This thesis examines a studio of five visual artists based in Madrid, Spain, a group who (illegally) utilize the public space of the city as both their medium and canvas. It explores an aesthetic practice often (and, more often, incorrectly) termed either ‘graffiti’ or ‘street-art’, a practice of both ornamentation and order which bound together my informants as a unified collective of social actors. Based on data collected over 20 months of fieldwork, the work attempts to renegotiate this material practice, to place it within a broader historical/political/aesthetic purview, one escaping the traditional themes of vandalism and art, gangs and pollution that these discourses so often educe. The study is hence divided into two main sections, Ornamentation and Order. Part One, Ornamentation, explores the physical artefacts themselves, the meanings my informants ascribe to their images as well as the tensions and communicative schemata emerging out of their very form. It will attempt to place these artefacts within the wider theoretical debate over the public sphere that they materially re-present. Part Two, Order, is focused more closely on the immaterial residue of my informants’ spatial acts, the explicitly performative, practice-based elements of their aesthetic production. It will thus move away from notions of ‘meaning’ and attempt to track how this cultural production comes to not only reflect but also actively structure and shape the moral and social guidelines of my informants’ lifeworlds. The study thus aims to set these particular aesthetic processes within a larger historical timeline of architectonic practice in the city as well as placing them within a framework of ritual performativity. It will explore both what these images mean and what they do, how they function within the classical desire for the ‘good’ city; it will examine how these practices operate within a modality of contemporary civic ritual.

This thesis is an ethnography of a village in southeast Romania. The theme of the thesis is whether people feel comfortably aligned with their objective conditions of life as they experience them. In the thesis I discuss different means by which people evaluate the relation between their ideals in life and what they see as their actual lives: from the most stable material culture of houses and possessions to ideals and aspirations for a ‘modern’ life. I explored these issues through a hierarchy of forces that act upon the individual. The highest level is the political economy and how it imposed ideologies as to how life should be lived, but also practices. The next level down is represented by the normativity of the village life, where issues of political economy are balanced with for example the autonomy that came from the church, the lenience of communism, peasant sensibility and how people judge these as well as being judged by them. Finally, I discuss the individual and the sense of appropriate alignment between the external pressures of political economy as expressed in and through one’s social category and the internal subjective sense of aspiration within those terms of who one wants to be. The thesis then focuses upon the sense of boredom as an objective appreciation of such hierarchy. I explain why and how the ethnography of boredom effectively maps out these relationships between political economy, village normativity and people subjective sense of their own alignment with the imposed social forces. Therefore, the thesis suggests that individual boredom is not simply a consequence of how society is designed to function, or actually functions, but rather boredom objectifies particular individual and group consumption of their designated social position.

Integrated conservation and development programs (ICDPs) are aimed at addressing both conservation and development issues through the involvement of local communities in the process of wildlife management. Typically this involves providing park-adjacent communities with conservation-related benefits to induce pro-conservation behaviour. The Dzanga-Sangha ICDP Project (DSP), southwest Central African Republic, has coordinated the management of a protected area complex since 1990. Its activities include traditional conservation measures such as anti-poaching patrols, a developing gorilla tourism programme, and focused development activities. This study adopts an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate its efficacy at meeting both local development and conservation goals, with a strong focus on how these two areas interact. Evaluation of the DSPs impact on poverty alleviation in the reserve community suggests that the considerable opportunity costs caused by park formation largely fail to be compensated by the benefits provided. This effect is augmented by the high level of in-migration into the reserve. Examination of discrepancies between cost/benefit provision and recognition show that community-level benefits are particularly undervalued by local residents. Attitudinal surveys suggest benefit recognition to be strongly linked to pro-conservation attitudes. However, results from a 12-month market survey, a concurrent household consumption survey, participant observation and key informant interviews showed that conservation-related behaviour, in terms of both wild-food extraction and consumption, is largely unrelated to either benefit receipt or attitudes. Furthermore, evaluation of conservation efficacy suggested the main prey species are being hunted at unsustainable rates. This empirical study takes its place in a growing literature addressing not only the direct social and environmental implications of ICDPs but, crucially, the interactions between the two. It provides both applied management recommendations in addition to further contributing to our theoretical understanding of the dual development-conservation approach.

The release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the environment and food chain in the UK has produced one of the most visible and enduring cultural controversies in recent times. This research explores the ways in which these debates unfolded and were mobilised in the context of one region, the southern county of Dorset, where Farm Scale Evaluations of GM crop varieties were carried out. Contrary to existing studies that focus on conceptions of the specifically ‘genetic’ aspect of GMOs, typically associated with feelings of ‘unnaturalness’, and potential health/environmental risks, I refocus on the ‘modified’ aspect. Modify is a synonym for change and I argue this controversy is all about contested cultural change. Understood as such this is less a problem of culture interfering with nature; but rather a problem of competing cultural networks, as alternative ways of doing and being are subjected to, what I term, cultural risk. Ethnographic participant observation, semi-structured interviews and other qualitative methods were used to trace the ongoing construction and defence of local food networks in Dorset, a hub of social/economic activity in the construction of new food cultures and a centre of protest in the Farm Scale Evaluations. Simultaneous ‘virtual’ ethnography was also carried out as activist groups, historically connected to performative protest in Dorset, initiated network-building activities in response to trials of GM potatoes elsewhere in the UK. By utilising theories of cultural change and rhetoric, this research asks: what cultures are at stake here in the GM controversy? How do they identify and define themselves? Upon what resources do they depend? How do they persuade others to travel with them? Throughout I suggest that a key role is played by the rhetorical weaponry of the story, a crucial tool in both boundary-making and history-making processes within the ‘serious games’ of culture.

This thesis focuses on the tension that exists between the social identity of objects and their constituent substances, through an investigation of the activities and perceptions of professional practitioners who come into contact with either gold as gold objects or gold as an unconstrained substance. It adopts the strategy of ‘following the substance’ - considering the social flow of gold as a material - rather than being limited by the social biography of the object or taking a restrictive definition of production as just the physical fabrication of artefacts. Ethnographic data from fieldwork undertaken at assay offices, refiners, jewellery manufacturers and retailers and at precious metal scrap dealerships is analysed to identify how these sites interrelate through the movement of gold and the socially crucial points in this movement. The synthesised results of this analysis are presented as a visualisation of the social reclassifications of gold: the gold cycle. The main features of the cycle, including how the cycle incorporates the social trajectory of gold jewellery and the rite of passage undergone by gold as a substance, will be considered in relation to the subjects’ dominant self-identity as a group: The Trade. This case study is presented in order to contribute to the theoretical understanding of the social complexity of substances and the relevance of this to the production, consumption and destruction of objects.

Large-scale cooperation between unrelated humans is a major evolutionary puzzle. Natural selection should favour traits benefiting the self, whereas cooperation entails a cost to self to benefit another. The work presented in this thesis makes an empirical contribution towards understanding the evolution of large-scale cooperation in humans. Theory posits that large-scale cooperation evolves via selection acting on populations amongst which variation is maintained by cultural transmission. While cross-cultural variation in cooperation is taken as evidence in support of this theory, most studies confound cultural and environmental differences between populations. I test and find support for the hypothesis that variation in levels of cooperation between populations is driven by differences in demography and ecology rather than culture. I use economic games and a new ‘real-world’ measure of cooperation to demonstrate significant variation in levels of cooperation across 21 villages of the same small-scale, forager society, the Pahari Korwa of central India. Demographic factors explain part of this variation. Variation between populations of the same cultural group in this study is comparable in magnitude to that found between different cultural groups in previous studies. Experiments conducted in 14 of the villages demonstrate that the majority of individuals do not employ social learning in the context of a cooperative dilemma. Frequency of social learning varies considerably across populations; I identify demographic factors associated with the learning strategy individuals employ. My findings empirically challenge cultural group selection models of large-scale cooperation; behavioural variation driven by demographic and ecological factors is unlikely to maintain stable differences essential for selection at the population-level. This calls for re-interpretation of cross-cultural data sampled from few populations per society; behavioural variation attributed to ‘cultural norms’ may reflect environmental variation. The work presented in this thesis emphasises the central role of demography and ecology in shaping human social behaviour.

This thesis stems from 12 months fieldwork among the Kel Antessar and other Tuareg clans in the District of Goundam (Region of Timbuktu) in north-west Mali. The Kel Antessar are an anomalous clan compared to other Tuareg. Their maraboutic status has catalysed their social and spatial mobility and given them a special mediatory role throughout past and present history. Although the research was initially focused on repatriated refugees following the end of the 1990s Tuareg rebellion, my data show that it is not analytically useful to isolate the refugee category from other forms of mobility in northern Mali. Kin-based networks and various forms of mobility structure social, economic and political relations which are of central importance in the allocation, distribution and use of human and natural resources in a society which is in a constant state of flux. The Kel Antessar’s elite has also played a particularly important role in brokering aid in the context of the decentralised administrative system in this region.

Based on ethnographic research, “Amputations and Invocations” is a study of Maltese amputees. It is an examination of how the body is rebuilt following lower limb amputation surgery within a Maltese context. The study contributes to current arguments in medical anthropology because it shows how the body is a cultural artifact not only in its presence but also in its absence. The amputated person becomes the pragmatisation of significant aspects of Maltese culture. Roman Catholic beliefs, biomedical interventions and family support are simultaneously invoked when a person loses part of the body. These invocations reflect how society conditions the way fragmented bodies are perceived and rebuilt. This profound human change was interpreted from an emic and etic perspective by examining this experience as a symbolic “rite de passage” and by applying an original framework based on the Roman Catholic belief in Death and Resurrection. These explanatory models helped bridge the difficulty that arises when the ethnographer, without self-experience of amputation, writes about such a non-ordinary human experience. Various levels of analysis revealed that body rebuilding following limb amputation is not just a matter of substituting the flesh with technology. Rebuilding the mutilated body entails facing challenges imposed not only by the body with missing limbs, but also by society's reaction to the mutilated, broken body.

This thesis is based on an ethnographic study of the process of exhumation, identification and reburial of the human remains of Republican civilians killed during the Spanish Civil War and buried in mass graves located in two rural communities in the Burgos province of Castile Leon, Spain. This ethnography is based on participant-observation as an archaeologist in the exhumation process, informant interviews with participants in the exhumation, as well as an analysis of material culture in these field sites. There are estimated to be thirty thousand Republican civilian victims of political killings buried in mass graves throughout Spain. The wider context of this thesis is the resurgence of public awareness and debate of the Republican experience of political repression during Spain‟s Civil War and subsequent dictatorship. This repression engendered a condition of atomization amongst the relatives of Republican victims, accompanied by state prohibitions on Republican mourning and commemoration. This condition of atomisation remained unchallenged during Spain's democratic transition, a period of political consensus characterised as the 'pact of silence'. This thesis contends that the radical rupture in the 'pact of silence' observable in Spanish society since 2000 is attributable in large part to an orchestrated campaign across Spain to exhume the bodies and personal possessions contained within the mass graves from the Civil War, and the subsequent processes of scientific identification and the return of bodies to communities for commemorative acts of reburial, which this thesis argues should be understood as a sequence of radical shifts in the way the way the past is materialised. To enable a more detailed understanding of how this rupture has been produced, this thesis follows the exhumation process in two communities, identifying a series of shifts in the material register within in which the dead Republicans, as well as the traumatic events surrounding their deaths, are materialised. Different forms of materialising the past in my field sites were identified before, during and after exhumation. An analysis of these shifts in material register entail a consideration of a broad range of material: the imagined and remembered objects that recur in informants‟ narratives on the past; photographs and personal possessions from the dead; the bodies of the dead; the personal possessions retrieved from the mass grave; and the material culture that accompanies the reburial and commemoration of these bodies. The potentially divergent roles of the relatives of the dead, expert practitioners and pro-exhumation campaigners are identified. Shifts in material register are viewed as opportunities for divergent representations of the dead and of the traumatic past to be made and contested by these different participants. The question of how far these representations of the dead foster new affective bonds between the living and dead, and may form the basis for new collective identities amongst the living is assessed.

Within museological studies, the changing relations between anthropology museums and their differentiated publics, which intensified in the second half of the twentieth century, are typically apprehended through material cultures, through objects, collections and exhibitions. From a different perspective, this thesis argues that the shifting politics and relations–engaging anthropology museums, source communities and the broader sphere of cultural production–are equally, if not more, pronounced in performance culture. Such collaborative frictions are concentrated, enacted and iterated in ‘museum acts,’ which frame and centre human actors, rather than objects. Based on a critical and diachronic ethnography of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) (1976–2008), this analysis focuses on a diverse range of museum acts covering: artists’ residencies, exhibition openings, unveilings, cultural performances, memorial services and symposia. It demonstrates that, despite their ephemerality, such acts or intangible representational practices are crucial indices and constituents of museum space, discourses and histories. Central to this argument is the theory of performative acts, which is drawn from the disciplinary folds of linguistics and philosophy. Like their linguistic counterparts, it is argued, museum acts are intersubjective media that possess a dual agency; an illocutionary force that enables them concurrently to signify and constitute social ‘realities.’ Or to be more specific, as the case studies illustrate: through their intersubjectivity and “performative parallax” (Hastrup 1995, 97–8), museum acts operate to index and iterate relations and identities; to enact and validate artefacts and memories; to mediate and assert or alternatively contest and reclaim cultural knowledge and knowledge of culture. In this way, museum acts are central to the production of the anthropology museum as highly textured and sedimented, hybridized and indigenized, political and contested monumental space.