By elaborating a Bourdieusian methodological framework, this thesis explores the temporalities of working lives in two different empirical settings. First, in portraits of people’s careers featured in contemporary newspapers, and second, for two different kinds of workers associated with the banking industry in London. These two workforces consist of a group of people in their early and mid-careers who are involved in the ‘core’ activities of banks and a group of cleaning workers in the subcontracted ‘periphery’ of the banking industry. In regard to these empirical settings this thesis explores the interconnectedness between economic structures and individual working life temporalities. It does so by considering in particular two pervasive processes, namely individualisation and precarisation and it shows that these processes both operate at the level of time and narrative. The analysis of career portraits shows that such portraits of (usually unknown) people’s career in newspapers have a role model function and they serve as a technique of individualisation as they convey an individualised understanding of working lives, an individualisation which is in alignment with the neoliberal values of self-determination and individual autonomy. While career portraits enact de-temporalised and de-socialised notions of individual agency, my analysis of the two workforces in banking provide evidence for the socially and economically grounded nature of individual agency, in particular with regard to people’s work biographies and their working futures. It is shown that although individualised understandings of work biography were an important feature among the group of people in their early and mid-careers in banking, the precariousness of the working conditions of cleaners force many of these workers to ‘stabilise the present’ whilst future plans and ambitions remain out of individual reach. However, in recent years, many of the cleaning workers have joined trade unions aiming to collectively improve their future.

This thesis is an anthropological attempt to understand how land and underwater archaeologists develop expert knowledge in different environments. The research focuses on the relationship between experience and conceptualization, showing how archaeologists and other scientists studying the past have understood time in relation to space. The analysis relies on ethnographic work carried out with teams of Chilean and Scottish archaeologists, on a range of prehistoric and historic sites both submerged and on land. Most of the time, archaeologists have to explore and cross surfaces as they encounter a past hidden deep beneath them. I argue that the particular ways in which depths and surfaces are encountered has a major influence on how time and space are conceptualized within the discipline. Analysis of archaeologists’ use of temporal concepts in speech and gestures indicates that the past is sometimes understood as below the ground. Such understanding not only contrasts with the common western experience of the past as lying behind but also involves an idea of the past as suddenly coming to the fore. As archaeologists move forward (downward) into the future they also move forward into the past. This corresponds with a general understanding of chronologies as a vertical unfolding from bottom to top that, in western science, can be traced historically in disciplines such as geology, biology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology and philosophy. Such verticality contrasts with the horizontality in which chronologies tend to be displayed in other disciplines that study the past, such as history. Here I trace some of these understandings of time, while drawing comparisons with non-western time concepts. The analysis provides important insights into the nature of disciplinary knowledge, arguing that it is ultimately impossible to divide conceptualization from experience and that, contrary to mainstream discourse, knowledge is neither discovered nor constructed, but grows.

This thesis examines contemporary drawing practices in Iceland. It reflects upon twelve months of ethnographic research amongst contemporary Icelandic artists in Reykjavík, Iceland. This research was premised on the contention that art is a particular type of practice founded on the processes of its making. These processes allow for ways of seeing and knowing that are applicable to the practice of anthropology: both the artist and anthropologist are creative practitioners and through the practice of art – in particular, drawing – knowledge may be transformed or re-presented as it is transferred from one register to another. Thus, this thesis seeks to reveal the relationship between art and anthropology and, in so doing, to ask if anthropology can use ways of gathering, representing and resolving specific to art-making. The medium of drawing is decisive in this regard. Through an examination of the specificity of drawing as a particular technique – as evinced by the Icelandic artists I worked with – I ask what the processual nature of the medium entails and how this can lead to the re-imagination of ethnographic techniques of description and documentation. This approach is built upon overturning the propensity to focus upon the completed artefact-object within analysis, accounting instead for art-making as it emerges for the artist. To fully explicate these ideas from the point of view of the artist, I approached my research within an interdisciplinary framework, which allowed my own experiences as an artist to come to the foreground. Under the rubric of a ‘graphic anthropology’ I hoped to realise and explore the potential of the ‘anthropologist-artist’ as a research method. Under the rubric of a ‘graphic anthropology’ I hoped to realise and explore the potential of the ‘anthropologist-artist’ as a research method. These two tenets of my project were designed to explore the potential of drawing to bring together the disciplines of anthropology and art-making, and thereby to reimagine a discipline that could embody the theoretical and methodological stances of both.

The aim of this study is to develop a procedure that can be used for the optimal allocation of funds available for road safety remedial measures in the State of Bahrain. The study reviews the nature of the road accidents problem in Bahrain in sufficient detail to highlight the relative magnitude ·and seriousness of the problem. Factors comprising the total (comprehensive) cost of road safety remedial measures with special application to Bahrain (including the capital and maintenance costs of the remedial measures and accident component of road user costs) are identified and analysed. A methodology for identifying the most hazardous locations on the road network is then developed. Using this methodology preliminary and primary rankings of sites are determined. 70 hazardous locations are identified and analysed. A programme of 26 countermeasures is then drawn up and the effectiveness of 10 different types of alternative improvements is evaluated with special emphasis on the regression-to-mean effect. The other 16 countermeasures effectiveness estimates are adopted from other sources. A Budget Optimisation Model Computer Programme (BOM) is then developed using multi-stage dynamic programming for selecting an optimal set of schemes under a single-period budget constraint. Within the constraint that it must choose only one alternative for each location, BOM selects a group of alternatives that produces an optimal overall net present value (NPV) within the resource constraint level. BOM is then used to determine the optimum combination of improvement of the 70 sites with different budgets. In all budgets, BOM searches throughout the list of projects for those alternatives which would provide the greatest NPV. Projects with different budgets are clearly economically viable and viability is further demonstrated by the sensitivity tests which are subsequently carried out. Finally, it is shown that improvements selected by a dynamic programming can yield a higher return for a given budget than those chosen entirely on the basis of benefit-cost ratio.

This research centres on the local acts of national memory politics and retributive justice performed in a Polish town during the years 2006‐2008, when a conservative Law and Justice Party government was in power. Looking at the political processes of conventionalizing and objectifying the communist past in authoritative settings (commemorative rituals, unveiling of monuments, courtrooms, associational meetings, Catholic masses) the author searched for patterns of inclusion and exclusion of political subjects into/from the commemorative landscape of the Polish historicized national community. The thesis concerns the two broadly defined categories of people who became politically engaged during communism: the anti‐communist activists and the ex‐officers of the Ministry of Interior Affairs. The author combines participant observation in various institutional settings with archival work, Critical Discourse Analysis of institutionalized discourses, analysis of material culture of commemoration and an in‐depth work on personal narratives, in order to address the mediating role which state and religious institutions, their agents, and the representations produced by them have played in individual processes of remembering, commemorating, and recalling. The thesis describes the conflicting ways in which the two groups of subjects have actively engaged in an interactive production of representations and claims concerning the communist past. It examines ways in which the institutionalization of memory has generated a cultural form of self-perception relying on a sequential and repeatable way of experiencing the self in a collectively achieved framework of ‘hero/victim’ or ‘perpetrator’. The author approaches the topic of memory by imagining it as a multidimensional figure, understanding the processes of individual remembering and constructing the self as located at the intersection of processes of perception, development of self-schemata, group interaction, and collective instances of objectification and conventionalizing.

This thesis addresses the problematic relationships between ecology and politics that have proved so hard to pin down in studies of environment and development, and related policy responses. By exploring the mutual constitution of resources and meanings in three rural villages of southern Belize, it examines resource-related issues, focussing on how local people perceive and engage with decision-making over highway construction, electricity provision, community forestry and the disputed national border, in a sensitive political climate in which the nation-state, indigenous groups and others are urgently debating land security within broader contestations of ‗marginality‘ and ‗modernity‘. Using qualitative data collected during 18 months of fieldwork among Mopan, Q‘eqchi‘ and mestizo people I combine interpretive ethnography with arguably more empirical themes of ‗development‘ and ‗ecology‘. Political relations at multiple scales are embodied and engaged in the environment, as people practically and discursively navigate places and paths, entwined in historical patterns of human migration and settlement. Environment constitutes both means and ends in contemporary struggles in which lands, livelihoods, and their associated meanings are at stake. The ‗village as community‘ – so often the target of development projects - has a complex history, influenced by colonial and post-colonial contexts of imagined, acknowledged and lived citizenship, as described in compelling narratives of refugees and pioneers. Significant groupings and connections exist within and between villages; their mechanisms of formalization and ephemerality are dynamic. Toledo‘s frontier areas (particularly the Guatemalan border) are not merely marginal territories, but resource-full and meaningful locales of connection, affirmation and anxiety. A proposed cross-border highway distils many of these hopes and fears. Such interactions, border processes and negotiations – comprising what I envision as an ecology of politics - are at the heart of a more nuanced, contextualized approach to studies of environment, sociality and development.

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Kinship and marriage systems represent the ways in which humans organize relatedness and reproduction. The work presented in this thesis extends the philosophical, theoretical, and methodological foundations of evolutionary biology to the study of these aspects of human social behaviour. Firstly, a game-theoretic analysis shows that the evolution of monogamous marriage can be understood within the framework of inclusive fitness theory. In this framework, the stability of monogamous marriage requires that men transfer property to their wife's offspring; consistently, the log-linear analysis of marriage and transfer strategies across a worldwide sample of societies shows that norms stipulating the transfer of land to wife's offspring exist in a larger proportion of monogamous than polygynous societies. Secondly, phylogenetic comparative analyses of marriage and residence strategies across societies speaking Indo-European languages reconstruct early Indo-European society as practising monogamy and prevailing virilocality with alternative neolocality. However, there is no evidence of co-evolution of monogamy with neolocality in the history of these societies; thus, it cannot be excluded that the observed association between marriage and residence strategies is the artefact of a history of descent from a common ancestor. In line with the archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence, these findings challenge explanations that link the emergence of monogamy and neolocality to the development of idiosyncratic features of "western" social organization; such explanations dominate the social sciences. More generally, they illustrate the relevance of the evolutionary paradigm to the study of kinship and marriage systems, contributing to the development of a biologically based social anthropology.

This dissertation is based around a comparative ethnographic study of two geographical indication (GI) regimes--which protect place-based products under what is generally accepted to be the framework of intellectual property law-- the appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) system for wine regulation in Bordeaux and the Protected Food Names (PFN) system which protects artesan foods in the UK. Conceptually, the project considers the social construction of meaning in GIs, particularly in regard to the differences between legal/policy debates around protection and the ways in which producers and other actors engage with protected products in more sociocultural ways (especially in terms of policing of existing cultural norms or cultural heritage motivations). The project also explores the ways in which new networks of connection and belonging are being constructed out of legal status or the quest to receive it.