This thesis concerns contemporary Thai bhikkhuni in society in relation to the laity, particularly lay women. It adopts an approach that considers a multiplicity of voices not limited to monastics, local traditions, and local modes of thought. The thesis focuses on the social impacts of contemporary bhikkhuni on gendered society, a relatively unexplored aspect of the literature. In order to investigate the social impacts, the thesis examines the socially assumed values of ordination and its fully ordained form in Thai society. It pays particular attention to why and how the fully ordained form of bhikkhuni relates to gender in Thai society. Data for the thesis were based largely on my 12 months of fieldwork in Thailand and were obtained through participant observation, interviews, and questionnaires. This thesis proposes that the social significance of fully ordained women – bhikkhuni –can be understood only when the values of ordination are fully realized in their Thai context. This can be achieved through considering at once a multiplicity of voices, local traditions, and local ways of thinking. This thesis argues that the emergence of contemporary bhikkhuni has wider social impacts on Thai society where religion is not separated from the domain of gender, but is a guiding force that subsumes it. In this regard, bhikkhuni are not only beneficial for lay women, but can empower them. Through both full and temporary ordination, gender relations and ideologies are changing in positive ways for Thai women. This empowerment and transformation is not the result of a feminist agenda. Instead, female monastics all emphasize engagement with Buddhism as a means of transcending rather than transforming gender. This transcendental perspective, which is similar to their shared self-presentations, is arguably what secures them social acceptance in assuming the most important and consequential religious form as fully ordained bhikkhuni.

This thesis aims to develop the understanding of inland floodplain fisheries. It focuses on the Western Border of the 160,000Km2 Pantanal wetland in Brazil, using participant observation, semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, and a critical exploration of Systematic Conservation Planning meant to optimize land use planning for biodiversity conservation. Following the introduction, study site and methods chapters, the first data chapter presents a description of fishing communities’ social structure, livelihood and history of resource use and occupation. New information on this hitherto unstudied group explores their mobile way of life and their physical displacement during the creation of Protected Areas. The second data chapter analyzes the current management of inland fisheries, examining evidence for claims around overfishing by local communities. The results do not support narratives of overfishing. Instead, fishers’ customary use is characterized by mobile patch use, territory, and reciprocity. These map onto features of this dynamic ecosystem, such as the flood pulse and the presence naturally unexploitable reserves, in ways likely to create sustainable use. The discussion explores why these features may play equally important roles in other floodplain fisheries. The third data chapter discusses tenure and property in floodplains, using as case in point the conflict among Pantanal Protected Areas managers, fishers and state prosecutors over floodplain ownership. A multidisciplinary approach to resource use, access and property, drawing on economics, anthropology and ecology, may help understand tenure in floodplains so as to help management policies mesh better with local realities and resolve conflicts. The final data chapter critically examines prioritization solutions seeking to promote socio-ecological development. Applying Systematic Conservation Planning in the Pantanal case study shows the assumption of fixed set-aside areas is incompatible with the ever-changing nature of the Pantanal and the needs of local fishers. Dynamic socio-ecological systems, such as floodplain fisheries, demand continual adaptation.

Due to the fact that human mothers often have multiple, vulnerable offspring with long periods of dependency, it is argued that mothers need assistance from allomothers to successfully provide and care for their children. Cross-cultural observations and quantitative research converge on support for the idea that mothers in high fertility, high mortality populations need assistance from other individuals for successful childrearing. It is also clear within the literature that there is variation across populations in terms of who matters: who provides the help, how they help, and how much impact they have on childrearing. The current thesis extends from previous studies by exploring the effects of allomothers on childrearing in a contemporary developed context: With economic development and the demographic transition, questions arise regarding the importance of allomothers for successful childrearing, and whether humans in these settings still operate as cooperative breeders. This thesis specifically focuses on quantitatively investigating the effects of fathers, stepfathers and grandparents on child development in the UK. First, using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, I investigate how direct investments from fathers and stepfathers affect multiple child outcomes. Second, using the UK Millennium Cohort Study, I investigate how direct and indirect investments from maternal and paternal grandparents affect parental investment levels, as well as multiple child outcomes. Taken together, my findings suggest that allomothers do indeed impact child development in the UK. However, the important allomothers seem to be those within the nuclear household. This is in contrast with many high-fertility, high mortality populations where grandmothers, especially maternal grandmothers, are often the most important allomothers regarding child survival, and fathers less so. Within its limits, the current thesis highlights who matters for childrearing in the UK today.

The focus of my thesis is the role and status of control in the MMO World of Warcraft where one of the primary motivations for player engagement was to eliminate and marginalise contingency at sites across the game that were perceived to be prone to the negative effects of contingency, a process that its developers were to a significant degree complicit in. My field sites traced the activities and lives of gamers across the physical location of London and the south east of the United Kingdom and their online game locations that constituted World of Warcraft and occasionally other online games which included the guild they were a member of that was called ‘Helkpo’. It examines how the transparency attributed to the game’s code, its ‘architectural rules’, framed the unpredictability of players as problematic and how codified ‘social rules’ attempted to correct this shortcoming. In my thesis I dive into the lives of the members of Helkpo as both guild members and as part of the expansive network that constituted their social lives in London. It demonstrates how the indeterminate nature of information in the relations in their social network contrasted with the modes of accountability that World of Warcraft offered, defined by different forms of information termed ‘knowing’ and ‘knowledge’. This chapter considers how the certainties of the game produced a more reliable space for the enactment of English culture’s social dualism of public and private. I develop the argument that control should be considered as a legitimate issue of concern for studies of games and more broadly within processual anthropologies. I suggest that where contingency is ascribed cultural classification there is always the possibility that cultural forms of control may be employed to eliminate it. Importantly, I argue that as anthropologists the recognition of control as a meaningful product of culture, even under the indeterminate conditions of modernity, remains critical for the discipline.

Egalitarianism is a practice as much as it is an ideology (Woodburn 1982), and several authors highlighted the importance of the use of the body in hunter-gatherers’ egalitarian societies as well as the ways political power is framed by a subtle balance between genders (e.g. Biesele 1993; Kisliuk 1998; Finnegan 2013) through embodied performative practice. An important context in which Mbendjele egalitarianism is embodied by individuals is through musical and playful performances obeying the strict rules of the institution massana. In this thesis, I describe these embodied processes with a focus on the role of aesthetics and emotions, to show how egalitarianism is re-created/re-asserted during each massana performance. Mbendjele egalitarianism and the role of massana in this political system are investigated through an analysis of the processes of embodiement of egalitarian values and behaviour, and of the effect of play, music, dance and emotions on the human body in the Mbendjele context. This thesis is divided in six chapters. Chapter 1 defines egalitarianism, Mbendjele egalitarianism and the role of massana in this political system. Chapter 2 explores the processes of embodiement of egalitarian values and behaviour, and the effect of play, music, dance and emotions on the human body in the Mbendjele context. Chapter 3 investigates the structure of Mbendjele music, and chapter 4 looks at visual aesthetics in forest spirit performances (mokondi massana). Chapter 5 focuses on Mbendjele’s ‘collective body’ through a study of gender communication. Chapter 6 shows how Mbendjele achieve beauty and restore harmony through the performance of forest spirit rituals (mokondi massana).

In this dissertation I explore the multiple meanings that cultural difference acquires in everyday practices in public primary healthcare centres in Madrid. I specifically look at how Gitano’ and Roma’ cultural difference is understood by healthcare workers in various settings at primary healthcare. Gitanos have been living for centuries in Spain and they have been historically persecuted and segregated from wider Spanish society. Current European policies aiming for “Roma inclusion” include health as one of the strategic areas of intervention. Roma and Gitanos’ health inequalities are frequently mentioned but little is known about the actual health-status of Gitanos and Roma or the difficulties they encounter when accessing healthcare facilities. Furthermore, the public healthcare system in Madrid has gone through several changes in recent years, some of them publicly contested (like various privatisation attempts, for example) others inadvertently assumed (like the budgetary cuts). Primary healthcare is the access door to the public healthcare system, but it is also a social space where broader social representations about Gitanos intertwine with different expert knowledge systems (such as biomedical or managerial knowledge) in the provision of healthcare. Drawing on twelve months fieldwork in primary healthcare centres, in this dissertation I explore how notions of cultural difference are enacted within the specific social space of primary healthcare centres, which are complex technical, moral and political sites. This dissertation engages with the debates about the complex relation of culture and biomedicine and with the anthropological literature on care to investigate the multiple uses and meanings that healthcare workers give to “cultural difference” and how and when they operationalise Gitano difference in their practices. Through the analysis of these encounters in clinical settings this dissertation sheds light on the ways that social representations of Gitanos are articulated within the institutional configurations that frame the provision of care.

The skill with which primates use their hands to explore and interact with the environment sets them apart from most other mammals. The non-human primate hand serves an important functional role during not only terrestrial and arboreal locomotion, but also enhanced grasping and manipulative behaviours. Understanding how living primates use their hands for these various functions is fundamental for understanding the order Primates and the evolution of humans within this order. While bipedalism and the extraordinary manipulative abilities of our human hand for manufacturing stone tools are considered to be unique, their origins remain controversial. Understanding this evolutionary shift in human hand use from locomotion to manipulation requires comparative studies of hand use in our closest living relatives, the African apes (chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas). To date, however, little research has been done on African ape daily hand use, including both locomotor and manipulative behaviours, especially in natural environments. This dissertation will address this gap by conducting detailed studies of hand use and posture during two complex manipulative behaviours (i.e., plant-processing, nut-cracking) and arboreal locomotion (i.e., vertical climbing) in the natural environment of African apes. I conducted the first comprehensive analysis of bonobo palm oil nut-cracking in a natural environment at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary, Democratic Republic of the Congo. All eighteen bonobos showed exclusive laterality for using the hammerstone and there was a significant group-level right-hand bias. The study revealed 15 hand grips for holding differently-sized and -weighted hammerstones, 10 of which had not been previously described in the literature. The findings also demonstrated that bonobos select the most effective hammerstones when nut-cracking and that bonobos, despite rarely using tools in the wild, can be efficient nut-crackers with a skill level that is similar to palm oil nut-cracking chimpanzees of Bossou, Guinea. I further provided the first insights into the manual skills of Bwindi mountain gorillas by examining hand-use strategies, hand grips, and hand-preference (i.e., laterality) during the processing of three different plants. Two of these plants are woody-stemmed plants for which the food is more challenging to access in comparison to leaves, lacking physical defenses that are relatively simple to process. Bwindi gorillas used the greatest number of hand actions to process the most complex plant food (i.e., peel-processing) similar to complex thistle feeding by Virunga mountain gorillas. The manipulative actions were ordered in several key stages organised hierarchically. The demands of manipulating natural foods elicited 19 different hand grips and variable thumb postures, of which three grips were new and 16 grips have either been previously reported or show clear similarities to grips used by other wild and captive African apes and humans. A higher degree of lateralisation was elicited for the most complex behaviour of peel-processing but the strength of laterality was only moderate, suggesting that peel-processing is not as complex as thistle leaf-processing by Virunga gorillas. Finally, I examined for the first time hand use, forelimb posture and gait chacteristics during vertical climbing in wild, habituated mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei) of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, and semi-free-ranging chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) of the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust, Zambia, both within a natural environment. This research revealed that both apes used power grips and a diagonal power grip, involving three different thumb postures. Gorillas showed greater ulnar deviation of the wrist during climbing than chimpanzees, and the thumb played an important supportive role when vertically descending compliant substrates in gorillas. Comparisons of temporal gait parameters showed that large-bodied gorillas exhibited significant longer cycle duration, lower stride frequency and generally a higher duty factor than chimpanzees. This quantitative analysis revealed that mountain gorillas adapt their climbing strategy to accommodate their large body mass in a similar manner found in captive western lowland gorillas, and that chimpanzees showed less variation in their climbing strategy than has been documented in captive bonobos. In summary, this study demonstrates the importance of forceful hand grips and the variable use of the thumb relative to substrate size in both ape species, and particularly in large-bodied mountain gorillas as they face more biomechanical challenges during vertical climbing than smaller-bodied chimpanzees. Together, this dissertation provides new insights into the functional link between hand morphology and behaviour in African apes in their natural environments that may ultimately generate more informed reconstructions of fossil hominin locomotor and manipulative behaviours. Furthermore, this research shows that the suite of "unique human grips" or "unique human manipulative abilities" that have typically defined humans is getting much smaller the more we learn about African apes, particularly in their complex natural environment where the hand has to adjust to varying foods and arboreal substrates, and where individuals have ample opportunity to learn and develop high manipulative skills.

All native reptile species are protected against harm through their inclusion on UK legislation. With the exception of two species, this protection does not extend to reptile habitat. As a result, reptiles are frequently subject to mitigation translocations to facilitate the development of land. However, there are few published studies of the effects of mitigation translocation on reptile populations and whether such translocations are effective conservation interventions. The effectiveness of translocation was tested through a combination of: 1) field surveys of sites subject to mitigation across England and Wales; 2) the radio tracking of translocated adders; 3) the monitoring of a population of slow-worms at site where they were released 20 years ago; and 4) a penning experiment to test whether viviparous lizards attempt to disperse from the release site. Very few translocated reptiles were encountered during the monitoring of release sites. This paucity of recaptures is either due to post-release mortality, imperfect detection or dispersal. Translocated male adders dispersed farther and had larger home range sizes than resident conspecifics. Some male adders undertook large unidirectional migrations back to the donor site crossing areas of unsuitable habitat as they did so. A population of slow-worms persisted at an isolated site two decades after translocation, albeit in relatively small numbers. Body condition improved over 20 years and the population resumed breeding and recruitment. The temporary penning of viviparous lizards was effective in preventing post-release dispersal and resulted in an increase in recapture rates of greater than 16 times when compared to unpenned viviparous lizard populations. The fact that no lizards were recaptured in the unpenned areas provides strong evidence for the effect of post-release dispersal. Although, mitigation translocations may prevent the immediate death of animals that would otherwise be destroyed with their habitat, there is little evidence that they are compensating for the loss of populations on a broad scale.

This dissertation comprehensively examines the hereditary links, ritual practices and pantheon of indigenous deities on which the spirit-mediums of Upper Tibet rely. Known as lha-pa, dpa' bo and lhamo, these specialists in channeling the gods operate in the overlapping Stod and Byang-thang regions of western and midwestern Tibet. This work is based on in-depth interviews and the translation of a variety of Tibetan texts. It utilizes a diachronic model to explicate ethnohistorical dimensions as well as legendary and contemporary aspects of the spirit-mediums through both oral and literary sources. This work, drawing upon a wide range of ethnographic and textual materials to investigate the phenomenon of lha-bzhugs (spirit-possession) in Upper Tibet, analyses the way in which its historical and present-day characteristics are interrelated. Thus, the continuity of the tradition of spirit-mediumship and the way in which it has been conceived and preserved, is the underlying theme giving this work its narrative and analytical coherence.

Human-wildlife conflict is a global problem, due to habitat destruction and fragmentation, and it severely impacts the livelihoods of people and leads to the persecution and retributive killing of wildlife. In Kenya, human-elephant conflict is one of the most serious and challenging conservation issues. To successfully reduce conflict, management strategies and land-use planning must be informed and underpinned by robust evidence-based research. This thesis focused on understanding how land-use patterns and change in the Trans Mara District, Kenya, is driving human-elephant conflict and elephant movement. The aims of this thesis are to: (1) determine the implications of agricultural expansion on human-elephant conflict; (2) understand the seasonal, temporal and spatial drivers of crop raiding over time; and (3) investigate elephant pathway use and their role in human-elephant conflict. Methods used included risk mapping, landcover change scenario modelling, human-elephant conflict monitoring, fine scale spatial analysis of crop raiding using Generalised Additive Models, camera trapping, elephant sign surveys, qualitative focus groups and quantitative household surveys. The findings from this thesis show that the extent of agriculture land in the Trans Mara has increased by 42.5% between 2000 and 2015 and scenario modelling suggests that even with high future deforestation levels, large areas will remain susceptible to elephant crop raiding. The results also indicate that temporal, seasonal and spatial conflict trends are becoming less predictable, as crop raiding occurs throughout the year and affects crops at all stages of growth. This crop raiding has increased in frequency by 49% since 1999-2000 but has decreased in damage per incident by 83%, and increasingly involves a new group type consisting of elephant family units plus bulls. Results from this thesis also show that elephants used pathways between the Trans Mara and Masai Mara National Reserve at night, and that elephants preferred paths that had a high percentage of forest cover and were closer to farms, saltlicks and forest in the Trans Mara. In light of changing patterns of human-elephant conflict and landcover, land-use planning is crucial to balance the needs of humans and wildlife.