Based on ethnographic research undertaken in a Mexican town in the southern desert highlands of Puebla, this dissertation explores the spatial relations and qualitative embodied scales of intimacy and distance, near and far, small and large, the encapsulated and the cosmic. It takes the anthropological concern with landscape environment to emphasize ethnography oriented towards questions about lived processes and the immersive sensory qualities of perception and practice. It examines the culturally constructed metaphors and ideational creativity in the principal arenas of the body, domestic and social places, territory and, the in the formation of worlds. Ethnographically, it builds upon a concern for how spatial orders relate historical developments through a sentient memory of place in a rural town in Central Mexico. Towards these ends, this dissertation employs a combined a phenomenological and semiotic approach aimed at developing an analytical framework within a descriptive practice. Within these parameters, the approach accepts that landscape creativity is largely image based, cosmogonic in orientation and necessarily exploits a pre-existing, if always indeterminate, Mesoamerican cultural milieu.

This thesis analyses relationships between the tourism industry, conservation and development around a marine protected area (MPA) on the coast of Kenya. In doing so it aims to unravel the complexities of these interactions, to inform debates on whether and under what circumstances conservation and poverty alleviation objectives can be jointly met. Many MPAs are charged with the task of fulfilling both ecological and social objectives. Previously it has been proposed that tourism can be used as a vehicle to enable the MPA to meet these dual objectives as tourism is predicted to contribute to poverty alleviation at the same time as achieving conservation goals through funding the MPA, displacing fishing livelihoods and changing attitudes and behaviours. To analyse these relationships a sustainable livelihoods approach is taken. The results show that on one level tourism was found to be achieving a ‘win-win’ outcome as it was providing high levels of employment and funding for the MPA. However, benefits from tourism were so highly inequitably distributed among the community and in ways so dependent on social relations, that they were not reaching the poorest sectors of the community. Also, although tourism was funding the park it was not found to have had any of the other conservation impacts observed in other cases, such as displacement of natural resource based livelihoods. On the contrary, it was expanding the market for fish and leading to a rise in the use of unsustainable fishing gear. The implications of these findings in terms of policy and practice related to both the tourism industry and conservation strategy are discussed.

This thesis presents an ethnographic exploration of the spatial practices and conceptions employed by the Mixe or Ayuuk (an indigenous group from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico) in the construction of their territoriality. Located in a rugged mountainous region known as the Sierra Mixe, Ayuuk communities have developed a sophisticated range of strategies to socialise a geography characterised by a remarkable ecological, linguistic, cultural and political diversity. The research offers a detailed account of the way in which the discontinuities and variations that characterise the geography of the Sierra influence the political, economic and religious organisation of Mixe communities. It argues that ideas about fragmentation, fluctuation and impermanence are fundamental in the making of a political model characterised by the alternation between different types of hierarchical orders. The study also suggests that Mixe society is marked by a permanent tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces which create a social dynamic in which the inhabitants of the Sierra congregate in villages and towns and then disperse to live in autonomous hamlets scattered throughout the mountains.

This is a study of the everyday postsocialist politics of labour in the wider context of flexible capitalism during times of intense socio-economic transformations in Bulgaria. It is based on fieldwork in Mladost, a large-scale glass factory in Sofia. Two successive hegemonic teleologies—socialism, then capitalism—and repetitive economic crises shape the work experience in Mladost. Using shop floor ethnography, this study considers workers’ and managers’ local participation in macroeconomic processes. It highlights inequalities between regular and casual employment and between the genders. In 1997, Mladost was purchased from the state by a Greek multinational. This dramatically intensified a course of neoliberal downsizing, outsourcing labour, and accentuated the focus on core production. Mladost’s production was outsourced to larger corporations which brought new inequalities across the factory. The presence of ‘the market’ on the shopfloor has been rendered permanent and menacing. The thesis engages with these circumstances while grasping the relationships in production along the conveyor belt. Ethnography of the shop floor is complemented by a broad ethnographic scope: kinship ties inside and outside the plant; new discourses of ‘individuality’ and ‘flexibility’, interacting with pre-existing ‘collective productivity'; perceptions of the past; and the alternative ways workers use abandoned factory buildings. Neoliberal templates have introduced new characteristics to the organisation of production, thus causing fragmentations of the workforce. The divisions between casual and regular workers determine different degrees of insecurity, irrespective of common class experience. Workers make sense of radical upheaval in daily discussions about continuity and change; for them, ‘the past’ is constantly present. Along with daily resistance and complaint, visions of ‘no change’ encapsulate a perception of ever-lasting oppression and enduring structural power bridging socialism and capitalism. ‘Everything is the same’ and ‘everything has changed’ coexist in a peculiar combination, revealing the paradox of transformation.

Menopause is widely accepted as a complex individual bio-psycho-socio-cultural process which varies within and between cultures and which changes over time. Most studies on menopausal symptoms and symptom experiences during midlife have been conducted on Western populations. There have been very few studies on menopausal women or menopausal symptom experiences in South Asia and none, to my knowledge, have been attempted in Bangladesh. Moreover, little is known about the menopausal and midlife symptoms, experience of menopause and perception towards menopause among Bangladeshi women and Migrant Bangladeshi women now living in Western countries. Hence, a cross-sectional study was initiated with an exploratory study design to compare frequency of symptom reporting among: 1) Bangladeshi women who migrated to the UK; 2) Sedentees still living in Bangladesh, and 3) a group of UK women of European origin. Data on socio-demographics, socio-economics, migration history, symptom experiences, reproductive history, physical activities and anthropometry were also collected. Qualitative data on Bangladeshi women’s perceptions, beliefs and attitudes regarding menopause and menopausal symptom experiences were explored. The primary hypothesis tested in this study was: Sylheti women who migrated to London will have a higher frequency of symptoms associated with midlife and the menopausal transition compared to Bangladeshi Sedentees due to lack of English skill, extended family support, socio-economic stress and social isolation. This hypothesis led to the prediction is that Sylheti Migrants will have a higher frequency of symptoms associated with midlife and menopause and will report a higher frequency of somatic, emotional, vasomotor and sexual symptoms compared to Bangladeshi Sedentees. The prediction was upheld for somatic and emotional symptoms but not for vasomotor and sexual symptoms. Bangladeshi Migrants therefore reported higher frequencies of somatic and emotional symptoms compared to the Sedentees. Moreover, both Migrants and Sedentees reported significantly higher somatic and psychosomatic symptoms compared to the Europeans. However, symptoms that are attributed directly to menopause (vasomotor and sexual symptoms) showed no significant differences between the two Bangladeshi groups. Long-term illnesses such as cardio vascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and osteoporosis rather than menopausal status per se are significant factors explaining an increase in somatic and psychosomatic complaints associated with midlife. Perceptions and attitudes associated with menopausal symptom experience were mostly positive among Bangladeshi women and menopause was perceived as a neutral phase. Qualitative findings indicate that the meanings of menopause in Bangladesh are dependent on the social and cultural environment.

This thesis aims to rethink subcultural theory by applying it to an unusual age bracket. It proposes to chart forms of reflexivity in risk perception among the practitioners of a dangerous sport, and adopts as its empirical point of departure the subculture of middle class, middle-aged glider pilots in the Italian village of Bilonia. Exploring the world of gliding, it describes ethnographically the local situations in two gliding clubs, Bilonia, where the main fieldwork took place, and Piti, where a second shorter period of participant-observation was conducted. Adopting a comparative perspective, these local realities are contrasted amongst themselves and with the wider subculture of gliding in Italy. The thesis argues that, despite the prevalence of a single dominant subculture, gliding is practised in different ways in different places, especially with regard to risk perception and management. However, these are affected in all locations by the peculiar characteristic of the subculture, the average age of the glider pilots, which rules out the extreme behaviours of younger practitioners and goes against the tenets of some explanations of voluntary risk taking. In the first three chapters a theoretical framework is developed based upon advances in sports anthropology, subcultural theory and social scientific theories of risk. In the empirical chapters that follow, gliding is variously introduced as an experience involving a precise script, as a local reality tinged with peculiarities that set it apart from the wider reality of the sport in the national arena. The last three chapters discuss key points of the theoretical approach adopted and the findings they led to, in particular the implications for the study of sport subcultures. The empirical data presented suggest the existence of a middle-aged sport subculture, something that has not often been encountered in the literature on the subject. It is shown how risk perception follows a precise pattern which is shaped by the cultural norm of the gliding subculture – in its turn affected by the average age of the members.

This thesis is based on fieldwork undertaken in Ifrane, a migrant city in the Middle Atlas Mountains, Morocco. The community has always faced what Simon Harrison has called a ‘scarcity’ of identity in suffering social, cultural, linguistic and economic dislocation. However, a close analysis of everyday life has afforded new insights into the creation of relational stability and migrant well-being through little understood, seemingly insignificant, phenomena. It uncovers an unrecognised relationship between identity and numerical objectification in a Muslim cosmology and, consequently, challenges and overthrows existing assumptions of heterogeneous religiosity. The numeric utilisation of seemingly insignificant objects by migrants is instrumental in the creation of relational nexuses so important for well-being in their new home. In this city migrants find happiness at the intersection of the self, thing and number: a reshaping of identity. It is achieved through the migrants’ complex interactions with the physical world, and relies on their ability to numerically strategise and organise objects. Numeric operations make relationality possible and allow knowledge to be shared across linguistic and cultural boundaries. In all cases well-being in this new environment is found not in the extraordinary or the idiosyncrasy, but rather through normality. By amplifying and introspecting the connectivities that emerge from acts of calculation in the everyday, this thesis contributes at once to a burgeoning study of ethno-mathematics and to the study of well-being in anthropology, drawing attention to the relational nature of actions and their foregrounding in fragile social worlds.

A major focus of evolutionary neurobiology has been on whether different regions of the eutherian brain evolve in concert, and how free the brain is to evolve independently of body plans. Since the eutherian brain is loosely modularized, such that one region is rarely isolated for specialization at the expense of others, but the design of modularization itself can be adapted by tweaking developmental programs, the degree to which brain regions must evolve in concert and can evolve independently may carry a deep phylogenetic signal. Using data collected from preserved brain tissue of 37 primate, 21 carnivore, and 15 other eutherian species (spanning 11 orders), I examined the phylogenetic level at which the proliferation of neurons and glia in the primary visual cortex and hippocampus proper, as well as granular layer volumes of the dentate gyrus and cerebellum, may be constrained by conserved developmental programs. In doing so, I was able to test for cellular signatures of (1) evolutionary changes in metabolic activity, (2) phylogenetic divergences, (3) specializations in behavior, and (4) developmental constraints. The degree to which disparate brain regions evolve in concert is shown to be generally conserved in Eutheria, although a derived ability to evolve regions independently is observed along the primate lineage. Using a separate dataset on placental and life-histroy character states, a comprehensive comparative phylogenetic approach was used to resolve relationships among five aspects of placental structure and to identify syndromes of placental morphology with life-history variables. My results support two discrete biological phenotypes of placental morphology and life-history, which are shown to have an evolutionary affect on allocortical, but not neocortical, brain organization. I have provided a new perspective on exploring how developmental constraints – acting both within and without the brain – may affect brain organization at the cellular level, and the extent to which those constraints have been adapted along certain eutherian lineages.

This thesis surveys the interface between a small rural development and conservation nongovernmental organisation (NGO) in the north Indian state of Rajasthan and two of the villages in which it operates. It looks at the genealogy of ideas that have guided this liaison and at their variegated interpretation and implementation by multiply sited actors. This ultimately contingent process of mediation, in which mainstream discourses of development and conservation are diffracted through manifold media, has fostered a grassroots encounter predicated on the tacit pursuit of second-order conservation (the preservation of a socioecological system in toto). Using qualitative data derived from 14 months’ fieldwork in Alwar district, this study seeks to assess the day-to-day workings and effects of this emergent discourse in its specific historical, political and psycho-social structural context(s). This work is divided into three main parts. Part one introduces the setting of this study, paying heed, in particular, to extant projects of conservation and development in Alwar and their historical antecedents. The second section presents an ethnography of the concept of rational self-interest, which looks at two core instantiations of development economism: the bureaucratic institutions designed to bring about collective action in resource management and conservation; and the agency ascribed to actors in participatory modes of development. Then, in the final part of this thesis, attention turns to the NGO’s mediation of conservation and development discourses, the forms of grassroots action thus engendered and some consequent changes in subjectivities. The current study stimulates debate on the lived experience of development and conservation projects, commonly conceived by critics as monolithic and hegemonic enterprises. By attending to the dynamic manifestations of these endeavours at a microsociological level, it serves to undermine such essentialist portrayals in favour of a relational approach that allows for the complex, contingent and creative corollaries of the grassroots encounter.

This thesis examines Amazonian people’s negotiation of bio-cultural rights, and explores the nexus between people in the field and stakeholders at different national and international levels. It draws primarily on one year of fieldwork conducted in the Upper Amazon; I also build on my experience as a lawyer working on environmental and people’s rights in Mexico. Anthropological and legal approaches to property rights and biotechnology, as well as local and global systems of power and political life inform the analysis. Amazonian people’s positions regarding IPR and bioprospecting are dynamic rather than fixed. They respond more to historical processes including alliances and fragmentation between groups than to definite ideological positions such as do IPR advocates or sceptics. Distinct groups co-exist with different levels of acceptance. Amazonian leaders tend to regard “community” as an external imposition with a colonial origin, in contrast to pueblo (people) considered a more legitimate term. Yet, in practical terms, community remains a relevant social unit appropriated by people in the rainforest. Another finding is the central role that indigenous NGOs based in urban areas play as gatekeepers of Amazonian bio-cultural resources. This thesis challenges certain academic and popular assumptions concerning indigenous people’s IPR. It reveals that the tensions between differentiated forms of intellectual property lie relatively less in the incommensurability between individual (Western) and collective (indigenous) and more in the types of individual and collectives (e.g. corporation) that can become IPR holders. Critical events at the mesolevel trigger the reinterpretation of old categories, and the emergence of sui generis IPR. Conflictive situations can be sources of socio-legal innovation eliciting new ways of thinking about the negotiation of IPR between local, national and international levels.