In recent decades, many wild animal populations across Africa have been driven towards extinction due to human activities. This is also true for great apes. As our closest extant relatives, these species serve as evolutionary models for an array of traits which might have characterized our last common ancestor and early humans. Furthermore, apes are considered keystone species to local biodiversity. Therefore, their disappearance would cause permanent damage to local ecosystems, and also impede the understanding of our evolutionary origins. Hence, it is crucial to conserve the last remaining wild populations. Against this background this thesis pioneers a large-scale analysis of factors relevant to ape conservation. This is based on the so far most extensive compilation of information on great ape distribution across Africa and examines threat impact and conservation activities inside protected areas. The objective of this study is to evaluate ape population presence and distribution in response to threats over different spatial scales. Furthermore, the study promotes an evidence-based conservation approach, by evaluating benefits and shortcomings of various different conservation efforts and their effects on overall great ape status. The thesis presents three main result sections. First, it provides an overview of threats and their impact level in all areas across the great apes' range. Second, analyses of the effectiveness of conservation efforts demonstrate that long-term presence of law enforcement guards, tourism, research and NGOs are best suited to prevent apes from extinction. Furthermore, the long-term presence of law enforcement is found to be the key for a successful conservation strategy inside protected areas. Third, it demonstrates that all African great apes are found to respond differently to external threats from area borders. Finally, the study provides some recommendations on how to improve conservation strategies at global and local scales.

This thesis untangles and examines the myriad of social relationships, as they exist in a residential community in San Francisco. The community has a central meditative practice referred to as Orgasmic Meditation, which involves the ritualised stroking of a woman’s clitoris by a male partner in a group setting. Using ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical analysis, the thesis considers issues of embodiment, substance, and domination. The ethnographic evidence supports the argument that understanding the role of the body and embodiment is fundamental to understanding processes of self construction, and of power and domination in a social context. The community examined in this thesis is a so-called ‘transformational’ community; one where individuals can ‘work on themselves’ in order to better fulfil what they understand as their potential. This transformation is facilitated by the ‘movement of energy’ brought about by Orgasmic Meditation. By undertaking this mindful physical practice, the way practitioners understand the constitution of their bodies, and subsequently their social relationships, is transformed. The embodiment and visceral experience of ‘Orgasmic energy’ impacts on the social structuring of the community. Émile Durkheim’s work on religious ‘force’ is used to suggest that in this community, society is Orgasm, and Orgasm is society. The thesis analyses the residential experience of living within the community, practicing Orgasmic Meditation, and being involved with the running of the organisation. Deep immersion in the field site has allowed for a deeper understanding of the phenomenological and visceral experience of the embodied transformation afforded through Orgasmic Meditation and the relationship between a new embodied subjectivity and the hierarchical organisation of the community. The thesis examines the transformation of the organisation over a period of time and how this impacted on the residents. It uses Durkheim, Bourdieu, Douglas, Csordas, and Deleuze and Guattari to examine the relationship between the body and society, and how this is affected by social change. It employs the work of Bataille, and ethnographers who have worked in Melanesia such as Marilyn Strathern, to examine the role of an embodied substance in the constitution of self and other, and in social relationships. Finally, the thesis examines the relationship between the organisation and wider, ‘mainstream’ society, arguing that although there is an attempt at separation and distinction, particularly within new forms of subjectivity encouraged by Orgasmic Meditation, the oscillation, movement and tension between the utopian ideals of the organisation and the established institutions of mainstream society becomes too much to manage for many of the residents, some of whom leave feeling disillusioned. As a contribution to the anthropological literature, this thesis reflects on the role of the body in contexts of power, and how understandings of self and substance influence social form.

In my thesis I am looking at how National Museums create their own identity and try to give us a sense of being in the world all of their own, which is distinct for each one museum. I am asking how conservation contributes, as an integral part of their physical substance, through a sense of familiarity and homeliness which the Museum constructs around authentic objects and its own collections. The concept of behind the scenes is examined from the bottom up with regard to museum practice by looking at conservation in a particular context and at a particular time. I investigate this idea of creating museum ‘homeliness’ through the concept of truth, the process of ascribing value to objects, the visual aspect of the practice of conservation, the object’s materiality in relation to ideas of tangible and intangible in conservation, the quest for origins in relation to object’s biography and how exclusivity is constructed. In particular I am investigating the role of the conservator in the construction, preservation and transmission of cultural knowledge and, within the setting of the Victoria and Albert Museum, I aim to gaining a better understanding of how conservation practices are shaped and adapted to the requirements of a major national institution as a particular moment is fixed, and who we are, or wish to be, is affirmed in the process of object preservation.

My work explores how low-income residents of the Brazilian state of Maranhão constitute affective relations with kin and otherworldly forces. Both men and women locally consider the expression of desire, rage, longing and other emotive dispositions as the provenance of autonomous agency. Persons however also stress the indispensability of self-restraint, ‘respect’ and deference in the maintenance of abiding social hierarchies. In the course of ordinary life, both these frameworks of action inform the public presentation of ethical personhood. Based on 20 months of fieldwork, my thesis focuses on the ways by which persons employ these mutually-exclusive modalities in the generation of intimacy within and across family houses.

This thesis addresses the phenomenon of land restitution among native people, which has emerged as a central issue within the broader context of State-indigenous people relations in the last two decades. By focusing on idioms of land and place among the Mapuche people of Southern Chile, it approaches land restitution as a process in which two different understandings of the meanings associated with ancestral land, one of Mapuche people and the other one of the Chilean State, are brought together. This encounter is characterised by both unresponsive attitudes by functionaries working within the bureaucratic and legal framework and by genuine misunderstandings on the significance of ancestral land for the Mapuche people. More specifically, divergences are centred on the issue of cultural continuity between Mapuche residing in rural communities and the dwellers of the demanded ancestral land. By following the implications of the idiom of tuwün, as the specific geographical location of the origins for each Mapuche person, this thesis illustrates how the significance of ancestral land coexists with ambivalent feelings of distance towards the ancestry. The relation between Mapuche people and their locality is central to the analysis of land claims. In this thesis, the claim made by Mapuche people that their ancestral place of origins is both a given element of the individual and a necessary condition in order to be Mapuche will not be taken as a discursive articulation of identity. Rather, by focusing on both the relation between human and non-human components of the local environment and the significance of the tuwün as a potential determination of Self and Otherness at different levels, the local ethnography will unambiguously point at the salience of the relation between Mapuche residents and their local surroundings.

Reproductive ecologists have proposed that environmental conditions experienced during development influence adult reproductive hormones. An earlier study on Bangladeshi women aged 18-35 showed that women who migrated to the UK during childhood (<16 years) have significantly higher salivary progesterone levels compared to women who grew up in Bangladesh. But no such study has been reported in the context of later reproductive hormone levels and ovarian reserve. In the research here, hormone profiles that predict ovarian reserve (inhibin B, AMH and FSH) were compared between: 1) migrant Bangladeshis who moved to the UK as adults, or 2) migrant Bangladeshis who moved as children, 3) sedentee Bangladeshis living in Bangladesh, and 4) white European women. Data on socio-economic, demographic and reproductive histories were also collected. The following hypotheses were examined: 1) There is inter-population variation in ovarian reserve depending on environmental conditions during development; 2) Moving to a better environment during adult life does not affect age-specific ovarian reserve; and 3) The childhood environment has an impact on age-related ovarian reserve in later life. The findings support these hypotheses. Results suggest that changes in the developmental environment during childhood, when the tempo of growth and maturation are determined, influence reproductive hormone levels and ovarian reserve. Conversely, environmental change during adult life, when maturation is completed, does not alter later life reproductive hormone levels or ovarian reserve. The childhood environment therefore appears to have a significant effect on ovarian reserve reinforcing earlier findings that developmental plasticity extends beyond the uterine period in humans. Consequently, the higher age-specific ovarian reserve of child migrants who grew up in the UK results in an extended reproductive life span compared to women who grew up in Bangladesh. This may eventually put child migrants at an increased risk of developing age-related diseases such as breast cancer.

This thesis describes the interdependence of visual and material cultures in the home and seeks to understand of the place of structures of mass consumption and mass visual communication in the making of personhood. It brings together the study of the photograph with that of the memento and the collection. Through an eighteen-month ethnography of eighty households in South London, material culture categories and consumer genres are dissolved in favour of exploring the precise relationships between images and objects in the representational, memorial and ancestral practices that establish kinship and friendship, and shape experiences of migration and belonging, death and memory. Cross-cultural comparison sheds light on the themes of inalienability, memory, materiality, reproduction and ancestralisation. In particular, works on photography in non-Western settings have established its ‘other histories’, embedding photography in everyday social and ritual lives. Turning to the Euro-American cultural region, this thesis abandons the search to define the essence of ‘the photograph’, offering instead a guide to the range of practices in which specific types of photographic images and mementos establish the sociality, time and memory of households in Britain. The thesis transforms the photograph as an object of analysis, shifting the gaze from the image-in-itself to its place among the sensuous materials and values of the interior. Secondly, it explores the consequences of the labour that householders invest in the material transformation of memory and experience. This is summarised in the three parts of the thesis as the work of display, collection and dispersal. This perspective develops the theorisation of the mutual implication of images, objects and persons in establishing different forms of knowledge and community, illuminates relations between domestic, museum and consumer landscapes, and allows for the productive convergence of new and established anthropological literatures.

Developmental constraints influence individual energetic apportionment between growth, maintenance and reproduction with long-term implications for health and longevity. Such life-history trade-offs are hypothesised to explain the observed variability of human male and female reproductive steroid levels. Salivary testosterone (salT), anthropometric, and demographic data were collected from: 1) sedentees in Sylhet, Bangladesh (n=107; aged 20-78 years, mean 39); 2) Bangladeshi born men who migrated to London as adults aged ≥18 (n=61; aged 23-76, mean 49); 3) Bangladeshi born men who migrated to London as youths <18 (n=50; aged 18-69, mean 32); 4) British born Bengalis (n=48; aged 18-42, mean 25); and Londoners of white British or other white European parentage from 5) similar socioeconomic background compared to migrant groups (n=58; aged 18-75, mean 41); and 6) higher status socioeconomic background compared to migrant groups (n=30; aged 22-54, mean 37). SalT and somatic markers of adult Bengalis is dependent upon the age at which they migrated from Bangladesh to the UK and suggests differences in male reproductive phenotype, health behaviours and diet due to changes in ecological conditions during development. These findings contribute to the growing body of evidence that salT, stature and apportionment of skeletal muscle vary in accordance with early life conditions and the strategic allocation of reproductive effort in the human male, with a corresponding increase in early symptoms of adult onset disease of the prostate and glucose metabolism, and low socioeconomic status (SES). Predicted blunting of diurnal salT profile in adult migrants was inconclusive. Contrary to the predictions of this study, Bengali men do not have lower salT in relation to reproductive status of paternity or marriage, while older British-born European men of low SES have higher salT in relation to number of offspring and marital status. British-born Bengalis and migrants who arrived as children under the age 12 years were revealed to be of significantly higher SES than migrants who arrived in London after the age 18, possibly reflecting a generational shift away from historical conditions of poverty within the London Bengali community.

This thesis describes the family experience of mental illness in Kintampo, Ghana. Beginning from the history of colonial and anthropological speculations on mental illness and the dangers of acculturation in Africa, it provides an ethnographically informed analysis to assumptions regarding the value of the extended family and the village environment to recovery from mental illness in low-income settings. The thesis explores mental illness as primarily a social experience, bordered on one side by a complete social undoing embodied in the national stereotype of the homeless mad vagrant, and on the other by the chains and shackles which form the extreme materialisation of attempts to maintain a mentally ill relative within the family unit. It demonstrates how families seek to nurture the person’s endangered humanity against the popular view of the madman as a ‘spoiled’ or ‘useless’ human being through the process of day-to-day care and a prolonged and costly search for healing. The psychiatric hospital is a popular resource for treatment, and often the first rather than the last port of call, as health workers fear. However given the limited efficacy of psychiatric treatment, families frequently turn or return to traditional and Christian healers in the hope of an ultimate cure. Despite the promises of such healers, treatment is often unsuccessful in the long term and material and social resources can be depleted. The thesis concludes by considering the implications for the future of mental health care in Ghana given the limitations of all forms of treatment and the ongoing predicament of families living with mental illness. I argue for an approach which draws not on a reductive version of biomedical psychiatry to treat individual pathology, but which reinvigorates the postcolonial vision of a socially embedded psychiatry which may be of value not only in Africa but also elsewhere.

Combining processual and cultural meanings-orientated with post-functionalist agency-focused approaches to relatedness, this thesis examines the role of women in the reproduction of Cortorari kinship. Cortorari are a Romanian, “traditional” Gypsy society, kin-based, bilateral and endogamous, with a strong androcentric ideology. It demonstrates that women, who are otherwise accorded less symbolic value than men and may not inherit ceremonial wealth, have a preeminent role in the reproduction of the cosmic and social order. Cortorari consider themselves descendants of a common group of ancestors. Inclusion or exclusion from kin is achieved in relation to a person’s depth and breadth of interrelatedness. However, the spread of kin ties is an expression of transactions in property: especially chalices. These material items, which are imbued with transcendent value, circulate as inalienable possessions along male bloodlines. In marriage transactions, wife-givers gain entitlements in the groom’s chalice in exchange for cash “dowries”. The transaction entails intermarriage in the future. Conceptions of proprietorship articulate notions of gendered personhood: Inheritance of a chalice is premised on birth of a male offspring to the heir. Maleness and femaleness are, in turn, achieved through procreation inside wedlock and through enactment of moral behaviour revolving around “honour” and “shame”. Detailed ethnography of several marriages – involving practices of cousin marriage and daughter exchange as well as an overarching principle of sibling unity – and of the accompanying ceremonial gifts leads me to contend that the idiom of exchange cannot account for the economic, political and sexual significances of Cortorari marriages. I demonstrate that women as “daughters”, “mothers” and “wives” secure men’s possession of chalices. This thesis concludes with a critical engagement with orthodox anthropological thinking about Gypsies. I use my ethnographic findings to query deterministic explanations of Gypsy cultural survival, the model of “living in the present” and the performative nature of Gypsiness.