För kvinnor innebär en graviditet en tid av såväl fysiska som psykiska förändringar. Dessa förändringar är naturliga och försvinner oftast efter förlossningen. De plötsliga kroppsliga förändringar som sker i en gravid kvinnas kropp leder ofta till att kvinnan känner att hon förlorar kontrollen över kroppen. Samtidigt håller omgivningen kvinnan ansvarig för att kontrollera hennes gravida kropp så att den är i linje med de normer och ideal om kroppen som finns i samhället. Uppsatsen undersöker hur gravida kvinnor förhåller sig till samhällets normer och ideal om en vacker gravid kropp. Materialet till studien utgörs av observationer och analys av två diskussionsforum på populära mötesplatser för gravida och en tidning som inriktar sig på graviditet. Resultatet visar att kvinnor redan i ett tidigt stadie av graviditeten bygger upp bilder och förväntningar över den gravida kroppen som ett resultat av hur media framställer en gravid kropp. De kvinnor som upplever stora kroppsliga förändringar ger ofta uttryck av besvikelse, frustation och skam över att inte lyckas leva upp till sina egna förväntningar och förväntningar som de uppfattar att omgivningen har på deras gravida kropp.

Denna uppsats är en studie av motståndet mot den köttfria dagen i skolan ur ett symboliskt perspektiv. Den undersöker symbolens innebörd och betydelse för motståndarna och jämför sedan dessa gentemot symbolens tilltänkta. Studien visar på att en symbol kan ha olika betydelser samt vara av olika karaktär beroende på vem mottagaren är. Detta kan leda till samhälleliga konflikter och denna studie belyser just hur man kan studera symboler för att få en större förståelse för hur och varför dessa uppkommer. Den köttfria dagen är en symbol vars tilltänkta betydelse är att vara en förklaringsmodell och praktik för en miljövänligare och hållbar framtid men studien visar att den istället ges betydelser som vittnar om samhälleliga motsättningar gällande normer och värderingar och där modernitet – tradition, kollektivism – individualism, frihet – tvång samt manligt och kvinnligt står i huvudfokus.

<p>170601.</p>

<p>170601.</p>

The subject of my essay concerns the images of refugees that have been taken on Lesvos during the last year. The aim of this essay is to examine the relationship between the photographer, the camera and the island as a scene för photographers, through the images that were taken there. The main scene is the beaches of Lesvos where tragedies and (sometimes) even comedies take place. I am working in a field where photography, aesthetics and social anthropology intersect. As regards to method, I have applied researcher Ruben Anderssson's ”extended field site” to my own field studies concerning Lesvos. The refugee situation that recently found its centre on the Greek islands is built up of networks that stretch far and wide across the globe. Events in one part of the world affect what is happening on Lesvos and vice versa. The media and NGOs are also part of larger networks. Therefore the field site needs to be extended beyond the geographical borders of Lesvos. I did field studies on Lesvos two times during the last year. I interviewed photographers and volunteers and took photographs of my own. Intuition is an integral part of my work and I have also applied it to my field studies. One of my starting points has been Judith Butler’s thoughts on what makes a life grievable. Butler's main hypothesis is that we view certain lives as having less value than others and thereby we will be less likely to grieve the passing of such lives. I examine the images of refugees to see if photography can help us better regard their lives as grievable. Refugees are people whose exposed bodies live precarious lives. Photographers can capture this in images but it is the spectator who has the final say in how images affect him or her. I end the essay by examining the spectator and what happens when we are confronted with disturbing images. Images of refugees in need exhort us to react whether we want to or not. We can turn away, but once images have entered out consciousness, there is no turning back.

Amidst widespread concerns about aging on several levels ranging from the personal to the societal, this dissertation examines the construction of meaning in life and older age in contemporary Japan. Based on an ethnographic account of a community salon in Southern Osaka, it explores the experiences of older people and their ideas of the good and meaningful life, while arguing that than an anthropology of the elderly can reveal a far wider scope of issues than aging alone. Drawing on a socio-narratological approach, I show how stories connect people, form a shared body of knowledge, inform our understanding of the everyday, and provide frameworks for our choices. I argue that the capacity of narratives to create coherence and make sense of seemingly random and unconnected events can help to reveal existential issues, and that narrative analysis may therefore be a powerful tool for creating an existential anthropology capable of elucidating and understanding deeply personal dilemmas in their social and cultural context. The ethnography and life stories of elderly salon goers, volunteers and others involved in a local Non-Profit Organisation raise important issues of autonomy and dependence, sociality and isolation, care and concern. People express concern for others through practices ranging from gift-giving, visiting, balanced forms of polite yet friendly discourse, the provision of information, and volunteering in the salon and beyond. I argue that older Japanese are as much providers of care as recipients of it, thereby challenging the constructed image of the elderly as frail and dependent, even though maintaining independence relies paradoxically on cultivating multiple dependencies on others. Navigating the tensions between the benefits of rich social ties and a desired level of separation in which the burden imposed is minimised, or between dependence and freedom, emerges as central to the balancing acts required for living well.

Situated on the north-eastern coast of Morocco, the Spanish enclave of Melilla is a paradigmatic case of an unusual yet increasingly common kind of community. These are small, rather isolated communities with no industry or natural resources of their own, which rely heavily on capital and labour drawn from outside. Together with Ceuta, Melilla is one of the two only land borders between Europe and Africa. The enclave’s economic and political set up reflects its geopolitical importance. Across the border from Melilla lies the Moroccan province of Nador, home to one of the largest communities of Moroccan emigrants in Europe and a steady source of unskilled labour on which the Spanish enclave relies. Connections across the border are strong, including kinship links, employment networks and a wide range of both legal and illegal commercial transactions. Based on twelve months of fieldwork conducted on both sides of the border, this thesis departs from prevailing images of the borderland as either an abstract space of ‘creolisation’ and ‘hybridity’ or a locus of resistance to state power, and suggests, instead, that we carefully consider the large-scale political and economic processes through which places like Melilla and Nador are produced, and analyse the ways in which such global structures shape local reality. A fundamental aim of the thesis, therefore, is to elucidate the nature of the relations between space, place and capital at the Spanish-Moroccan frontier, and understand how such relations affect the lives of those who inhabit the region. This involves thinking about the language of a ‘community’ and the discourses and practices of morality that sustain it; analysing discourses of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ in contexts of institutionalised economic inequality; and understanding local conceptions of identity, morality and legitimacy, and how the three interact.

Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in suburban Hyderabad, India, this thesis contributes to emerging debates on the Indian new middle classes and postcolonial middle classes more generally. I challenge images of a homogenous middle class enjoying the benefits of liberalization by highlighting the diversity in wealth, lifestyle and access to opportunities within this class sector. Contrary to the pervasive image of a hedonistic and morally corrupt new middle class, I assert the centrality of moral discourses to the construction of middle-class identity in Hyderabad. Middle-class Hyderabadis engage in moral discourses of ‘respectability’ and ‘open-mindedness’ in relation to caste, consumption, education, and women’s public and domestic roles. These discourses of morality are central to the reproduction of class and gender inequality as successfully balancing the demands of respectability and open-mindedness is particularly difficult for those with fewer resources such as the lower middle class and for women who are expected to embody authentic Indianness in their demure comportment, ‘traditional’ attire and commitment to ‘Indian’ family values, but are also liable to being judged ‘backward’ if their clothing and lack of education and paid employment are seen to be in conflict with fashion and open-mindedness. The focus on balance and compromise in middle-class Hyderabadis’ narratives echoes other work on postcolonial middle classes that has emphasised people’s efforts to adhere to local notions of respectable behaviour that are central to national identities while also attempting to align themselves with a ‘modern’ global consumer culture. In contrast to much of this literature, however, I challenge the notion that modernity and tradition, the local and the global are objects of desire in and of themselves and instead argue that they function as important reference points in discourses that legitimate the dominant position of men and those of upper class-caste status.

An ethnographic approach is used to produce a nuanced investigation of the efforts of the Haida First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, to repatriate the human remains of their ancestors from collections around the world. The result is a contextualisation of Haida repatriation within values and structures of kinship—a position that stands in contrast to the frequent use of political or legalistic frameworks to understand repatriation issues. Incorporating Haida sensibilities toward kinship relations is necessary as analyses based in colonial or post-colonial encounters fail to account for the full range of motivating factors, which include the Haida value of yahgudangang (‘to pay respect’ and ‘to be fit for respect’) and the agency of ancestors after death. Furthermore, it is argued that kinship is the predominant structure through which Haidas experience identity, history and memory. Repatriation is therefore approached as a collective space in which kinship and memories are created, as well as a collective space in which remembering occurs. In order to understand how the individual elements comprising the repatriation process reflect and foster the construction of kinship, the expectations and obligations that exist within matrilineages and between moieties are traced, as is their material manifestation in objects, as well as tangible and ephemeral property. The sharing of embodied experiences between generations as a consequence of Haidas’ participation in the process of repatriation is shown to augment collective memory and family histories. The ways in which repatriation is incorporated within individual and collective narratives are explored as a further means of understanding the dynamic between the production of kinship, memory and identity. Avenues for expanding the current findings on repatriation, the connections between memory and kinship, and Northwest Coast scholarship more generally are presented.

This thesis constructs an ethnography for the nineteenth century ǀXam Bushmen of the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, known primarily through a nineteenth century manuscript collection of oral narrative (the Bleek-Lloyd archive), which has, over the past twenty-five years, increasingly become the focus of scholarly attention, mined for insights about the cultural world of southern Bushman societies. It draws on the Bleek-Lloyd archive to produce a detailed ethnographic case study, focusing on the ideological and ontological concepts that underpinned the differentiation of ǀXam society. Firstly, the thesis situates the archive and ǀXam society within their particular environmental and historical contexts, providing valuable supplementary information that informs readings of the narratives. By producing a fully searchable transcription of the entirety of the archive, paying close attention to emic terminology, and examining the recurrence of thematic associations of this phraseology throughout the narratives, the analysis explores the constitution of ǀXam ‘personhood’ and examines the extent to which the ‘hunter-gatherer’ category forms a useful heuristic for understanding ǀXam society, with a particular focus on models of the ‘animic ontology’. The ǀXam deployed a series of positively and negatively evaluated traits in the creation of dimensions of authority, obligation, and social responsibility, embedded in particular social identities; central to these constructions and to the differentiation of these identities were the techniques and resources of ǀXam subsistence practices, salient in the production of admirable (socially-responsible hunters), reprehensible (antagonistic ‘beasts of prey’), and more ambiguous (ǃgi:tǝn ritual specialists) identities. Recognising this internal differentiation, the thesis outlines ǀXam ‘subsistence strategies’ and suggests they should be defined broadly to include their contacts and interactions with non-ǀXam groups, with domesticated animals, and with the novel material culture of the colonial period; these interactions were a consequence of their ‘hunter-gatherer’ strategies rather than a negation of them. Such strategies generated experiences that reinforced and reconstituted ǀXam ideological frameworks, incorporating the dynamics of the nineteenth century ‘frontier’ scenario and provided avenues for social change that ultimately led to the collapse of independent hunter-gatherer lifeways, and to the adoption of strategies that incorporated ǀXam individuals within rural and urban ‘Coloured’ populations of the Northern Cape; placing the ǀXam in a comparative colonial context, the thesis stresses the wider relevance of this particular ethnography for understanding hunter-gatherer engagements with food-producing, state-level societies.