Through a primarily ethnographic approach that also consisted of fifteen interviews with members of the Gypsy and Traveller community and eleven interviews with key-stake holders, this research explores how Gypsies and Travellers deliver justice within their community by developing a greater understanding of their moral codes and their relationship with, and recourse to, official agents of social control. The research shows that the Gypsy and Traveller community adhere to a strict moral code. This at times conflicts with the values held by the wider British society. This has meant that the Gypsy and Traveller community have had to adapt to their environment, becoming bricoleurs; drawing on some facets of the dominant British society while at the same time other aspects are rejected and replaced with their own cultural values. Crime is understood through the notion of harm, and techniques of neutralisation are applied to attitudes of crime and deviance. The research also highlights how informal community justice is operated through a system of restorative justice. Through the use of shame, those who transgress the moral boundaries become reintegrated into the community. However, the severity of some offences is so great the only course of action is the exclusion of the individual. Here shame becomes disintegrative. The community have very limited recourse to official agents of social control. This in part is due the lack of legitimacy seen by Gypsies and Travellers in the policing of their community.

This thesis explores the social and cultural integration of the mobile phone in the lives and relationships of a sample of consumer-targeted and predominantly middle-class graduate mobile phone users aged between 17 and 27. Drawing on qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork that took place in a mobile phone retail outlet over a year, the thesis examines how mobile phone use becomes integrated into social, intimate and identity relations in everyday life. Using a progressive amendment approach to research design, ethnographic methods were adopted involving participant observation in a commercial environment - including interviews, diarying, and group interviews - to gather rich data through rapport and relationship building. The data was analysed and examined with reference to empirical research studies of mobile phone use in the UK concentrating on friendship groups, intimacy and consumption together with reference to mobility, the information society, the network society and identity. Illustrating that use of the mobile phone provides a visibility of relations together with a powerful reshaping of relations and cultural practices in the liquid connectivity of interaction. Additionally, mobile phone use has established paradoxes of interaction in everyday life. Key findings and points of discussion include co-present use strengthening ties while forming exclusive bonds and heightening insecurities over disconnection compulsion for contact virtual and continuous contact yet non-committal interaction blurring of public and private spheres through de-privatising in public while privatising booths of public space and reshaping social conduct and etiquette making and breaking of intimacy through multi-modal uses which change etiquette and the culture of communication the creation of monitored body data for togetherness and as a digital leash while heightening insecurities, suspicion and accountability gendered use of the mobile phone in communication and identity exclusivity yet not individualism or exclusion and integration into existing lifestyle while aspiring towards another more attractive and distinct lifestyle.

This ethnography explores textile-making as an occupational domain in the context of a Welsh guild of weavers, spinners and dyers, where I am a member. The guild, an autonomous special interest group, is affiliated to a wider network of guilds and textile organisations. Its members have different backgrounds, interests and experience. As a contemporary craft discipline, textile-making links art and science and incorporates the use of technology, yet its traditional materials, formats and techniques survive from pre-industrial production. As a contribution to occupational science the study explores how people engage in creating textiles by hand individually and collectively, what it means to them in the context of contemporary British (particularly Welsh) and other influential cultures and a technological society together with the significance of textile-making and guild membership to individual and collective identity, and personal and social well-being. Textile-making is explored through a reflexive, visual and interpretive ethnography using constructivist grounded theory as a methodological approach. The study is informed by symbolic interactionist, phenomenological and hermeneutic perspectives and situates the researcher as an insider. Data was gathered during fieldwork through participant observation interviews photography documentary sources and material culture. Theoretically the study accounts for how textile-making as an occupational domain is creatively shaped, moving it beyond traditional practices, by individuals who share their skills and experiences. Through becoming and being textile-makers individuals develop a sense of self and a collective sense of self through belonging to a guild. Ultimately, through socio-cultural networking, capital is created for guild members and others to draw on to enhance personal and social well-being. Methodologically it recounts a personal research journey from an initial idea to a final product highlighting the value of diverse forms of data and the complexity of situating the researcher in reflexive ethnography. The findings imply the need to study occupation as a multi-faceted phenomenon contextually and from different theoretical perspectives.

The thesis focuses on four main areas of interest. Through ethnographic description and analysis, the research explored those elements of the public library which account for its 'libraryness'; the inherent appeal of the service which makes it an attractive and valued social space for those who frequent it. The second area centres round the ways the library is organised and used, and the techniques by which its success is judged. This enables an exploration of what counts as library provision and the ways in which, as a public policy arena, the library is made accountable and auditable. The third area is the library as a public and community space; the ways a branch library is used for social interaction and how these account, in part, for the library service's appeal as a space for participation and engagement. Finally, the research reflects on contemporary policy debates in the library service, specifically how the service uses and promotes itself and its services, and the tensions between (and meanings of) educational, recreational and cultural uses of the public library.

This thesis considers the experiences of a group of (young) teenagers in a large town in North Wales, UK. Attention focuses upon their identities and spatialities in relation to their 'in-between' or ambiguous positioning between childhood, youth and adulthood. The research demonstrates how teenagers go about actively creating and negotiating their identities in relation to their 'age', traversing and transgressing boundaries and engaging in quasi or temporary rites of passage. Furthermore, the research explores the alternative social and cultural identities teenagers construct for themselves. Such identities become created and enacted through identification with others and particular spaces which take on a symbolic significance in the activities of the groups. By means of deconstructing the popular metaphor of 'the street' as a place for young people to hang around, the research explores the mosaic of micro sites that become (re)produced as part of the teenage landscape. Rather than focusing upon binary conceptualisations of adult domination and teenager resistance, the research demonstrates that relations between adults and teenagers, and similarly between colliding groups of teenagers are better represented as 'entanglements'. The thesis comprises a multi-voiced, multi-sited text, the main emphasis of the work being to explore the narratives and subjective experiences of teenagers. This was achieved through adopting a range of teenager-negotiated qualitative methods with a specific emphasis upon visual and mobile methods. Through placing teenagers at the centre of the research they were active in defining their own multiple identities and spatialities.

This thesis is based on fieldwork carried out in San Pablo de Lípez province, Bolivia. Through an examination of the history of the region, economic activities, ritual and oral histories, it seeks to understand the sorts of relations that have come to exist between a rural Andean group and the Bolivian nation-state and, in particular, the ways in which rural people understand themselves in the face of the state’s nation-building activities. The thesis is thus situated within the framework of studies of mestizaje, or of hybridity of peoples and cultures, and of nation-state and Indian in Latin America. The thesis proposes a model to account for the ways in which contemporary people in Sud Lípez understand themselves and others. This takes into account the historical dimension and attempts to avoid reifications of such groupings as ‘Indian’, mestizo and Spaniard, and of ethnic groups in the more abstract sense. Central to it is the concept of intertextuality, a term borrowed from linguistic theory and literary criticism that derives largely from Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogue. Intertextuality emphasises the heterogeneity of texts and the diverse elements from which they are made. The thesis is concerned primarily with discourses that surround categories of people. In contemporary Bolivia, such discourses include a current official discourse of pluralism and ethnic diversity which, it could be said, is in dialogue with ideas of homogenisation, assimilation of the Indian population, and the mestizo nation that became prominent following the National Revolution of 1952. This dialogue between contemporary discourses can be held to constitute a ‘horizontal axis’ of intertextuality. A ‘vertical axis’, which forms the context for the present-day dialogue, is in turn constituted by the discourses and dialogues surrounding categories of people throughout the colonial and early republican eras. The historical focus of the thesis allows a consideration of these past discourses. The central chapters of the thesis focus on the relation between discourse and material practices. Chapters 5 and 6 show how discourses concerning identity are reflected in everyday life in San Pablo. Chapters 7 and 8 concern ritual, and focus on local and national identity. These chapters start by attempting to divide rituals of the state from rituals of the locality and introduce the idea that people are cast as ‘consumers’ for rituals of the state, while they are the ‘producers’ of rituals of their own locality (c.f. de Certeau 1984). Ultimately, however, the chapters conclude that such a division is not as clear as it might at first appear, and that it is not a simple matter to separate productive from consumptive practices and the tactics of consumers from the strategies of producers. The chapters end by suggesting that local people have a greater degree of agency than the initial model allowed, and with the proposition that through ritual they produce a locality (Appadurai 1995) that incorporates belonging to the nation. The thesis concludes that agency is essential to the process through which the people of San Pablo arrive at an understanding of themselves and the nation-state. Agency enables them to put themselves beyond the categories that others imagine, that is, to adopt a strategy of making themselves indeterminate. Local people may inherit discourses from the past, and are aware of those of the present, but they do not merely adhere to them, nor do they simply rearrange their elements. They may adopt elements from the different discourses that surround them, but in so doing, they transform them.

This thesis is an exploration of the concepts of knowledge, sociality and relatedness amongst the Nivacle indigenous people of the Paraguayan Chaco, concentrating particularly on the community of Jotoicha in the Mennonite Colonies of the Central Chaco region. A central issue in this thesis is the concept of "knowledge" as a relational capacity and the ways in which knowledgeable behaviour can be constitutive of aesthetically pleasing forms of sociality. Such practices can be generative of increased similarity between individuals over time. The thesis begins with an exploration of Nivacle understandings of "knowledge" and shows it to be an eminently social concept that is created in an organ located in the stomach known as the cachi. "Knowledge" for the Nivacle is the basis for an individual's social conscience, their productive and reproductive skills, as well as their inter-personal relationships. "Knowledge" is also a central aspect of Nivacle understandings of relatedness. Rather than being based on a static genealogical structure, relatedness is best understood within the context of lived relationships that are constantly evolving. These relationships are generated through the practices of feeding and caring for one's "close" kin, with such practices also being generative of sociality itself. However,"close" relationships are neither static nor geographically bounded and are always open to the possibility of re-activation through visiting and gift giving. The Nivacle have been inserted into the market economy for several decades. Wage labour is conceptualised alongside other "subsistence activities" and productive activities are generative both of gender relations and sociality itself. In the final chapter I discuss Nivacle notions of reciprocity within the context of team-based sporting events. I show that whilst such community-based divisions appear to be premised on relations of "sameness" and "difference," they are best understood within the context of an overarching desire for people to generate similarity between different kinds of people in a variety of contexts.

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There are many forms of traditional health practices in Nigeria, many of which are at odds or conflict with orthodox western biomedical practices. Yet they are hightly patronized, especially by rural dwellers who make up about 80 percent of the country’s population. The objective of this thesis is to consider the traditional health practices of the Kanuri people of Borno, NE Nigeria, and the extent to which they may harm and endanger the lives of people especially mothers and children. The context of the study is the high rates of maternal and infant mortality in the state. I occupy a dual role as both an upholder of the traditions of the Kanuri people (including their health traditions) and a public health professional. The dissonance and paradox inherent in this dual role is illustrated with firsthand examples throughout the thesis. It gave me the motivation to undertake this piece of research with a view to reducing the rhetorical gap between theory and practice which pertains in the state in regard to integrating the two systems, the co-existence and integration of which is promoted by the health policy of the country as a whole. Formal ethnographic research was conducted during a five year period from 1999 to 2005. The philosophy of reflexivity was adopted, drawing on my earlier experiences in an auto-ethnographic manner. Data triangulation was employed due to the complex nature of the research. Focus group discussions, interviews and questionnaire administration were employed with different categories of research subjects – traditional and orthodox health workers, urban and rural mothers. The results show that western-trained health professionals in the state stand between their own culture, which is of course changing, and the global professional identities they have acquired through professional development and training. At the same time the traditional healers can no longer operate in a context separate from official western-based systems which co-exist with the traditional practices and are widely known to the general public in Borno. Historically, the systems have been in opposition. Now there is supposed to be collaboration and overlap.