Scholarship on the Western Sahara conflict has long puzzled over an ‘extraordinary leap’ of Sahrāwī tribes to the status of refugees and citizens of an exiled nation-state. It has glossed over this process as a modernising and civilising act of detribalisation, applauded women’s recent political appearance within a sovereignty-solidarity discourse, yet simultaneously used an insecurity discourse to measure Sahrāwī ‘performance’ hypercritically from inside the nascent state’s corridors. This ethnographic study observes Sahrāwī political action differently, by looking out from inside the tent and through the eyes of women. The thesis re-examines Sahrāwī tribe to state transition using a new framework of women’s tents and circulating, veiled males. Drawing on two years of anthropological fieldwork, the significance of the tent emerges as the decision-making centre for both men and women whereby the domestic is the political. I argue that women must be analytically recognised as political architects, utilising and presiding over tents as a female political economy of affection that casts a centralised political constellation across the Sahara. Not only do these fresh insights of Sahrāwī strategic tribe-state symbiosis and tactical nomadic sedentarisation overturn received anthropological wisdom on the stele of ‘tribe’, but it is women and their tents that can offer explanations for the ‘leap’ from genealogical reckoning to nationalist consciousness. This study presents comparative ethnography to engage critically with anthropology’s ‘great debates’ and popularised tropes regarding veiling, patriarchy, gendered space and power, and ‘tribal’ society. A different analytical light is cast on the gendered use of the exoticised Middle Eastern ḥarīm and of new hybrid forms of human socio-political reorganisation that challenge Western default notions of nation and state to suggest the need to rethink ‘tribe’.

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The use of donated human semen in the UK was developed by medical practitioners as a means of circumventing male infertility and helping childless women to achieve a pregnancy. Uncertainty about the legal status of donor-conceived children and moral concerns about the possible effects on the marital relationship of the recipients worked to maintain donor insemination (DI) as a largely hidden practice in which the donors remained anonymous to the recipients and unrevealed to any resulting donor offspring. Donors were not expected or encouraged to take any interest in what became of their donations even after the practice became subject to regulation by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. This thesis is based on a set of unstructured interviews with medical practitioners and other health professionals currently or formerly working in clinics providing DI services in the UK, and with men who donated semen between the 1960s and early 1980s mostly when they were medical students. Participant observation was carried out at conferences and other meetings of organisations and individuals with professional or personal involvement in donor-assisted conception, and a survey was made of infertility clinics’ policies concerning the use of semen from donors known personally to recipients. Discussions with donors revealed ambivalent and mixed feelings about their involvement in providing semen, often for payment, and about their lack of information regarding the outcome of their donations. The idea of possible contact with donor offspring is influenced for these semen donors by their perceptions and experiences of what it means to be a parent and by the significance attributed to physical resemblances between genetically related people. In this situation of ambiguity and uncertain obligation, there is no existing script for managing possible new kinds of kinship relation. The historical tension in DI services between opportunity and risk because of possible defects or disease in donated semen is now echoed in professional uncertainties about whether to allow semen donation where the donor and recipient are known personally to each other. I show that for some people, including donors, this brings the practice into a kinship frame, whilst for others it confuses family boundaries because of the possible fantasies between donor and recipient, and the involvement of the genetic father with the donor-conceived child’s upbringing. Finally I show that disagreements in the UK over whether to remove the legal provisions for anonymity turn on whether it is necessary to protect donors from emotional and financial claims from their donor offspring, and on perceptions about what constitutes a parent.

This is a study about children living in an unusual setting, a refugee camp. It recognizes that this situation causes disruption to children’s lives but rather than focusing exclusively on this disruption, emphasizes the children’s everyday experiences of continuity and change as interpreted through their position as social actors. The study is based on 2 years of fieldwork conducted in Kala refugee camp in Zambia using participatory and child-centred research techniques. It studies the children’s everyday lives in order to gain a picture of continuity and change, and in particular, how these are experienced by the children. Going to school, working and playing remain central to children’s lives but these are experienced differently in the camp. By locating children as agents within their social context, this study considers the wider impact of the camp setting on children’s experience of growing up. Children’s preoccupations reflect those of the social group but include a unique child perspective on these issues. Dependency on NGO provision of food is a key defining characteristic of their refugee experience. The impact of this reaches beyond provision of nutrition due to the importance of food in economic and social transactions, as a means of defining social relations and its symbolic role in everyday conversation. These combine to provide a forum for the negotiation of power relations between refugees and with the NGOs. The study concludes that changes to lifestyle affect the way that children grow up and therefore have an impact on their ideas of identity and what is acceptable or desirable behaviour. Adults, who aim to ‘socialise’ children into appropriate behaviour, affect this, but ultimately children are active in authoring their own experiences, drawing influences from every aspect of their environment.

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This dissertation aims to combat the general neglect into which the study of Indian princely states has fallen. Covering nearly 40% of the Indian subcontinent at the time of Indian independence, their collapse soon after the departure of the British has discouraged both anthropologists and historians from choosing Princely states as an object for study in terms of both chronological as well as social depth. We are left therefore with major gaps in our understanding of the Princely State in colonial times and its post-colonial legacies, gaps which this thesis aims to fill by focussing on relationship of king and subject in one of the largest and most important of these states – the Princely State of Mysore. One of the few influential texts concerning colonial princely states is Nicholas Dirks’ The Hollow Crown (1987), a study of the state of Pudukkottai in pre-colonial times, whose thesis is suggested by its title. Essentially Dirks argues that Royalty was integral to ritual, religion and society in pre-colonial South India, and that these ties were torn apart under colonial rule (although little evidence is given to prove this), when the Princely ruler was deprived of all political and economic control over the state. This dissertation takes up, qualifies and contradicts this argument in several important ways by using a combination of historical and anthropological methodologies. Our examples are drawn from the state of Mysore, where the royal family was actually (re-) installed in power by the British following the defeat of the former ruler Tipu Sultan in 1799. After 1831, Mysore further saw the imposition of direct British control over the state administration. Mysore has thus been regarded as more of a puppet state than most. However, this dissertation argues that the denial of political and economic power to the king, especially after 1831, was paralleled by a counter-balancing multiplication of kingly ritual, rites, and social duties. At the very time when (as might have been predicted) kingly authority might have been losing its local sources of power and social roots, due to the lack of income and powers of patronage, these roots were being reinforced and rebuilt in a variety of ways. This involved the elevation of the king’s status in religious and social terms, including improvement of the City and Palace, strategic marriage alliances, and the education and modernisation of the entire social class (the Urs) from which the royal family was drawn. Above all, kingly authority was progressively moved away from a material to a social and non-material base, with the palace administration being newly reconstructed as the centre and fountain of the politics of honour within the state. It is for this reason that when the Princely states of India were abolished after independence, and their pensions cancelled after 1971, they were not forgotten. Thus, as described in the conclusion, the idea of kingship lived on in South India and continues to play a vital and important role in contemporary South Indian social and political life.

The Sri Lankan civil war has been ongoing for over twenty years. Fought out in the civilian areas of the North and East of Sri Lanka, between the Sri Lankan Government and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) it has completely transformed the lives of ordinary people living in the primary battlefields of the North and East. The last twenty years has seen massive internal and external displacement from the North and East as well as the complete reordering of physical and social landscapes of the past, the present, and thus the future. This thesis is centred roughly on stories of one place, Jaffna and the concept of ur/home that Daniel (1984) argues is central to ideas of Tamil personhood. I examine what home means when disproportionate movement occurs and what happens to displaced families and individuals. The thesis examines both Tamils and Muslims from the North, and takes at the heart of its inquiry, the nature of belonging, and who is allowed to belong and who is not. Through a few individual biographies I trace themes of displacements and memory. I look at what people's ideas of home are, and, what happens to these ideas of home in displacement. In particular I examine how people come to find that by inhabiting different places/homes, they may become different kinds of persons. This becomes folded into generational structures. Thus I look at the work of inheritance of property, memory, kinship that different generations attempt to transmit and pass on in an attempt to be related to each other. The intimate and the familial are linked to the ongoing political situation where the interior becomes the repository of stories disallowed in the exterior. I use the metaphor of houses and rooms in my thesis to point to the conditions of internal terror that framed my research. Tamils, living with internal terror, could only tell stories in the spaces of the interior. In contrast working with Muslims, outdoor ethnography was possible. I discuss the freedom to belong, denied to Muslims, and the freedom to speak, denied to Tamils. Thus, I reflect upon the different imaginations of speaking and silence, residence and belonging for different political and social locations within the same history and place. In the end this is a thesis about how individuals reflect upon their lives. While it is not based in Jaffna, it is on Jaffna past, Jaffna present, Jaffna imagined and Jaffna lost. It looks at the specificities of how people deal with the larger human dramas of love, loss, home and the relationship of the self to kin.

<p>Den här uppsatsen handlar om Sydafrikas väg mot en sanningskommission och hur landet har tagit itu med sitt förflutna med hjälp av kommission. Till sin hjälp har man tagit sanningskommissioner i bl.a. Chile och El Salvador. Uppsatsen kan ses som en analys av det tillvägagångssätt som användes i Sydafrikas kommission.</p> / <p>This essay is about South Africa's way to a reconciliation and truthcommission and how the country has taken care of its past with help from this commission. South Africa took help from truthcommission´s in Chile and El Salvador. The essay is analysis of the course of action that was used in South Africa's commission.</p>

Den här uppsatsen handlar om Sydafrikas väg mot en sanningskommission och hur landet har tagit itu med sitt förflutna med hjälp av kommission. Till sin hjälp har man tagit sanningskommissioner i bl.a. Chile och El Salvador. Uppsatsen kan ses som en analys av det tillvägagångssätt som användes i Sydafrikas kommission. / This essay is about South Africa's way to a reconciliation and truthcommission and how the country has taken care of its past with help from this commission. South Africa took help from truthcommission´s in Chile and El Salvador. The essay is analysis of the course of action that was used in South Africa's commission.