate numerous context-specific challenges. I argue that real reform requires an intentional effort to change the culture of education and that pedagogy and culture have to necessitate the use of ICTs to more fully integrate them into the education process. I characterise the culture I observed in New Tech schools, particularly at Pacific Coast, as an 'ICT-facilitating school culture' with (1) a collaborative project-based focus and encouragement of students to communicate and find information themselves which pushes them to use ICTs, (2) a system of cultural values that, when internalised, operates as a means of social control, keeping students on task as they work independently and collaboratively, using ICTs, including social networking sites, and (3) an ideal classroom layout and technology infrastructure that facilitates the use of ICTs. I characterise the New Tech Network of schools as a revitalization movement, addressing the needs of a changing society by changing the culture of education.
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Dhand, Amar. "Peer learning among a group of heroin addicts in India : an ethnographic study." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0103cc06-7f34-432e-9499-5b06c8bf8757.
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This is an ethnographic account of peer learning among a group of heroin 'addicts' in Delhi, India. This study responds to the limited attention given to 'naturalistic' or 'informal' peer learning patterns in the educational literature, and the lack of explicit exploration of the phenomenon among drug user populations. The study involved seven and a half months of fieldwork with the predominant use of participant observation and semi-structured interviews to generate data. Analysis was inductive and interpretive with the use of situated learning theory to 'tease out' patterns in the data. The participants were using and non-using addicts affiliated to SHARAN, a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the religious marketplace of Yamuna Bazaar. The group included approximately 300-500 members, 20 of whom were main informants. Analysis of the group organization revealed community-based and masculinity-based characteristics that enabled the group to manage stigma, promote 'positive' ideals, and co-construct nonhegemonic masculinities. Peer-based outreach was identified as a form of 'institutional' peer learning in which peer educators performed the roles of 'doctor', 'role model', and 'counsellor' during interactions with 'clients' that had the effect of disempowering clients in many cases. The practice of poetry in which peers created couplets in alternating exchanges was identified as one form of naturalistic peer learning that entailed processes of legitimate peripheral participation, meaning negotiation, and reflective learning. Street 'doctory' in which peers provided medical care in the form of procedures, illness discussions, and health consultancy was identified as another naturalistic peer learning pattern involving processes of legitimate peripheral participation, meaning negotiation, and learning through teaching. These findings suggest that naturalistic peer learning involved co-participatory processes that manifested in a diversity of everyday practices. It is recommended that engaging these processes and practices would be useful for interventions, while further research should explore such patterns in other contexts.
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McLennan, Amy Kathleen. "An ethnographic investigation of lifestyle change, living for the moment, and obesity emergence in Nauru." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bd001d98-7648-4d2b-9d92-8130f022b34b.
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The Republic of Nauru, a small Pacific island nation, has one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Obesity emerged rapidly in Nauru during the 1970s, a period characterised by political independence and unprecedented economic growth resulting from lucrative phosphate mining. In the mid-1970s, the Nauruan population was one of the first in the world in which obesity, diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease – co-morbidities associated with obesity – were identified as significant public health concerns. Such ‘lifestyle diseases’ continue to have debilitating effects on the Nauruan community. Obesity is generally understood to result from an energy imbalance; that is, people eat and drink more calories over time than they expend. This biomedical paradigm is implicit in the majority of research relating to obesity, such that the lifestyle to which obesity is attributed is limited to diet and activity. Yet in practice, lifestyle is much more than this. The lifestyle of a particular group is related to political, legal, religious, economic and value systems, modes of education, communication, transport and healthcare, and styles of art, music and entertainment. In this thesis I draw on ethnographic participant observation carried out in the Republic of Nauru during 2010-11, life history interviews, and diverse historical materials to answer three questions. First, what characterises the Nauruan lifestyle? Second, in what ways did the Nauruan lifestyle change over the second half of the twentieth century, the time period during which obesity and diabetes rapidly escalated? Finally, how might these changes be linked to the emergence and persistence of ‘lifestyle diseases’ in Nauru? I focus on one characteristic that stood out prominently in many different aspects of Nauruan life: ‘island time’, or the suggestion that there is ‘No Action Unless Really Urgent’. In theorisation of obesity, such living for the moment has been interpreted as laziness, pleasure-seeking or lack of self-control. However, a deeper analysis reveals that island time emerged gradually in the latter half of the twentieth century as Nauruans incorporated market-derived moral values into their everyday lives. This has led to profound changes in the way people feel when engaged in social exchanges, and is linked to temporally-shorter and more spatially dispersed social networks. I thus recast living for the moment as representative of a social trend rather than individual self-interest, and obesity as a phenomenon associated with the space between bodies rather than within each one. This leads me to consider more closely the links between social relationships and health. In Nauru, as in many societies, it is difficult to disentangle the biological and the social; the same feeling of unhealthiness, for example, is associated with being clinically ill and having a fight with a loved one. Yet many activities that are associated with tightening social networks, and which are prominent in the lifestyle characterised by island time – eating, drinking, or sitting and gossiping, for example – are also associated with obesity emergence. As a result, being biomedically healthy and feeling healthy are now somewhat incompatible in Nauru. In concluding, I argue that the adoption of economic rhetoric into everyday life has re-shaped moral values, everyday social relationships, and the demographic health profile on Nauru.
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Cheng, Yi'En. "Restructuring of education, youth, and citizenship : an ethnographic study of private higher education in contemporary Singapore." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d7ee615b-6d54-4ce5-a518-0f47d69e3c5a.
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In spite of widespread critiques about the neoliberalisation of higher education and its production of citizenship in relation to the market, transformation of students into profit-maximising individuals, and the vitalisation of a self-enterprising subjectivity, many of these claims remain under-examined with respect to cultural production. The objective of this research is to explore the neoliberal production of middle-class citizenship through the lens of educated non-elite local youth in Singapore. By combining geographical, sociological and anthropological insights about education and youth, I develop a theoretically informed ethnographic case study to examine how this segment of young people reproduce themselves as middle-class citizens. The research is based on eleven months of fieldwork at a local private institute of higher education, where I hanged around, talked to, and observed Singaporean young people between ages 18 and 25 studying for their first degree. The ethnographic materials are written up into four substantive papers, demonstrating the ways in which educated non-elite Singaporean youth in private higher education engage with state disseminated ideas around neoliberal accumulation and human capital formation. I argue that these students draw on class-based sensibilities and feelings to produce vibrant forms of normativities, subjectivities, and politics that pose a challenge to dominant assumptions of a "hollowed out" citizenship under neoliberalism. The research makes two overall interventions in geographic and social scientific writings about neoliberal restructuring of higher education and its implications for youth citizenship. First, it cautions against a straightforward claim that neoliberal technologies of control have extended market values into citizenship subjectivity and, with it, the erosion of progressive political projects. Second, it provides a much-needed analysis of middle-class citizenship formation among young people caught at the losing end of a diversifying educational landscape.
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Mallinson, William James. "The Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha : a critical edition and annotated translation." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2003. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:945071bf-3282-4492-8f18-159417f5d554.
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This thesis contains a critical edition and annotated translation of the Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha, an early haṭhayogic text which describes the physical practice of khecarīmudrā. 31 witnesses have been collated to establish the critical edition. The notes to the translation adduce parallels in other works and draw on Ballāla's Bṛhatkhecarīprakāśa commentary and ethnographic data to explain the text. The first introductory chapter examines the relationships between the different sources used to establish the critical edition. An analysis of the development of the text concludes that its compiler(s) took a chapter describing the vidyā (mantra) of the deity Khecarī from a larger text to form the framework for the verses describing the physical practice. At this stage the text preserved the Kaula orientation of the original work and included verses in praise of madirā, alcohol. By the time that the text achieved its greatest fame as an authority on the haṭhayogic practice of khecarīmudrā most of its Kaula features had been expunged so as not to offend orthodox practitioners of haṭhayoga and a short fourth chapter on magical herbs had been added. The second introductory chapter concerns the physical practice. It starts by examining textual evidence in the Pali canon and Sanskrit works for practices similar to the haṭhayogic khecarīmudrā before the time of composition of the Khecarīvidyā and then discusses the non-physical khecarīmudrās described in tantric works. There follows a discussion of how these different features combined in the khecarīmudrā of the Khecarīvidyā. Then a survey of descriptions of khecarīmudrā in other haṭhayogic works shows how the haṭhayogic corpus encompasses various differnt approaches to yogic practice. After an examination of the practice of khecarīmudrā in India today the chapter concludes by showing the haṭhayogic khecarīmudrā has generally been the preserve of unorthodox ascetics. In the third introductory chapter are described the 27 manuscripts used to establish the critical edition, the citations and borrowings of the text in other works, and the ethnographic sources. The appendices include a full collation of all the witnesses of the Khecarīvidyā, critical editions of chapters from the Matsyendrasaṃhitā and Haṭharatnāvalī helpful in understanding the Khecarīvidyā, and a list of all the works cited in the Bṛhatkhecarīprakāśa.
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Vogler, Pia Maria. "Translocal identities : an ethnographic account of the political economy of childhood transitions in northern Thailand." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:046dc27e-fa91-4f1d-9e1f-0ce057db6ebb.
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This thesis examines Karen childhood transitions in a context of expansion of the cash economy, formal education and modern institutions. Since the 1960s, Thai state development has had a significant impact on the organisation of work and learning among highland populations. Today, household economies largely depend on cash income and children aspire towards an adult life in which paid work is central. Formal education is highly valued as a means to reach this goal. Children often migrate for education to better-resourced locations and access scholarships provided by national and international institutions. On the basis of 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between October 2007 and September 2009, the thesis seeks to understand the effects of globalisation on politically and economically marginalized children in northern Thailand through the lens of changing modes of production and learning. Findings indicate that children’s migration for education reflects broad political economic inequalities among Karen households as well as between them and mainstream Thai lowland populations. International dimensions of unequal relations are revealed in local peoples’ collective negotiations with Japanese and Catholic Christian NGOs. Although socio-cultural constructs like ‘gender’, ‘generation’, and ‘ethnicity’ shape Karen childhoods, this study found that their economic and political status are more fundamental in shaping all aspects of their social lives, including their socio-cultural identities. Childhood transitions emerge as multidimensional learning processes towards mastery of ‘translocal identities’, the skill to manage identities and relationships across multiple spaces and institutions. This is a culturally valued skill evidenced when minority children tactfully negotiate differing modes of compliance, resistance, and adaptation, especially in the domains of work and education. Thus, children participate in the moulding of local versions of the modern political economy of northern Thailand.
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Philip, Shannon. "A city of men? : an ethnographic enquiry into cultures of youth masculinities in urban India." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:800c9cb5-d8a0-42ab-b37f-f2c8e9135de3.
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The gender order in urban India is changing rapidly. Several economic, political and sociocultural shifts have brought with them new opportunities and challenges for Indian men and women. This thesis attempts to understand some of these social and cultural changes from the perspective of a group of affluent young men in Delhi. By ethnographically studying young men and their masculinities in urban public spaces of leisure and consumption, this thesis explores some of their relatively new practices of consumption and embodied performances of gender, as well as its consequences on gendering a city space. Through focusing on newly commodified spaces like gyms, shopping malls, night clubs, bars, metro trains and cruising parks in Delhi, I argue that a politics of space, age, gender and class come together to mark men's identities, bodies as well as urban spaces, creating forms of belonging and exclusions in a neoliberal India. Within this context, I explore how ideas of what it means to be a young man are changing in a consumerist India and how this in turn shapes young men's relationships with other men, women, families and changing city spaces. Using ethnographic data collected over fourteen months of fieldwork in Delhi, along with visual and cultural analysis, this thesis lays bare the layers of masculine performances and reveals the everyday attempts at embedding and reproducing a heterosexist patriarchal social order under the guise of a 'new Indian man' and his 'new' India. In the process, I critically but empathetically explore the gendered hierarchies and anxieties that emerge in contemporary India and its consequences on various bodies and city spaces. The chief arguments are presented in five empirical chapters: 1) A 'New' Indian Man, 2) A Masculine Body, 3) Desexing a Masculine Body, 4) A Smart and Masculine City, and 5) A Safe/Unsafe City.
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Ferrari, Matthew P. "Mysterious Objects of Knowledge: An Interpretation of Three Feature Films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Terms of the Ethnographic Paradigm." Ohio : Ohio University, 2006. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ohiou1150466591.
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Best, Anne. "Regional variation in the material culture of hunter gatherers : social and ecological approaches to ethnographic objects from Queensland, Australia /." Oxford : Archaeopress, 2003. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb390773190.
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Emmerich, Kamper Theresa. "Determining traditional skin processing technologies : the macroscopic and microscopic characteristics of experimental samples, prehistoric archaeological finds and ethnographic objects." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/22073.
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The importance of skin processing technologies, in the history and dispersal of humankind around the planet cannot be overstated. This area of material culture is often underrepresented as a research topic, and has been hampered, in part, by the lack of a systematic analysis methodology targeted at specifically this material type. This research aimed to develop a methodology for determining the tanning technologies in use during prehistory, from extant archaeologically recovered processed skin objects. The methodology is a product of macroscopic and microscopic observations of a large sample reference collection, used to produce a database of defining characteristics and tendencies for each of six tannage types. The sample collection is made up of twenty-two species identified as economically important from both Europe and North America. Six sample pieces of skin were taken from a single individual of each of the twenty-two species, and processed using six tanning technologies, the use of which covered a large geographic area and time frame. A second reference collection of clothing and utilitarian items, made from traditionally processed skins, was used to add a section of in-life use traces to the database of discriminating traits. The developed methodology was tested by examining archaeologically recovered and ethnographically collected skin objects, from museum collections across North America and Europe. Objects from many different preservation contexts, including wet, dry, and frozen sites were analysed to determine whether or not the discriminating traits survived interment. It was found that defining characteristics and tendencies do exist between the main tannage technologies, and can be recorded at multiple levels of observation. The analysis of skin objects in museum collections confirmed that at least some defining characteristics and tendencies survived in all preservation contexts. In addition, the preservation of in-life use traces proved to be diagnostic of not only tannage type, but small sections of chaîne opératoire and object biography as well. Overall, this research has demonstrated that archaeologically preserved objects made from processed skin can provide information about the tannage technologies in use prehistorically, as well as more detailed information such as manufacturing sequences and the conditions of use an object was subjected to. Thus, analysis of this nature can be used to access information on a more individual level than previously believed.
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Best, Anne. "Regional variation in the material culture of hunters and gatherers : social and ecological approaches to ethnographic objects from Queensland, Australia." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.301037.
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Romani, Sahar Pervez. "Generation NGO : youth and development in urban India." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b8d8d9f1-f358-431a-bb48-50db9ab4f129.
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This dissertation is about the role of NGOs in the lives of subaltern youth in urban India. It is an ethnography on the everyday lives of young people between the ages of 18-32 from impoverished 'red-light areas' in Kolkata who grew up participating in NGO youth programmes. This thesis investigates how NGOs partake in a process of subject making, and how young people interact with and improvise NGO subjectification to better their own lives in a world- class aspiring city. The youth featuring in this dissertation spent their childhood and adolescence either residing in NGO shelter homes or regularly attending NGO drop-in-centres in their neighborhoods. They came of age attending NGO education programmes, job skills trainings, and human rights workshops. Grounded in 13 months of fieldwork, my ethnography tells the stories of young people’s lives after their participation in NGO programmes, amidst their everyday worlds of work, consumption, and politics. My examination of the young people’s post-NGO daily lives in Kolkata makes three key contributions. First, it reveals the contradictions of NGO development. It examines the ambivalent effects of NGOs on subaltern young people’s gender and class identity, as well as their social and political subjectivity and mobility. Second, it illustrates the plural forms of agency practised by urban marginalised youth. My thesis demonstrates how young people are not just passive recipients of NGO development opportunities, but active negotiators of development as they interact with NGOs and navigate its attempts to regulate youth. Third, it illustrates how NGOs and post-NGO youth both foster and trouble class divisions in the world-class aspiring city of Kolkata. I illustrate how young people develop cultural dispositions that straddle across subaltern and middle classes and unsettle class boundaries but not inequalities. This dissertation argues for ethnographic attention to the everyday lives of post-NGO youth as an analytical lens to theorise NGOisation and global city processes in contemporary India and the greater global South.
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Burton, Lindsay Julia. "Community-based early learning in Solomon Islands : cultural and contextual dilemmas influencing program sustainability." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b9c96049-ea5d-47e3-b74c-951cd22bb090.
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The Solomon Islands (SI), a small developing nation in the South Pacific, demonstrates an emergent community-based kindergarten model with the potential to promote context and culture relevant early learning and development. SI early childhood education (ECE) particularly rose in prominence with a 2008 national policy enactment requiring all children to attend three years of kindergarten as prerequisite for primary school entry. However, these ECE programs remain severely challenged by faltering community support. Internationally, many ECE programs dramatically resemble a universalized Western-based model, with a decidedly specific discourse for “high quality” programs and practices for children ages 0-8. Often these uncritical international transfers of Euro-American ideologies promote restricted policies and practices. This has resulted in a self-perpetuating set of practices and values, which arguably prevent recognition of, and efforts to reinvent, more culturally-relevant, sustainable programs for the Majority World. Based on the Kahua region (est. pop. 4,500) of Makira-Ulawa Province, this collaborative, ethnographically-inspired, case study explores how community characteristics have affected the cultural and contextual sustainability of community-based ECE in remote villages. The study traces historical and cultural influences to present-day SI ECE. Subsequently, it explores the re-imagined SI approach to formal ECE program design, remaining challenges preventing these programs from being sustained by communities, and potential community-wide transformations arising from these initiatives. To achieve this, the study collaborated with stakeholders from all levels of SI society through extensive participant-observations, interviews, and participatory focus groups. Findings aspire to enlighten regional sustainable developments and resilient behaviors relating to ECE. Key research findings suggest five overarching principles influencing kindergarten sustainability: presence of “champion” for the ECE vision; community ownership-taking, awareness-building, and cooperation-maintenance; and program cultural/contextual sensitivity and relevance. These elements were found to be strongly linked with an intergenerational cultural decay in the Kahua region, as conceptualized through a model of Cyclically-Sustained Kindergarten Mediocrity.
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de, Lannoy Jean. "Through the vale of darkness : history in South Malakula, Vanuatu." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2004. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:57eb5894-fe4c-440a-843f-fe195d4239d0.
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The thesis is a multi-vocal and localized history of the destruction of ancient Malakulan society through depopulation, migration and conversion, of the salvation of some people who gathered around Christian communities, and of the relationship of these people and their descendants to the places they have left and to the communities in which they now live. The thesis brings a historical perspective to Vanuatu anthropology. Compared to earlier work in anthropological history in the Pacific by Sahlins, Dening and Bronwen Douglas, the main innovation in method is that all historical statements are set in their context, emphasizing the multiplicity of view points and revealing the significance of even minor variations which refer to important local issues, from land disputes to conversion to Christianity. Innovative use is made of funerary inscriptions, local maps and court archives, reflecting local forms of historical literacy. The research is part of a growing interest in Christianity in Oceania, after a long neglect by anthropologists. This is the first historical anthropology of Vanuatu and perhaps Melanesia to consider the long-term social impact of the dramatic depopulation that accompanied the colonial expansion of Europeans. The abandonment of the interior of the island of Malakula and the weakening of traditional links with other islands have reduced the social space of Malakula to the original zone of contact with Europeans, the coastal areas and nearby small islands. I argue that Christianity allowed the people of Malakula to create a new form of sociality in response to these events. The new society has its own time and space organized around the nuclear family meal and Sunday service, which were the two cornerstones of the conversion process, symbolizing the abandonment of former ritual activities and of the segregation of cooking fires according to ritual status. This process of cultural adaptation continues with the appropriation by villagers of the historical perspective of official courts favouring material evidence and legalistic principles in land disputes. Earlier research on Vanuatu was dominated by the themes of 'kastom', a discourse on tradition opposed to Western ways, and of the rootedness of people in place. This double emphasis is linked to the fact that most fieldwork in the country was done in the 1970s before a fifteen years ban on foreign research after Independence in 1980. In the context of the struggle for Independence and the restitution of alienated land, Vanuatu people needed to emphasize indigenous values and attachment to land. Today, priorities on the ground have changed and new types of discourses have come to the fore emphasizing conversion to Christianity and adopting new concepts reflecting a shift in preoccupation from recovering colonial land to the relation between indigenous Christian migrants and original owners.
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Canuday, Jose Jowel. "Music, dances, and videos : identity making and the cosmopolitan imagination in the southern Philippines." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ad25b3dd-8d0c-4c9a-8b0a-c85eb3255dd3.
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This ethnography examines the processes in which rooted but overlapping forms of cosmopolitan engagements implicate the Tausug imagination of collectivity. It investigates Tausug expression of connection and belonging as they find themselves entangled into global cultural flow and caught up in the state and secessionist politics of attachment. Utilising methodological and theoretical approaches engendered by visual and material anthropology, the ethnography locates rooted cosmopolitan imagination in the works and lives of creative but marginalised and often silenced Tausug cultural agents engaged in street-based production, circulation, and consumption of popular music and dance videos on compact discs. The ethnography follows these cosmopolitan expressions as they are being imagined, embodied, reproduced, and shared by and across Tausug communities in the Zamboanga peninsula, the Sulu archipelago, and beyond through the digital spaces of the internet and cross-border flow of the videos. How the translocality of imaginaries reflected on the videos play out in everyday life and the broader politics of representation are demonstrated here as vital to the understanding of Tausug imagined community as an open, flexible, and dynamically engaging Muslim society despite long-standing political turbulence and economic uncertainty in their midst. Saliently, the thesis argues that Tausug cosmopolitanism cannot be reduced into a phenomenon driven by the expansive currents of Western-led globalisation. Rather, Tausug cosmopolitanism constitutes both continuity of and departure from past forms of translocal connections of Zamboanga and Sulu, which as a region was once integrated to a pre-colonial Southeast Asian emporium and continually through varying ways of connectedness. Old and new global processes come into play in shaping the everyday production of Tausug imaginaries inevitably rendering Tausug identity formation as a trajectory rather than an unchanging fact of being. Drawing from the Tausug ethnographic experience, the thesis contends that rooted cosmopolitanism does not necessarily constitute a singular condition but rather a contested and distinctively multifaceted phenomenon.
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Smith, Simon Paul. "Towards a knowledge management methodology for articulating the role of hidden knowledges." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:32449230-a86a-453b-b9d4-dca2d0b7be3c.
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Knowledge Management Systems are deployed in organisations of all sizes to support the coordination and control of a range of intellectual assets, and the low cost infrastructures made available by the shift to ‘cloud computing’ looks to only increase the speed and pervasiveness of this move. However, their implementation has not been without its problems, and the development of novel interventions capable of supporting the mundane work of everyday organisational settings has ultimately been limited. A common source of trouble for those formulating such systems is said to be that some proportion of the knowledge held by a setting’s members is hidden from the undirected view of both The Organisation and its analysts - typically characterised as a tacit knowledge - and can therefore go unnoticed during the design and deployment of new technologies. Notwithstanding its utility, overuse of this characterisation has resulted in the inappropriate labelling of a disparate assortment of phenomena, some of which might be more appropriately re-specified as ‘hidden knowledges’: a standpoint which seeks to acknowledge their unspoken character without making any unwarranted claims regarding their cognitive status. Approaches which focus on the situated and contingent properties of the actual work carried out by a setting’s members - such as ethnomethodologically informed ethnography - have shown significant promise as a mechanism for transforming the role played by members’ practices into an explicit topic of study. Specifically they have proven particularly adept at noticing those aspects of members’ work that might ordinarily be hidden from an undirected view, such as the methodic procedures through which we can sometimes mean more than we can say in-just-so-many-words. Here - within the context of gathering the requirements for new Knowledge Management Systems to support the reuse of existing knowledge - the findings from the application of just such an approach are presented in the form of a Pattern Language for Knowledge Management Systems: a descriptive device that lends itself to articulating the role that such hidden knowledges are playing in everyday work settings. By combining these three facets, this work shows that it is possible to take a more meaningful approach towards noticing those knowledges which might ordinarily be hidden from view, and apply our new understanding of them to the design of Knowledge Management Systems that actively engage with the knowledgeable work of a setting’s members.
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Todd, Jason. "Social remembering and children's historical consciousness." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7a14abf5-e58c-44c7-98e7-c0465c68e121.
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This study explores how young people's engagement with history outside of the classroom shapes the development of their historical consciousness. Drawing on public discourses around the First World War (WW1), I address the implications of this engagement for history teachers and young peoples' learning. Recognising the active and dynamic construction of memory and meaning by young people, I develop the concept of social remembering. Building on socio-cultural perspectives, I examine the 'lived experience' of young people's memory work. Using WW1 as a context, and adopting an innovative mixed methods approach, the research was conducted over two stages. The first stage of the research used a quiz and survey to explore the extent and nature of young people's social remembering. In the second stage of the study I examined young people's memory work outside the classroom. I worked with several small groups of students to construct their own ethnographic accounts of societal and familial remembering and their emerging historical consciousness, fashioning these into ethnographic portraits. The research highlights the role that social remembering plays in young people's identities, including the ways in which they value and use history, attribute historical significance to events and orientate themselves in time. It shows how different forms of social remembering can both include or exclude young people and impact positively or negatively on young people's historical consciousness. An understanding of social remembering outside the classroom can support history teachers in the development of pedagogies that build on students' meaning making associated with public events such as commemorations. I argue that teachers can use the intersections between social remembering and disciplinary history to engage and support students in their study of history. Although the study originated within the context of history education, it has wider value, offering a ground breaking methodological approach to exploring young people's understandings of the past and in contributing to the historiography of historical memory.
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Roach, Rebecca C. "Transatlantic conversations : the art of the interview in Britain and America." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:117b36f3-feda-4faa-9e68-2fa77ae3a0a6.
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This thesis assesses the role of the interview form within literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The project contends that the interview, although styling itself as a revealing, authentic, private confession, is a genre of life writing that deeply troubles the model of singular Romantic authorship that it simultaneously promotes. The thesis argues that the interview has been a key site for negotiating conceptions of authorship since its inauguration. Exploring issues of publicity, life writing and gossip, through nineteenth-century newspaper depictions of scandals (chapter one), I argue that the act of interview publication is a staging of the speaking self in the public sphere. In chapter two I triangulate discussions of journalism, celebrity and material modernism to argue that the characteristic modernist authorial persona, far from being revolutionary, avant-garde or iconoclastic, was in fact deeply retrograde. Chapter three examines how the interview operated as a negotiation of the study, the marketplace and the middlebrow in the 1930s, with reference to the popular Everyman magazine series “How Writers Work.” The development of an interrogative interview model in the postwar era forms the subject of chapter four, as I demonstrate how the backdrop of the Cold War transformed the ways in which writers as diverse as Ezra Pound and the Beat poets responded to the interview in their work. The penultimate chapter argues that the Paris Review interview offers a hitherto unrecognised link between New Criticism and New Journalism and can revitalise discussions around the historical institutionalisation of literary studies. Chapter six considers the interview’s prominent contemporary position within world literature as a purveyor of literary value and archive of global cultural memory. Overall, the project illustrates how central the interview has been in the cultural construction of authorship in the last 150 years.
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Ustek, Funda. "Invisibility, struggle and visibility : women workers' strategies of survival in the informal sector." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:643e1d6f-6c32-4ae6-ac75-221d9dcb1b89.
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Across the world, women constitute the bottom segments of the informal labour market hierarchy, and the story is no different for Turkish women, except they are further constrained by a patriarchal family culture and corporatist welfare state structure which favours high-skilled workers in full-time employment. A reading of the literature on the reasons for participating in the informal sector suggested that workers either end up in the informal sector as a result of structural factors, such as high unemployment, horizontal and vertical labour market discrimination and limited job opportunities for the low-skilled and low-educated, or they actively chose to participate in the labour market to seize the opportunities it provides, such as evading tax and/or bureaucratic costs, or testing out business ideas. However, this dichotomous understanding provided little scope, if any, to understand why women also entered the informal sector, in ever growing numbers and what the gender-specific constraints and opportunities in the informal sector are. Against this background, this thesis aims to show that this dichotomous theorisation of the informal sector is an exaggeration of reality, and that women workers position presents a middle ground, in which they recognise the constraints on their ability to improve their lives but they are also not powerless. Hence, by focusing on the variety of survival strategies used by women workers in the informal sector, the thesis attempts to show the choice among these strategies, including the conditions in which these strategies can be adopted and the barriers to do so.
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Murrey-Ndewa, Amber. "Lifescapes of a pipedream : a decolonial mixtape of structural violence & resistance along the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cdd0811a-4324-4ec6-a867-aee9174fd984.
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People's narratives, interpretations and understandings of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and pipeline actors emphasise the uneven exercise of power through which structural violence is effected and experienced. The complexity of the processes of structural violence along with local socio-political context and peoples' dynamic understandings thereof play major roles in shaping resistance practices, in complex ways in Kribi and Nanga-Eboko. Working from these narratives, I offer a theoretical re-articulation of structural violence as (i) tangible through the body, (ii) historically compounded, (iii) spatially compressed and (iv) enacted in a globalised geopolitical nexus by actors who are spatially nested within a racialised and gendered hierarchy of scale. Drawing from critical interdisciplinary work on violence, my theory of a triad of divergent, often interrelated and co-existing, distinguishable indexes of structural violence includes: infra/structural violence, industrial structural violence and institutionalized structural violence. The particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power within structural violence, local socio-political contexts and the epistemologies through which power is conceived (in this case I consider epistemologies of la sorcellerie, or witchcraft) inform resistance practices; I illuminate key operations (within geographies characterised by high levels of infra/structural violence) within the spatial practices of power that influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be quiet, spontaneous and/or labour-based. I conclude with a discussion of the political and intellectual value of academic work on life and being amid structural violence, emphasising the need to move beyond the invisible/visible dichotomy that has often informed intellectual work on structural violence.
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Lobley, Noel James. "The social biography of ethnomusicological field recordings : eliciting responses to Hugh Tracey's 'The Sound of Africa' series." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:42da8899-6f92-4d65-9756-5c2be9656cad.
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This thesis is an ethnographic analysis of a collection of field recordings of music from sub-Saharan Africa: The Sound of Africa series made and published by Hugh Tracey between 1933 and 1973. I analyse the aims, methods, value and potential use of this collection, now held at the International Library of African Music (ILAM), in order to address a gap in the ethnomusicological literature and to begin to develop a critical framework for an evaluation of field recording and aural ethnography. An archival analysis of the collection enables me to trace the scope and intended uses of Tracey’s recordings. Identifying a primary intended audience that has not to date been engaged, I argue for the need to develop a new way to circulate recordings among a source community that has never before been reached through institutional archival practice. I use a small sample of Tracey’s archival Xhosa recordings and develop a method of sound elicitation designed to take the recordings back to urban Xhosa communities in the townships located near ILAM. By circulating archival recordings using local mechanisms in township communities, rather than institutional archival methods, I assess the potential relevance of historical recordings to an urban source community more than fifty years after the recordings were made. Having collected and analysed contemporary Xhosa responses, I consider the limitations and the potential for the recordings to connect with indigenous audiences and generate value. I argue that non-analytical responses to historical recordings may contribute to ethnographic understanding, to people’s own sense of Xhosa identity, and to archiving practice in future. Such responses may help increase our understanding of the relationships between music collectors in the field and the people recorded, whether fifty years ago, today or in future.
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Maas, Lucy Gabrielle. "Moral homelands : localism and the nation in Kabylia (Algeria)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ca46f9d7-eda1-4932-a6ea-fc2c07efe88a.
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This thesis is a study of attitudes to regional and national identity in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking region in northeast Algeria, and among Kabyle migrants in Paris. I illustrate how Kabyles nurture a fragile balance of nationalism and regional particularism through a primarily moral notion of local community, and extend it to an alternative vision for an Algerian nation which they believe has been debased by a corrupt state regime and Arabo-Islamic ideology since national independence. The thesis is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork divided between two places – Paris and a large village in Kabylia – and reflects my interest in how people ‘imagine’ national community through their experience as members of smaller social groups. Many Kabyle activists today formulate an alternative vision of Algerian national politics as a federation of several regionally based affective communities, each maintaining internal solidarity. This echoes a tendency in French colonial writings on Kabylia, discussed in the opening chapter, to conceive of the region as an island, intensively connected yet defensive of its autonomy. As citizens of the existing Algerian state, many Kabyles contest assimilation by claiming to represent Algeria’s ‘true past’, and investing contemporary governance initiatives with its values. They represent the radical difference that this implies with metaphors of the Kabyle community as a family within ‘public’ national life, and accuse the state regime of reversing this relationship by adopting a language of coercive authority appropriate only within the family. The transmission of Kabyle values today relies heavily on music, and especially political song, which I demonstrate – beyond its role in disseminating dissident ideas – acts as a vehicle for a type of secular revealed knowledge widely seen as the purest embodiment of Kabyle morality. Beyond the hollow rhetoric of Western liberalism that some see in Kabyle activism, I set out to demonstrate that the particular narrative of identity that I examine, in stressing regional uniqueness at the expense of recognition from a centralized state, also reflects anomalies inherent in the concept of ‘nationalism’ itself as a compromise between the requirements of external co-operation and internal allegiance.
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Shaw, Charlotte. "Buying a balance : the 'individual-collective' and the commercial new age practices of yoga and Sufi dance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a1fc05ce-7df5-4229-862a-132bbed153de.
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The individual's experience of inner authority takes centre stage in the majority of scholarship on New Ageism, with many writers highlighting this theme as a defnitive characteristic of the spiritual culture. The aim of this thesis is to explore this topic and to ascertain the place of the individual and the collective within two commercial New Age feld sites in London. The qualitative data which lead this investigation were collected from a yoga centre called Shanti and a Suf dance organisation called the Suf Order. From this data, the thesis identifes an individual-collective dialectic, one which manifests in particular forms and with divergent orientations; the result is a multiplicity of types of individualisms which include collective forces. The study makes the case for this argument by focusing on four modes in which, at both sites, the individual and the collective co-produce each other. One, the (collective) class culture of the practitioners informs and is informed by the (individual) ideologies of self that the informants assert. Two, the (collective) capitalist context of the organisations infuence and are perpetuated by the ways the (individual) representatives of those organisations express themselves. Three, (collective) shared principles regarding 'positivity' and 'energy' enforce and are sustained by the (individual) feelings of the student. Four, the (collective) communities of practitioners depend on and contribute to the (individual) set apart status of the teacher. These four manifestations of the individual-collective dynamic appear with different orientations in each feld context; in all versions and in both settings, individual and collective are both present and mutually- constituting forces, but at Shanti the dialectics lean more towards the personal and at the Suf Order, the 'same' dialectics lean more towards the social. Each organisation refects and adds to the intersections, both in their forms and their orientations. In so doing, the two New Age centres present divergent balances of the individual-collective dynamic that correlate with the personal and social dispositions of their respective student bodies.
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Panfalone, Anthony Vincent. "Formations of death : instrumentality, cult innovation, and the Templo Santa Muerte in Los Angeles." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6e4824c3-0960-4731-b44f-bd7bd50c066f.
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This thesis examines the Templo Santa Muerte in Los Angeles, a small, loosely organized spiritual group dedicated to the veneration of La Santa Muerte, or the Holy Death. Although originating in the urban barrios (neighborhoods) of Mexico City, Santa Muerte is now venerated in the southwestern United States as well, primarily among working-class Mexican Americans. Although Santa Muerte has been condemned by the Catholic clergy and vilified in mass media and popular culture for its ties to crime and gang violence, my fieldwork at the Templo Santa Muerte demonstrates that not all devotees of Santa Muerte can be characterized in this way. For Templo members, Santa Muerte is foremost a supernatural instrument whose appeal is in large part derived from her singular commitment to satisfying their corporeal needs and material wishes. While this quality is also attributed to many Catholic saints, Santa Muerte is believed to operate independently of Church orthodoxy and is viewed to be more powerful because of this. The Templo Santa Muerte, on the other hand, incorporates some features of formal Catholic liturgy while simultaneously organizing its services around the individual petitions of its members. In doing so, the Templo’s founders maintain an effective balance between liturgical features familiar to their mostly Catholic members and the fundamentally instrumental relationship they have with Santa Muerte. I argue that this balance is central to the appeal of the Templo and to the logic of its founders, who took advantage of the tolerant and diverse cultural atmosphere of Los Angeles to establish a spiritual enterprise that is truly the first of its kind. My methodology and theoretical approach acknowledges this, favoring an ethnographic examination grounded in respondent testimonies, direct observations, and relevant ethnohistorical interpretations of the symbolism and ritual behavior associated with Santa Muerte. At its most general, my analysis of the cult and Templo of Santa Muerte is framed around three separate but mutually interactive and informative dimensions: the instrumental and social manifestations of the cult and Templo, respectively, and the structuring influence that Catholic soteriology and cultural materialism exerts over both.
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Al-Saud, Reem. "Female religious authority in Muslim societies : the case of the Da'iyat in Jeddah." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cf61954d-93ef-46c2-a1ca-3e38e12bd9ec.
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The purpose of this dissertation was to explore how uninstitutionalised female preachers, or dā'iyāt, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia construct authority in a context in which male ulama dominate the production of religious knowledge and represent the apex of the religious and social hierarchy. The study was broad, descriptive, and explanatory and drew primarily on the framework known as ‘accountable ethnography’. Data collection occurred between June and December 2009 and consisted of observations, interviews, and collection of literary artefacts, which were reviewed alongside literature published internationally. A flexible mode of inquiry was employed, partly in response to constraints on public religious discourse imposed in Saudi Arabia after September 11, 2001. The study concludes that the dā'iyāt construct authority predominantly by relying on male ulama as marji'iyya diniyya (religious frame of reference) when issuing fatwas, as pedagogical models, as sources of charismatic inspiration, and as providers of personal recommendations. The dissertation also addresses a set of 'alternate' strategies of authority construction employed by Dr Fāṭima Nasiīf. Almost uniquely, this dā'iyā is found to construct authority that goes beyond reproduction of institutionalised views by developing scholarly arguments to support interpretations of Islamic texts that are responsive to women’s perspectives and needs. In doing so, she expands the parameters of religiously permissible practice while remaining, for her part, within the confines of orthodox practice. Thus, although her society and most researchers perceive knowledge as a masculine attribute in the Saudi religious sphere, in matters relating to women, as well as through active leadership in ritual practice, Dr Fāṭima demonstrates that the dā'iyā can become the authority. Nevertheless, for her and for the other dā'iyāt, the study finds that legitimatising female religious authority depends upon maintaining the established social order, including the hierarchy that places women in a subordinate position to men.
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Munk, Anders Kristian. "Risking the flood : cartographies of things to come." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:55c2df2e-3506-4a93-8cab-37f133866182.
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Reflecting on fieldwork carried out in the UK insurance sector, the thesis explores the role played by various types of actuarial and hydrological expertise in the performance of flooding as a matter of sustained public concern. In doing so, the question is raised: what analytical status to give the concept of risk when accounting for the epistemic doings involved in bringing yet unrealised future floods to bear on the present? Contrary to most other European countries the provision of flood insurance in the UK is left to the market and organised via an agreement under which insurers pledge to provide cover in areas protected by the Government to a standard of 1:75 years (the average return period between floods). What should be taken into account when mapping out this 1:75 year flood zone is subject to debates constantly revitalised by flood events with changing characteristics as well as new ways of modelling and anticipating what has yet to take place. How should we understand the knowledge claims hardwired into these debates through the involvement of actuarial and hydrological expertise? The thesis will argue that a reorientation of flood risk away from a status as the (multiple) object of these claims towards a status as an event in which a diverse variety of other things are brought into being (maps, futures, frequencies, anxieties, publics, geographies, things which are not necessarily very well understood as risk per se), will give rise to more productive and eventful questions. In the terminology of Isabelle Stengers, to risk is to create the possibility of bringing new things to life – the risking of floods seems to be constantly exciting such creativities.
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Bantawa, Bipana. "Examining the structures and practices for knowledge production within Galaxy Zoo : an online citizen science initiative." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:574067c5-d6c2-4440-bdcb-746c5be97298.
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This study examines the ways in which public participation in the production of scientific knowledge, influences the practices and expertise of the scientists in Galaxy Zoo, an online Big Data citizen science initiative. The need for citizen science in the field of Astronomy arose in response to the challenges of rapid advances in data gathering technologies, which demanded pattern recognition capabilities that were too advanced for existing computer algorithms. To address these challenges, Galaxy Zoo scientists recruited volunteers through their online website, a strategy which proved to be remarkably reliable and efficient. In doing so, they opened up the boundaries of scientific processes to the public. This shift has led to important outcomes in terms of the scientific discovery of new Astronomical objects; the creation and refining of scientific practices; and the development of new forms of expertise among key actors while they continue to pursue their scientific goals. This thesis attempts to answer the over-arching research question: How is citizen science shaping the practices and expertise of Galaxy Zoo scientists? The emergence of new practices and development of the expertise in the domain of managing citizen science projects were observed through following the work of the Galaxy Zoo scientists and in particular the Principal Investigator and the project's Technical Lead, from February 2010 to April 2013. A broadly ethnographic approach was taken, which allowed the study to be sensitive to the uncertainty and unprecedented events that characterised the development of Galaxy Zoo as a pioneering project in the field of data-intensive citizen science. Unstructured interviewing was the major source of data on the work of the PI and TL; while the communication between these participants, the broader Science Team and their inter-institutional collaborators was captured through analyses of the team emailing list, their official blog and their social media posts. The process of data analysis was informed by an initial conceptualisation of Galaxy Zoo as a knowledge production system and the concept of knowledge object (Knorr-Cetina,1999), as an unfolding epistemic entity, became a primary analytical tool. Since the direction and future of Galaxy Zoo involved addressing new challenges, the study demanded periodic recursive analysis of the conceptual framework and the knowledge objects of both Galaxy Zoo and the present examination of its development. The key findings were as follows. The involvement of public volunteers shaped the practices of the Science Team, while they pursued robust scientific outcomes. Changes included: negotiating collaborations; designing the classification tasks for the volunteers; re-examining data reduction methods and data release policies; disseminating results; creating new epistemic communities; and science communication. In addition, new kinds of expertise involved in running Galaxy Zoo were identified. The relational and adaptive aspects of expertise were seen as important. It was therefore proposed that the development of the expertise in running citizen science projects should be recognised as a domain-expertise in its own right. In Galaxy Zoo, the development of the expertise could be attributed to a combined understanding of: the design principles of doing good science; innovation in methods; and creating a dialogic space for scientists and volunteers. The empirical and theoretical implications of this study therefore lie in (i) identifying emergent practices in citizen science while prioritising scientific knowledge production and (ii) a re-examination of expertise for science in the emerging context of data-intensive science.
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Mubarak, Kamakshi N. "Everyday networks, politics, and inequalities in post-tsunami recovery : fisher livelihoods in South Sri Lanka." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6140f40d-9b68-4148-b62e-a3d8d9bdc646.
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The aim of this thesis is to explore how livelihoods are recovering in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka through the lens of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework and the social networks approach—methods of inquiry that have gained considerable impetus in livelihoods research. The study is conducted with reference to two tsunami-affected fisher villages in the Hambantota District, Southern Province. It employs a qualitative ethnographic methodology that examines narratives emerging from households, local officials of government and non-government organizations, office bearers of community-based organizations, local politicians, village leaders, and key informants. Focus is on evaluating how particular roles, activities, and behaviour are given importance by these groups in specific post-tsunami contexts and how these aspects relate to broader conceptualizations of social networks, informal politics, social inequality, and ethnographic research in South Asia. The findings support four major contributions to the literature. First, social networks are significant as an object of study and a method of inquiry in understanding livelihoods post-disaster. Second, paying heed to varied forms of informal politics is critical in post-disaster analyses. Third, the concept of intersectionality can extend and improve upon prevailing approaches to social inequality in disaster recovery. Fourth, ethnographic research is valuable for understanding everyday networks, informal politics, and change in South Asia. Collectively, these findings present a human geography of post-tsunami livelihoods in Sri Lanka, where networks, politics, and inequalities, which form an essential part of everyday livelihoods, have been reproduced in disaster recovery. The thesis constitutes a means of offering expertise in the sphere of development practice, highlighting internal differentiation in access to aid as a key issue that needs to be identified and systematically addressed by policymakers and practitioners.
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Mainwaring, Cetta. "Centring on the margins : migration control in Malta, Cyprus and the European Union." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4666c423-23eb-4ef6-99dc-f85f8c3f391a.
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Why does the European Union focus on controlling irregular immigration at the external border? The emphasis presents a paradox as most irregular migrants in the EU arrive through legal channels and subsequently overstay or violate the conditions of their visa. In order to explore this paradox, the thesis examines two case studies, Malta and Cyprus. As small island states on the Union’s southern periphery, the two are ostensibly unable to resist the transfer of migration controls and asylum responsibility to the EU’s external borders. Yet, employing nonmaterial power, namely by highlighting the perceived migration pressures they are under, the two states have successfully attracted significant financial and practical support from other member states. In doing so, they have influenced policymaking within EU migration governance, but have ultimately reinforced the emphasis on controlling irregular immigration at the external border by portraying the phenomenon as a crisis. This thesis not only sheds light on the interaction between the EU and the two states under investigation, but combines three levels of analysis – the regional, national, and local. The crisis narrative detrimentally affects the migrant and refugee populations as it encourages the adoption of restrictive and deterrent measures rather than ensuring access to rights and long-term integration. Nevertheless, this population is not without agency. It is their individual decisions to move across national borders without state authorisation that in the aggregate both compels states into dialogue about the issue and provides the basis for the dynamic between the EU and these two member states.
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Rahman, Elizabeth Ann. "Made by artful practice : health, reproduction and the perinatal period among Xié river dwellers of north-western Amazonia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0c6e924d-f526-4f94-b1dc-bb40319a7d30.
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This thesis is an ethnographic study of a little documented indigenous group, the Warekena people, who live on the Xié River in north-western Amazonia. Examining the mythic histories of the animate riverscape, my work offers an overview of the emergence of riverside dwelling: starting with a macro view of Xié river lifestyles, I explain how seasonal and distinguishing historic-mythic narratives tie in to wider idioms, and to experiences of social reproduction. I focus on reproductive processes and the perinatal period, highlighting methods used by Xié dwellers to nurture healthy, quality-conscious lifestyles, and I examine Xié aetiologies and pathologies. Mindfulness, or awareness, is viewed as a key component of good health. In this context, healthy childbirth is for the birthing mother an art form, a practice for which her total life experience has prepared her. Childbirth is ranked with such other painful experiences as snakebite, and both childbirth and snakebite are opportunities for personal growth. Infant care is seen through the lens of specific, hands-on techniques that promote mindful states in both the carer and the cared for. Mindfulness emerges as a heuristic device that allows us to scrutinize the Amerindian soul and body, also elucidating soul-loss in the ‘animist’ lived world. I argue that mindfulness is a core characteristic of the ‘cool’ hydrocentric and status-conscious lifestyles of Xié river dwellers, and that it defines what it means to be a person, the Xié way.
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Billingham, John. "Divine authority and covenant community in contemporary culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3d96890d-8111-4922-9809-30c51d75e5b6.
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The question I address is: how might a theology of authority be conceived in the light of questions raised by what is termed 'post-modernity'? Is it possible to articulate a theology of authority coming to the church community 'from God' that avoids an oppressive and alienating heteronomy? The thesis explores the question of authority as of vital importance in the sociological dimension of religion, calling for legitimisation (in light of claims made for itself) and as obligatory in the theological sphere. For this reason the project involves two methodologies (theological and sociological/ethnographic). While this investigation is relevant to all sections of the Christian church, particular attention is paid to Baptist churches in the UK, since they hold a concept in their tradition that I suggest is valuable in answering the question of the thesis, namely that of covenant. Within the Christian tradition there is an inner 'problematic' relating the personal authority of Christ to the forms of institution (church) and text (scripture). I explore this with a brief survey of theological authority as found in the fourfold foundation of scripture, tradition, reason and experience. From this is developed a brief theological and Christological reflection on divine authority and covenant theology as found in Karl Barth and his response to the 'inner problematic'. Within contemporary culture I view authority through the lens of so-called 'postmodernism', identifying four challenges to the notion of 'external authority' (all of which exemplify a move from the external to internal, and objective to subjective approaches to authority). This is further explored by means of qualitative research with one-to-one interviews conducted in a Baptist church in York. This data is reflected upon by means of ethnography and 'judicious narratives', especially in dialogue with material from Guest ('congregational study'), Heelas and Woodhead ('subjectivised-self') and Healy ('theodramatic horizon' and 'practical-prophetic ecclesiology'), providing an intersection between the language of theology and sociology. The concept of church as covenant community is explored in Baptist and (more briefly) Anglican traditions, leading to a constructive proposal that both the inner-church 'problematic' and the 'postmodern' challenge to authority might begin to be resolved with the notion of covenant. It is within this context of relationship, human and divine, that the authoritative and revelatory Word of God, the story that is Christ, is found in community and praxis. Here is a 'triangulating' relationship between authority, story and covenant revealing divine authority in a non-coercive way and relevant to contemporary culture.
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Modh, Sandra Violeta. "Lamaholot of East Flores : a study of a boundary community." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b7693f46-3a18-4b1a-ba96-0f17e91f0282.
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Lamaholot is a population found on Flores and in the Solor Archipelago of Eastern Indonesia. The population is village-based and divided into patrilineal descent groups. Marriage is coupled with bridewealth and follows a pattern of asymmetric marriage alliance between descent groups. This thesis shows that a small group of Lamaholot in the administrative regency of East Flores shares certain traditions with a neighbouring population called Ata Tana ‘Ai. Ata Tana ‘Ai are a sub-group of the Sikka population in the administrative regency of Sikka. Descent group among Ata Tana ‘Ai are matrilineal and households were traditionally based in scattered gardens. Marriage is not coupled with bridewealth and instances of asymmetric marriage alliance between descent groups are here a consequence rather than a cause of marriage. The current fieldsite seems to have been part of the ceremonial system of Ata Tana ‘Ai and also to have shared a tradition of dispersed settlement in the gardens. The descent groups might initially have been matrilineal, but in the recent past there was also a habit of dividing children between the parental descent groups. Recent traditions of dividing children can be found throughout central-east Flores, but seemingly not to same extent as at the fieldsite. The payment of elephant’s tusks was a central feature in the acquisition of group members at the fieldsite and could be paid by both men and women. These payments were not necessarily tied to marriage and did not serve as bridewealth. In the last century outer social factors, such as the Catholic mission and the creation of the Dutch colonial state, have resulted in that many of the traditional practices at the fieldsite have been replaced with traditions from Lamaholot elsewhere. The residence pattern is now village-based, but gardens retain a central social and ritual position. The role of the elephant’s tusks has taken different expressions throughout this period of social change, and alongside the changing role of tusks, the traditional social and material authority of women at the fieldsite has declined, whereas that of men has increased. This thesis examines the current and the traditional practices in and around the fieldsite, and focuses on local definitions of descent group, kinship, and inheritance, looking at both biological and social perspectives.
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Kelly, Tara B. "Plants, power, possibility : maneuvering the medical landscape in response to chronic illness and uncertainty." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7d502bb7-8773-41f8-b71e-fe3f78b89cb0.
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This thesis is concerned with plants, chronic illness and medicine in Oku, Northwest Region, Cameroon. I focus on patient strategies to obtain effective medical outcomes, and on how such outcomes may be obtained through seeking traditional medicine in Oku. I argue that biomedical notions of efficacy do not appropriately represent the central and diverse roles that plants play in traditional medicine nor do they correctly represent how people in Oku evaluate the efficacy of plant-based traditional medicine. I argue instead that efficacy must be understood in terms of the emic concept of power. This power is understood to be located in the Oku landscape, which is still uniquely forested and said to embody powerful ancestral spirits. With plants as the primary tangible material of power, and traditional doctors in Oku as those who claim exclusive rights to manipulate and disperse such power, I discuss traditional medicine in Oku as a system wherein power from the natural landscape is drawn upon to challenge harmful powers feared to derive from the social arena. Using the pragmatic and phenomenological approaches, I show how patients evaluate the efficacy of a medical treatment based on their bodily experiences, and how their actions, as revealed in their therapeutic trajectories, reveal their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a given diagnosis and/or therapy. I discuss how enduring illness generates and exacerbates bodily, treatment-outcome, social, and psychological uncertainties. In this context, effective outcomes can be understood as those which address and limit these uncertainties and anxieties while offering ways to imagine hopeful prognoses. This thesis then outlines the major sources of uncertainty, people’s responses to such uncertainties, and what people might achieve in terms of limiting uncertainties by seeking traditional medicine in Oku.
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Mann, Philip A. G. "Achieving a mass-scale transition to clean cooking in India to improve public health." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:41ca7cfc-c3e2-43af-93ae-aab09f4e3178.
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This research provides policy-relevant insights into how a mass-scale, equitable transition to the use of Advanced Biomass (cook) Stoves (ABSs) can be achieved in India, with the aim of improving public health, especially for women and children. The research uses socio-technical systems to provide a characterisation of transition processes, and governance to explain issues of power influencing transition. A review of previous government cook-stove programmes in India and China highlights governance shortcomings in the former, in particular a lack of functional links between layers of administration and poor engagement with community institutions and cooks. Primary data from West Bengal and Karnataka highlighted sophisticated, skilful, flexible and culturally context specific cooking practices. Reasons for apparent low demand for improved stoves, characterised as lock-in, are found to include a combination of risk aversion and habits, lack of affordability, low awareness of the health consequences, as well as a mis-match between the normative priorities of policy makers – currently health- and those of cooks. It is found that the majority of polluting emissions within households - as well as greenhouse gases - from cooking derive from poorer households. A sectoral carbon offset strategy is proposed as a means of funding subsidies for ABSs and programme support measures. Several large corporations have invested significant sums in technology development, community outreach and dissemination, resulting in sales of over 600,000 ABSs. Reasons for their involvement appear mixed. Their market-based activities have generally not reached poor households and there are questions about their ability to build viable businesses in this highly dispersed and heterogeneous sector. A fundamental dichotomy is highlighted between large, centralised cooking programmes and the diverse, complex and changing reality of cooking activities, beliefs and behaviours on the ground. The research concludes that functional multi-level and multi-actor governance structures would be required to achieve a mass-scale transition to clean cooking using ABSs, with a lead role for the public sector. A key component of future success will involve building structures that ensure the agency of cooks and account for their socio-cultural cooking practices in the processes of technology and programme design and implementation.
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Unutulmaz, Kadir Onur. "Football and immigrant communities : transnational diaspora politics, identities, and integration in Turkish-speaking ethnic football in London." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:595c95fc-b99f-4dae-b238-f74776f3f6ba.
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This thesis is on the Turkish-speaking community, comprising Turkish-Cypriots, Turks from Turkey, and Kurds from Turkey, and ethnic community football in London, which has been conceptualised as a transnational social field. It is intended as a contribution in the debates on the growing importance of issues of diasporic communities, their identity politics, and cultural integration in a context of ‘super-diversity’. There are three major analytical themes. The first is transnational diaspora politics, which is redefined to comprise any relationship of power or interest by mobilising diasporic connections. I argue that the Turkish-speaking community uses ethnic football as a means for communal mobilisation around and representation of their ethnic identity in the public space of London, a city of unique political-economic and symbolic significance for the Cyprus Conflict which helped create the Turkish and Greek Cypriot football leagues in London. I show that the Turkish-speaking community has ever since used football to create and maintain a bridge between London and all the different locations of the community including Cyprus, Turkey, Germany, and beyond. The second major theme is collective identities and how they are (re)produced, represented, and manifested in the diaspora. I argue that the nature of the field of ethnic football as a familiar, open, and welcoming space conveniently positioned between the Turkish-speaking private sphere and the British/Londoner public space has been a major factor accounting for the effectiveness of various identity projects to be pursued within this field. Lastly, after presenting the historical link between modern competitive sports and masculinity, I claim that the one defining aspect of all the ethnic identities reproduced within the field is their masculine character. The last analytical theme is the cultural integration of immigrant communities. Without adopting a normative definition of cultural integration, I have considered the implications of involvement in ethnic community football in terms of belonging, social inclusion, marginalisation, and the psychological development and well-being of the individuals involved. The presented and analysed discussion rejects any automatic causal link between involvement in sports and integration or that involvement in mono-ethnic sporting organisations and segregation. Having reviewed a few exemplary organisations, which used football for integration purposes, and the nature of the ethnic community leagues, I have also argued in this thesis that the field of ethnic community football, again due to its specific nature, structure, and position between the private and public spaces, offers a great potential to be engaged by local and national governments in the service of integration policies.
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Sundaram, Usha. "Theorising place as practiced object of consumption : a street ethnographic story." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/23932.
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This study theorises and conceptualises place as an object of consumption, formed, shaped, and affected through practices. The study problematizes place treatments in extant managerial sciences and its contextual interpretations within consumption. It draws from a range of disciplinary inspirations from management studies, social sciences, philosophical, and phenomenological musings to empirically interrogate place construct using ethnography, in itself understood as placemaking practice. It analyses and interprets place through the lens of practice theories and non-representational methods to conceptualise place in consumption, and critically revisits its ontological hierarchy vis-à-vis space. The study delivers several methodological, theoretical, and axiological contributions. It uses an adapted form of historical street ethnography to interrogate place, imbuing it with a critical reflexive standpoint, and positions a revitalised and reinvigorated street ethnography as a critical reflexive epistemic tool of knowledge production in the analytical transitions from phenomenological to post-phenomenological narratives. The study’s theoretical, discipline-specific contributions arise from synchronous examinations of place, consumption, practice, and non-representations. It empirically validates heuristics of non-representation and practices in contextually examining place in consumption, appreciates genomic qualities of practices brigaded through universality of human experiences as pools of actions and competencies articulating consumption, and contemplates place as a processual, aspatial, fluid entity grasped beyond marketplace logic through practices. It expands understandings of marketplace, setting, structure, and actor, and invites attention to the liquefied, flowing nature of market and consumption through place plasticity and path-dependent practices. It emphasises the illocutionary force of place as object of consumption shaped through and in each moment of practice. The study empirically validates the reenchanted ontology of place, resituating it as the universal supreme abstract with space and time as component, co-constitutive elements, thus resituating extant place-space hierarchy. The study’s axiological and managerial contributions highlight mutability of practices in shaping place beyond marketplace logic in its many forms and settings, valorise everyday activities in shaping marketplace, illuminate the role of public, civic, and communal spaces and their contributions in the transition from market economy to marketized society not captured by marketplace discourses, and invite practice and non-representations into depictions of place marketing and consumption.
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Zorzi, Maria Victoria Gaburro de. "O \"Dicionário\" de Documents (1929-1930) e a Antropologia de Georges Bataille." Universidade de São Paulo, 2013. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8134/tde-24032014-110733/.
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A produção textual de Georges Bataille (1897-1962), privilegiadamente estudada nos campos da Literatura e da Filosofia, apresenta uma vasta gama de temas e é considerada por seus comentadores como refratária a qualquer classificação rigorosa e indexável. Contudo, ele é autor de uma obra de grande interesse para área da Antropologia em função de um forte experimentalismo dos conceitos e da escrita e de uma compreensão totalizante da experiência do pesquisador e do escritor. O presente estudo tem como objetivo o exame de parte específica da produção e atuação de Bataille que coincide com os inícios da institucionalização da antropologia francesa (anos 1920- 1930), quando o autor encontra-se envolvido com o projeto da revista Documents, Doctrines Archélogie Beaux-Arts Ethnographie (1929-1930) e bastante próximo dos antropólogos que colaboram com a publicação. Ao recuperar a formação primeira de Bataille como arquivista paleógrafo na École des chartes e seus primeiros escritos e interesses, entre os quais se encontra a antropologia de Marcel Mauss, o trabalho se dedica a construir as conexões entre a profissão de arquivista paleógrafo nas bibliotecas Francesas e a produção do escritor que tem lugar entre os anos 1918 e 1930, interessado em destacar os nexos entre essas dimensões e o processo de constituição dos museus na França sobretudo aquele que culminará no Musée de lHomme (1937). As experiências nas bibliotecas, nos museus e na revista colocam Bataille diante da questão da classificação e do arquivamento de objetos e documentos. O interesse em uma leitura de Bataille por essa via que procura relacionar a institucionalização da disciplina etnográfica na França ligada à formação, catalogação e arquivamento de documentos nos museus e o processo de criação do Dicionário de Documents auxilia a iluminar uma dupla intervenção crítica que consiste em construir um deslocamento, uma derivação da forma de pensar. Essa perspectiva diversa nos oferece um duplo olhar para os modos pelos quais a reflexão sobre o lugar das histórias da disciplina e seus praticantes tem sido experimentada.This present study has the purpose of examining some specific parts of George Bataille´s production and action that correspond with the beginning of French anthropology institutionalization (1920s and 1930s), when the author finds himself immersed in the Documents, Doctrines Archélogie Beaux-Arts Ethnographie (1929-1930) magazine project and building a very close relationship with the professionals involved in the publications creation. By resuming Batailles first occupation as paleographer archivist at École des chartes and his primary written pieces and interests, among which is the anthropology of Marcel Mauss, the work is dedicated to build connections between his job inside French libraries and his activities as a writer from 1918 to 1930, when his interests were focused on highlighting the links between these dimensions and the constitution of the museums in France - especially the one that will culminate at the Musée de l\'Homme (1937). The experiences in the libraries, museums and the magazine put Bataille before the classification and filing of objects and documents. His interest in this path that searches for relating the institutionalization of the ethnographic discipline in France connected to framing ideas, cataloging and archiving documents in museums and the creational process of the Dictionary of the magazine helps to illuminate a double critical intervention that consists in building a movement, an offshoot of thinking. This different perspective offers us another look to the means through which the reflections on the place discipline stories and its practitioners have been experienced.
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Mai, Dan T. "Sustaining family life in rural China : reinterpreting filial piety in migrant Chinese families." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8e679650-a857-4f3c-a5c1-770a1bff848e.
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This study explores the changing nature of filial piety in contemporary society in rural China. With the economic, social and political upheavals that followed the Revolution, can 'great peace under heaven' still be found for the rural Chinese family as in the traditional Confucian proverb,"make yourself useful, look after your family, look after your country, and all is peaceful under heaven"? This study explores this question, in terms not so much of financial prosperity, but of non-tangible cultural values of filial piety, changing familial and gender roles, and economic migration. In particular, it examines how macro level changes in economic, social and demographic policies have affected family life in rural China. The primary policies examined were collectivisation, the hukou registration system, marketization, and the One-Child policy. Ethnographic interviews reveal how migration has affected rural family structures beyond the usual quantifiable economic measures. Using the village of Meijia, Sichuan province, as a paradigmatic sample of family, where members have moved to work in the cities, leaving their children behind with the grandparents, the study demonstrates how migration and modernization are reshaping familial roles, changing filial expectations, reshuffling notions of care-taking, and transforming traditional views on the value of daughters and daughters-in-law. The study concludes that the choices families make around migration, child-rearing and elder-care cannot be fully explained by either an income diversification model or a survival model, but rather through notions of filial piety. Yet the concept of filial piety itself is changing, particularly in relation to gender and perceptions about the worth of daughters and the mother/ daughter-in-law relationship. Understanding these new family dynamics will be important for both policy planners and economic analysts.
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Owen, Oliver H. "The Nigeria police force : an institutional ethnography." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e824783a-8ba0-4d96-8519-0ee2b2090fc8.
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This thesis is an institutional ethnography of the Nigeria Police Force. It concentrates on evidence from 18 months of fieldwork in one particular police station, in the pseudonymised town of Dutsin Bature in central Nigeria, and draws comparative evidence from examples and locations elsewhere in Nigeria. The fieldwork evidence is also supported by analyses of public discourse, literature reviews, some formal interviews and historical research. The thesis aims to fill a gap in empirical scholarship by looking at policing in Nigeria primarily from the level of everyday practice, and deriving understandings of the ways the overall system works, rather than by taking normative structural approaches and basing suppositions of actual behaviour upon these. It also aims to document emic perspectives on policing in Nigeria, in contrast to most existing scholarship and public discourse which takes an external perspective, from which the voices and worldviews of police themselves are absent. The thesis situates this ethnography within three theoretical terrains. First, developing understandings of policing and public security in Africa, which have often neglected in-depth studies of formal police forces. Secondly, enlarging the ethnographic study of formal institutions in African states, to develop a closer understanding of what state systems are and how they function, beyond the overtly dysfunctionalist perspectives which have dominated recent scholarship. Thirdly, informing ongoing debates over state and society in Africa, problematising understandings which see these as separate entities instead of mutually constitutive, and drawing attention to the ways in which the two interpenetrate and together mould the public sphere. The thesis begins with a historical overview of the trajectory of formal policing in Nigeria, then examines public understandings and representations of policing, before moving inside the institutional boundaries, considering in turn the human composition of the police, training and character formation, the way police officers do their work in Dutsin Bature, Nigerian police officers’ preoccupation with risk and the systemic effects of their efforts to mitigate it, and finally officers’ subjective perspectives on their work, their lived realities, and on Nigeria in an era of transition. These build together to suggest some conclusions pertinent to the theoretical perspectives.
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Melia, Michael. "One startup's dream : an ethnography of a vision." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bdad8068-57b1-47bd-b22c-1b93130b9fcb.
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This is the story of how four people invented a whole new world and way of life - and how they attempted to establish it across the globe. Copass, a Parisian startup consisting of four cofounders, aimed to connect hundreds of the world's shared workspaces under their new global federation. But the main objective of this startup, in contrast to most, was not to build capital. It was to build a universe: a future where white-collar workers would be liberated from the shackles of office life to work anywhere in the world, to meet exciting people and to have amazing experiences. Here, workdays were permanently mixed with holidays. Work was fun, workplaces were play-places and workers were adventurers. The ambition of these four cofounders was to turn the way they wanted things to be for them into the way things ought to be for everyone else. To turn their desired lifestyle into a global social movement that enrolled, as they saw it, hundreds of cities and thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of people. In short, they created a company to fulfil a dream. This is an ethnography of that one startup's dream, analysed at length to demonstrate innovative ways of worldmaking employed by an ambitious tech company seeking success. A company dissatisfied with the world that, instead of changing it, decided to create a new one.
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Hart, Laurie Anne. "Collecting and curating objects of ethnography, an ethnohistorical case study of the O.C. Edwards collection." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ34310.pdf.
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Dakessian, Areck Ardack. "Casting nets and framing films : an ethnography of networks of cultural production in Beirut." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/31464.
Full textAbstract:
Filmmakers first received widespread academic attention as case studies into the increasing casualisation of labour in post-industrial economies. Their precarious existence in project-based labour markets provided much food for thought about the future of work, while their status as artists and producers of culture entered them into debates around just what art is and how to approach it. But in light of recent transformations in the cultural industries and the accompanied blurring of boundaries between production and consumption, academic understandings of the lives filmmakers lead have also been somewhat blurred. This ethnography of networks of cultural production in Beirut re-introduces filmmakers into the very sociological debates that they helped spark. Might a return to the situated experience of these theoretically and methodologically challenging people, who form workgroups and collaborate with each other repeatedly across projects as they craft their own careers, shed productive light on academic understandings of precarity, cultural production and indeed our increasingly confusing relationships with the objects around us? With that in mind, in this thesis I ask the following research question: how are networks of film production formed and maintained in Beirut? Based on an 'insider' ethnography of various film projects weaved into a mixed-methods social network analytic methodology, I adopt a relational sociological approach that conceives of production networks as akin to social worlds and find three analytic planes to delve deeper into: markets, objects and relationships. In relation to markets, I echo the argument that current classification systems of cultural production are too consumption-based and adopt a social network markets framework more sensitised towards production. Here, I find that the cyclical, project-based relationship of patronage that ties production networks to their clients is highly varied and contingent, shaping not only the process of cultural production but also its organisational structure. Further, I argue that the management of these contingencies is key to the potential repeat collaboration not just with clients (and their own social networks), but fellow producers as well. But past projects do not simply disappear once completed, they might well come back to haunt their makers. Drawing upon ethnographic and recent historical data on a number of web-series that emerged out of Beirut between 2009 and 2012, I compare using two-mode networks the past and more recent projects my interlocutors were involved in. Here, I find that one's past projects shape one's future by conducing or hindering their chances of finding new work. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, I find that filmmakers (and those around them) increasingly define themselves (and are defined by others) in relation to the past projects they have done. Over time, though, as filmmakers collaborate on an increasing number of films, their relationships take on deeper characteristics than monochrome economic considerations. Here I draw upon the notion of embeddedness to shed light on emergent meaning at the network level across a number of projects and, therefore, the emergent social world-ness of networks. While the first set of findings relates to debates in the sociology of work and the second to those in the sociology of cultural production, my final analysis shows just how intimately the two are connected. I conclude by highlighting the potential of empirically-grounded relational sociological approaches to finessing our understandings of cultural work in its economic, social, but also material and technical contingencies.