Despite extensive attempts to tackle domestic violence, it remains a pervasive, insidious and pertinent issue. This applied anthropological study attends to several unchartered dimensions of domestic violence in a previously unexplored context – namely, Polish migrant women’s experiences of abuse and associated service engagement in the United Kingdom. Research was conducted between 2013 and 2015 via a multi-sited ethnography, across institutions that administered and provided support to women experiencing domestic violence in Edinburgh. Analysis focuses on the significance of political economy in the context of domestic violence, particularly on how political economic practices relating to British statecraft intersected with Polish women’s migrant identities and experiences. Accordingly, this work is foregrounded within an intersectional paradigm of borderlands. This perspective permits this text to demonstrate how markers of difference, engendered by nation states, shaped Polish women’s experiences of abuse and their help-seeking interactions. In constructing this analysis, I draw attention to the salience of political concerns that are not typically included in discussions about domestic violence, and reflect upon their practical, existential and subjective implications. This reveals various ways in which the UK border, ethnic categorisation, and welfare governance intersected with Polish women’s migrant identities, to forge specific domestic violence realities. Throughout my analysis liminality and precarity prove prominent themes, which I argue permeated women’s experiences, their political subjectivities, and ultimately, their ability to achieve safety and protection from abuse. Principally, this work serves to create a critical discourse, highlighting how political economic factors can engender greater marginalisation and risk of domestic violence for Polish women. The research that grounds this thesis is therefore situated in the under-explored field of the anthropology of domestic violence. Through the use of ethnography, this work elucidates Polish women’s lived experiences of domestic violence and service engagement, but also the nature of the British borderlands, in which Polish women are emplaced. In doing so, this thesis illustrates the potential of anthropology for informing understandings of domestic violence, and conversely the possibility of domestic violence research for contributing to perspectives in anthropology.

How primates achieve their adult skeletal form can be ascribed to two broad biological mechanisms: genetic inheritance, where morphological characters are regulated by an individual's phenotype over development; and plastic adaptation, where morphology responds to extrinsic factors engendered by the physical environment. While skeletal morphology should reflect an individual’s ecological demands throughout its life, only a limited amount of published research has considered how ontogeny and locomotor behaviour influence limb element form together. This thesis presents an investigation of long bone cross-sectional shape, size and strength, to inform how five catarrhine taxa adapt their limbs over development, and further, evaluate which limb regions more readily emit signals of plasticity or constraint along them. The sample includes Pan, Gorilla, Pongo, Hylobatidae and Macaca, subdivided into three developmental stages: infancy, juvenility and adulthood. Three-dimensional models of four upper (humerus and ulna) and lower (femur and tibia) limb elements were generated using a laser scanner and sectioned at proximal, midshaft and distal locations along each diaphysis. Three methods were used to compare geometry across the sample: 1) principal and anatomical axis ratios served as indices of section circularity, 2) polar section moduli evaluated relative strength between limb sections and 3) a geometric morphometric approach was developed to define section form. The results demonstrated that irrespective of taxonomic affinity, forelimb elements serve as strong indicators of posture and locomotor ontogenetic transitions, while hindlimb form is more reflective of body size and developmental shifts in body mass. Moreover, geometric variation at specific regions like the midhumerus was indistinguishable across all infant taxa in the sample, only exhibiting posture-specific signals among mature groups, while sections like the distal ulna exhibited little or no intraspecific variation over development. Identifying patterns of plasticity and constraint across taxonomic and developmental groups informs how limb cross-sections either allometrically or isometrically scale their form as they grow. These findings have direct implications to extant and extinct primate research pertaining to body mass estimation, functional morphology and behavioural ecology.

Dental development is frequently used to reconstruct life history in primates for which little other information exists. In addition to the regular growth increments visible in histological tooth sections, accentuated lines are thought to form at the time of stressful events in the lives of individual animals. However, our understanding of when, how and why such accentuated lines form in relation to stressful events is limited. In this thesis, I tested the hypothesis that accentuated lines in the enamel and dentine are associated with stressful events in the lives of semi-free-ranging mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx, Cercopithecidae) from the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville, Gabon. I used dates of birth and death to calibrate dental histology to calendar time and individual age. I then reconstructed dental development sequences for individual mandrills, providing a detailed overview of mandrill dental development. I report sex-specific dental development chronologies, crown extension rates and stages of dental development, and compare these to mandrill life history. Based on this dental development data, I matched the observed accentuated lines in the mandrill teeth with the dates of events in the mandrills’ lives. My results suggest that accentuated lines can correspond to potentially stressful events, including resumption of reproductive cycling in the mother and menstrual cycles, and in some occasions with parturitions. My results show that male mandrills might form accentuated lines at the time of potentially stressful events too, but most potentially stressful life history events for males take place after dental development is complete. Furthermore, my findings suggest that the number of accentuated lines recorded in teeth varies between individuals in a population, reflecting differences that may influence reproductive success.

This research delves into the everyday practice of the now-elderly Waishengren, the Chinese diaspora in Taiwan, who retreated from China to Taiwan after World War II. The thesis compares and contrasts how Waishengren and their family, either from mainland China or the island of Taiwan, make sense of dwelling in Taiwan for more than a half century, and how they define their relationship with other (imagined) ethnic groups in Taiwan through material culture. This is revealed by (1) interviewing Waishengren and their families; (2) phenomenologically describing public and domestic space; (3) investigating the (in)significance of homes and homelands to them, and (4) exploring the way the Waishengren situate themselves in a time of emerging ‘Taiwanese statehood’. Semi-structured interviews with 40 households were conducted in LN Village in Hsinchu City of Northern Taiwan, and photographs, maps, spatial diagrams, floor plans, selected socio-spatial data and archives are exhibited and analysed in order to further understand how the Chinese diaspora and their family construct multiple identities through homes and potted-plant gardens in contemporary Taiwan.

This thesis investigates clothing as subjectivating practices of contemporary Hindu bhakti or devotion, and a means of figuration that shapes the divine, human and social body in the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Iskcon). Iskcon’s social body is analysed as a territorialising space of motions and emotions that uses a network of bodies-and-materials to manipulate technological efficacy and control the flow of divinity. Technology, or the study of techniques, is approached as an aid in the creation and maintenance of devotional values and relationships. Devotion is further qualified as ‘efficacious intimacy’, a sensorial and emotional rapport with the divine that creates a channel for connection, exchange and the possibility of salvation. Viewed through a textual lens, Iskcon’s global expansion and preaching is associated with scripture. Instead, I suggest that philosophical concepts have to be negotiated in daily practice and that devotees rely equally on the non-discursive efficacy of materials and actions. Devotees experience the potency and presence of the sacred through the tangibility of the deity’s form and physical properties, and the intangibility of qualities elicited through praxis and innovation. Actions of dressing and dressmaking transform devotees by mediating the porous boundaries between self and world, creating intersubjective relationships and shaping people in a situated manner. By tracing the distinct moods of worship across the space of the temple and the home and the clothing of human and deity bodies, I argue that devotion is an everyday process of orientation and scaling. Such processes can help emplace devotees in a contemporary religioscape by relating categories of interior/exterior and worldly/other-worldly. I propose that the study of clothing as devotion can help us understand how people use materials to relate to the divine, and shed light on notions of value and efficacy that bind a global religious community.

This thesis addresses the question of how a population of modern hunter-gatherers, the Mbendjele BaYaka, utilise social behaviours to exploit high quality but difficult to acquire foods. In contrast to other primates, the human diet contains a high proportion of meat, tubers and honey which have in common not only a very high calorific density but also considerable acquisition costs. The theory that human cognition coevolved with a transition to a diet specialising in these resources is far from novel. However, the underlying proximate mechanisms that allow hunter-gatherers to exploit these foods is poorly understood. It is widely accepted that food sharing by hunter-gatherers acts as a form of reciprocal altruism, reducing the risk inherent to high variability foods such as large game. However, the underlying mechanism which maintain the reciprocity are often ignored, simply assuming humans have the capacity to calculate and act upon inequalities. Similarly, a long-standing theory explaining the extended period of juvenile dependence in humans argues that it provides the opportunity to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to hunt and gather difficult to acquire foods, yet we still no relatively little about how hunter-gatherer children learn and develop. In this this thesis I address not only the well-worn question of the ultimate explanations for sharing and childhood, but also examine the proximate mechanisms underlying cooperation and social learning. I make use of a range of data on three contemporary Mbendjele camps, which offer varying social structures and levels of market integration, and compare this to previously published data on the Mbendjele as well as data on a contemporary population of fisher-gatherers, the Agta of the Philippines. The Mbendjele in this study live within a logging concession, an area that in recent years has undergone rapid development. This provides an opportunity to study the impact changes in economy have had on foraging and food sharing. In combination with analyses that make use of recent innovations in remote sensing technology and social network analysis to examine how kin and social relations facilitate cooperation, I find evidence that food sharing serves multiple functions in this society, one of which is risk reduction, but also that attitudinal reciprocity rather than calculated reciprocity may be the underlying mechanism. By observing how Mbendjele children spend their time and how this differs with both age and sex I find evidence that learning is a primary motivator of children’s activity. However, I challenge the assumption that direct experiential learning of male specific foraging is the main mode of learning for Mbendjele boys, suggesting that either learning is indirect and reliant on horizontal pathways, or that this type of learning is not the primary cause for the evolution of the extended juvenile period in humans. The key findings of this thesis highlight the important role played, not only by social behaviours, but also social structures in the hunter-gatherer economy. Affiliative relationships stabilise cooperation and facilitate social learning, and a greater understanding of the proximate mechanisms surely offers a pathway to a better understanding of human evolution.

This research is based on ethnography conducted at the Miraikan National Institute of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. As a museum of the future the devices Miraikan houses are often framed in terms of their potential uses. By critically engaging with the visions of the future that are presented in the museum the research hopes to elucidate some of these underlying influences traceable to social concerns and to determine which among these are particular to the Japanese context. This research also critically assesses the role of educators and volunteers in exhibit design and implementation, their background and activities as well as their relationship to one another as a community within the museum and research centre, drawing on participant observation with volunteers and staff as well as academic literature and journalism concerning volunteering and museum curatorship in Japan. The visions of the future on display at Miraikan can be seen as attempts to replace kinship relationships in various ways. In the kind of machines being created and in the nature of the roles these devices are designed to fill the changing relations of society and kinship in Japan can be seen. The demand for cheap labour in a country with little inward migration and a rapidly aging population leads inevitably to fantasies about how these roles might be filled by further leaps in technology. At the museum volunteers act as surrogate workers. By acting as volunteers they are able to compensate for lack of participation in the workforce at large. The role of female and elderly volunteers is particularly relevant to the effort to replace these ‘lost bodies.’ Miraikan, as a forum for the presentation of future technology, provides the opportunity to engage with the current kinship crises and is the ideal place to critically engage with these issues.

Through anthropology at the edge, this thesis looks at how social projects form in dialogic relation to the ‘other’ as they meet and contest the meaning, values and forms of the material world. This PhD emerged between two social projects who aimed to make better suburbs. One, the Adaptable Suburbs Project (ASP) aimed to release the “untapped potential” of suburbs through a methodology of architectural analysis that combined different data sources. An online mapping platform aimed to collect oral testimonies from residents to reveal the “meaning, values, symbols” of the built environment. The location of a mountain, destroyed by a giant, was added by a group of local enthusiasts - the “Seething Villagers”. Playing with notions of history, myth and “fact”, Seethingers create events and “stupid” stories to create meaningful communities which “allow people to shine”. The story was refused by the ASP as the historical “fact” compromised the communicative ideal of deliberative democracy that underpinned the mapping project. Both social projects, one making better through academically informed planning policy at a national level, the other through forming “resilient” communities at a local level, met again in a council meeting. Here one social project, - Seethingers, as local citizens - articulated the values and meanings of the built environment through the framework of the other in order to object to planning application. It is here where the effects of the refusal were felt again. Producing efficacious knowledge and articulations about the world takes “work”. This thesis asks what sorts of subjectivities emerge at the edge of social projects, in moments of contestations, and what is lost in this process? Subjectivities emerge, not from the centre of a social project, but from the edge where it is always meeting the other. This thesis examines (and is) the material transfer of knowledge of ‘the other’ and its social, ethical and political implications.

This thesis results from fifteen months of fieldwork in a working-class settlement located near an international touristic region within Bahia in the Northeast of Brazil. It addresses two main objectives: to offer an ethnographically-based description of the use of social media by working class Brazilians, and to examine the consequences of this use in relation to social change. The main theoretical framework I use comes from the field of linguistic anthropology. I examine locally traditional forms of communication that the anthropological literature calls ‘indirection’, a form of opaque speech that creates private spaces of interaction in situations of dense sociality. Indirection has been studied in postcolonial contexts as a means to protect socially vulnerable subaltern from everyday situations of conflict. The thesis moves from face-to-face uses of indirection to examine digital media enabling new possibilities for opaque communication. I also draw from this and other literature (analysing visual postings online) to posit that ‘private’ and ‘public’ are problematic notions to describe how my informants understand and use social media, so I propose as alternative the ethnographically-based notions of ‘lights’ on and ‘lights off’. Locals use the term ‘addiction’ to express the fascination they have for Facebook and WhatsApp, but while the Internet seems to symbolise modernity and prosperity, social media is used mainly for hidden acts of communication such as spreading rumours, gossiping, and for spying on each other. This suggests that, while appearing to be transformative, social media also reinforces forms of relations common in dense sociality such as the use of social control mechanisms. As such I posit that social media also serves the purpose of resisting changes associated with the expansion of formal work, the increasing presence of the state and the growing influence of Protestant Evangelical churches in low-income localities.

This ethnographic field study examines East Germans’ experiences and perceptions of state surveillance in the former German Democratic Republic. Through ethnographic accounts and in-depth life histories, this study illustrates the long-term effects state control has had on the wellbeing of individuals and society as a whole. Here, several key themes emerged which are explored in detail: ideology and state control; betrayal and distrust; and trauma and resilience. Life in a dictatorship and exposure to repressive techniques of the state created complex socio-cultural dynamics that are still palpable for victims today. Over 40 years of Stasi surveillance and the extensive use of unofficial informants within the population created a self-perpetuating surveillance culture. Along with the unique conditions that followed Germany’s reunification, this has impacted East Germans’ interpretation of their own wellbeing negatively (albeit to varying extents), accumulating traumatic experiences and compounding human suffering. The social dynamics created continue to impact East German’s lives, their sense of self, and their regional identities. This thesis explores through various accounts how traumatic experiences are understood and coped with. It concludes that state surveillance leads to collective trauma that at times causes continued suffering, but in certain cases is interpreted positively eliciting a narrative of resilience.