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This thesis explores the meaning and experience of local and transnational kin connections for Pakistani Muslims living in Teesside, United Kingdom. The thesis contributes to knowledge about 'the practice of kinship' in a transnational context. The attempt to combine an investigation of transnationalism with a study of how kin relations are conducted in the present day is one of the strengths of the work. The ethnography is based on eighteen months of fieldwork carried out among British Pakistani Muslims. It explores the domestic nature of transnationalism in kin connections that forms the experiential basis of global and local relationships. The research was undertaken with the cooperation of first, second and third-generation British Pakistanis living in the north east of England. Various ethnographic qualitative methods were used to collect data, including semi- structured interviews, life histories, participant observation and focus group discussions. demonstrates the complex interplay of gender, age, origin, kin connection and life-course events in creating variation in individuals' engagement with the transnational. I argue that during their migratory experiences many first and second-generation Pakistanis display new forms of' habits of meaning' or 'habitus' to cope with differences exposed in their transnational travels. The thesis is written from the perspective of local actors: people who identify themselves as Pakistani, British Pakistani and have a Pakistani-origin. Although the thesis attempts to foreground their perspectives and narratives, it is also infused with my open interpretation and analyses, which I attempt to distinguish from local 'emic' ones. I am much less interested in this thesis in generalising claims about British Pakistani migrants, than in local practices of British Pakistanis in Teesside. For British Pakistanis, transnational practices involve not only a particular post-colonial history, but also unique understandings of the meanings of birãdari (extended family), marriage and family life and the everyday practices in which the recipients of such global processes must live. The migration of Pakistanis into the United Kingdom however, has introduced volatile relationships between kin as new configurations of space, consumption and social reproduction are negotiated. A striking aspect of the lives of those whom I interviewed was the fact that most of them were in the process of acquiring new patterns of commodity consumption and desire. Narratives from parents and grandparents contain a 're-consciousness' of property relations revealing new ideas and practices about the importance of siblings and children in the new migratory context. Moreover, they form new self-definitions of fellow British Pakistanis and relatives living in Pakistan. It is these complex transnational reconfigurations (transnationalism, subjectivity, the meaning of ‘home' and relatedness) that comprise the main subject of the present thesis. However, this thesis spans several areas of anthropological interest: the practice of kinship and relatedness. South Asian migration, transnationalism, diaspora, intergenerational conflicts, nurturing practices, ethnicity and studies of ethnic minorities in Britain.

The Orang Ulu people of the East Malaysian State of Sarawak comprise many indigenous groups. They live predominantly in the north-east of the State in highland rainforest areas and are both swidden farmers and hunter-gatherers. Many of the utility objects they use are manufactured locally from forest resources. As communications in the area have improved, new materials and technology have arrived and are influencing their traditional production. This thesis documents the production of material culture by some of these groups. Using a comparative approach, it examines the processes that feature in material preparation, the tools used, and the various styles of objects made and the designs chosen. During fieldwork the techniques used in the production of the documented objects were learnt by observer participation until they were fully understood and the fieldworker could replicate them. The study includes many illustrations and explanations of designs and manufacturing techniques. In addition the thesis discusses the changes that have occurred within these material culture assemblages. It considers these in relation to various issues,such as people’s identity concerns and the commodification of their local products. It relates the objects to their maker, user and usage, investigating labour co-ordination in the region and gender issues pertaining to them.

This thesis investigates the conflict of values that occurs in Bangladesh between NGOs and wider society. It examines the dynamics of BRAC, a large NGO, in order to illustrate the dissonance and inconsistencies in development discourse. Tension is evident in development, which is a multi-stranded process, in which each strand may complement or contradict the others. The process may also be understood in terms of the societal change that results from an attempted synthesis of the contradictory, clashing values of Western agency (individualism, equality, market, etc.) and Bangladeshi rural cultural life (community, hierarchy, subsistence, etc.). Development processes, backed by strong finance, introduce Western ideas and theories to the South. NGOs subscribe to a global policy language in transforming these ideas into locally implementable programmes and projects, ignoring the diverse social, cultural and political settings in which they work. When villagers come into contact with these projects, they are pushed towards a sense of individualism, but instead of developing this individualism, they produce a new form of collectivism. In this hybrid environment, actors engaged in development adhere neither to the old values nor to new ones. Projects aimed at modernization, itself, have undergone change from a blue-print approach to a process approach. In reality, top-down approaches are renamed but not reformed into bottom-up approaches. NGO projects targeting women, notably through micro-credit programmes, contribute to the rise of women-only organisations as well as matri-focal groups that constitute a challenge to male-dominated village associations. Micro-credit also polarises the traditional notions of money into moral and immoral money to produce new arenas of dispute. Overall, religious groups oppose such NGO interventions. Conflict occurs within NGOs themselves. This is evident when BRAC, as an organisational entity, seek to accommodate to Western, Bengali and Islamic cultural traits which further generate conflict and are managed by a culture of fear or indulgence. Unless knowledge is shared by both parties there is the strong likelihood of increased conflict to the detriment of both NGOs and the local people.

The inter-relating topics of social capital, co-operation and spheres of exchange are examined in the context of case-studies of two very different community currency systems in the North of England. Participant observation, informal interviews and a questionnaire are complemented by the analysis of transaction records, using social network analysis. On a practical level, this research shows that community currency systems can be used to promote well-being, but that their success is greatly influenced by organisational culture and practices, and particularly by whether members are encouraged to set up transactions for themselves, and to form partnerships based upon direct reciprocity. The theoretical findings are of wider relevance. First of all I examine the amorphous concept of social capital, and suggest replacing it by two separate concepts: social cohesion and social reach, defined and measured using social network analysis. Turning to co-operation, I find that individuals with directly reciprocal social ties tend to cluster together, forming a network with a highly right-skewed degree distribution and a clear core-periphery structure, at the heart of which are a number of long-lasting Simmelian ties. This process relies on individuals being able to trade widely and change partners at will, while their behaviour is bounded by commonly held values relating to trust, equality and fairness. There are few examples of triad 030C, suggesting that if indirect reciprocity occurs at all, it is in conjunction with direct reciprocity, and/or in the form of a broken chain (with someone who mainly gives at one end, and someone who mainly receives at the other). Finally, although policy-makers are often keen to pigeonhole citizens’ behaviour as either ‘economic’ or ‘social’, a better model may be that of overlapping spheres of exchange. While some activities clearly take place in the sphere of the market economy, and others in the sphere of the gift economy, certain types of behaviour (e.g. transactions between members of community currency systems) may exist in the interstices of the spheres.

This thesis is a study of living Islam and Muslims’ lifeworlds in the margins of the postsocialist world, in the mountains of central Bosnia. Its main scope is an analysis of the scales of relatedness and the domains of knowledge traditions that assemble Muslims’ lifeworlds as tangible, coherent and meaningful social forms. In doing so, the thesis draws inspiration from the Barthian anthropology of knowledge to shed light on ‘what a person employs to interpret and act on the world’. A knowledge tradition, here understood as a local cosmology, is a product of multiple persons and relations that create the context in which knowledge and bodies of knowledge are produced and sustained. Therefore, I argue that it is a knowledge tradition that informs a ‘meaningful agency’ in the flow of everyday sociality and that continues to be Islam in the Bosnian mountains. In particular, I suggest that Muslim life in the mountains is lived along four complementary meaningful contexts, that is relatedness, spatiality, temporality and ritual. Relatedness embraces multifaceted processes of ‘living together’ that (re)fabricate, relate and extend Muslim persons through sharing of substances, memories, identity and divinity (chapters 3 and 4). The flow of everyday sociality between persons who ‘live in proximity’ is tapestried from day-to-day forms of exchange such as hospitality, intimacy and mutuality between neighbours, and enacted within two overlapping spheres, that is immediate (komšiluk) and extended neighbourhood (mahala) (chapters 5 and 6). The lifeworlds of Muslims as well as the flow of the everyday in the mountains are orchestrated and punctuated by particular rhythms embracing multiple forms of time reckoning and calendars, and orchestrating various agricultural and religious activities and practices (chapter 7). Ritual is a mode of appropriation of personal or communal good luck, fortune, blessing and well-being (chapters 6, 7 and 8), and cuts across the spheres of intimacy and proximity and embraces Muslims’ lifeworlds, well-being of the house, the land and the persons with the sacred landscape and divinity. Throughout the thesis I argue that our research in the post-Yugoslav regions needs to take into account local knowledge traditions as a serious matter of concern, and situate the war atrocities or postsocialist transformations within the larger analytical scales entwining cultural continuities and historicities with social, political and economic breakdowns. In doing so, I show that the ways Bosnian Muslims value and conceive of being a Muslim are primarily focused on cultural creativity, knowledge, morality and domains that inform, shape and (re)create their lifeworlds and cosmologies, and through which Bosnian Muslims exchange, communicate, validate and understand their religious experiences and imagination in the context of turbulent social, economic and political transformations.

This study explores the nighttime parenting behaviour of first-time adolescent and adult mothers. Two theoretical approaches are evaluated. The first model suggests that differences in parenting behaviour between teens and adults occur because teen mothers are less well-prepared for nighttime infant care compared to more mature mothers. The second draws on evolutionary theory and suggests that nighttime parenting figures into the suite of behaviours that comprise parental investment, which varies depending on the life-history trajectories and reproductive strategies of individual mothers. The project addresses how understanding nighttime parenting behaviour as part of an individual‘s life-history trajectory can inform public health policies and interventions related to infant sleep. Methods A sub-sample of adolescent and adult mothers was drawn from a larger, prospective longitudinal study on transition to parenting in Indiana, U.S.A. Overnight, infra-red video recordings of the nighttime parenting behaviours of mother-infant dyads were collected for 23 adolescent and 22 adult mothers when infants were approximately 4 months of age. The video recordings were reviewed in real time in their entirety and coded using a behavioural taxonomy designed for this study which was entered into the Noldus Observer software. Data were analysed for group differences and were assessed against the predictions derived from the two models to determine which theoretical framework better fit the behavioural outcomes. Additionally, qualitative descriptions of focal behaviours related to infant risk were produced. Results Teen mothers exhibited closer physical proximity while infants were awake and asleep, mother-infant bedsharing, and a higher number of sleep environments for infants. There was more compatibility between maternal and infant sleep periods in the teen group, with mothers going to sleep sooner after their infants did compared to adults. There was also a trend toward teen mothers having more frequent but shorter awakenings during the night. Adults spent more time at greater distances from their infants, and more often placed infants to sleep in a cot in a separate bedroom. Both groups were prompt to respond to infant crying, although there was a trend towards shorter crying bouts among infants of teen mothers. Fewer teen mothers breastfed their infants, and infant self-feeding from bottles propped on blankets or other materials was more frequent among teen mothers. There was a trend towards more frequent placement of infants in the prone sleeping position among the teen mothers, although intervention by research staff in such instances obscured the outcomes. More teen mothers placed their infants' heads on pillows compared to adult mothers, but for the major categories of risk that were coded (breathing risks, feeding risks, and other types of potential risk) there were no group differences between teens and adult. Conclusions The findings of this study revealed significant differences between teen and adult mothers in how they managed the costs of caring for infants at night. The predictions generated by the life-history model were a better fit for the behavioural outcomes overall. Life-history theory predicted that teens would engage in cost-reducing measures in order to meet their own growth and development needs as well as those of their infants while adult mothers could afford to exhibit greater parental investment relative to self-investment. Teen cost-cutting measures were evident, and were accomplished by pursuing a behavioural strategy that minimised parent-infant conflict and brought maternal and infant needs in line with each other during the night. The teen strategy achieved a reduction in maternal costs through increased involvement with and proximity to infants, rather than through the withdrawal and distancing that would be predicted by existing literature on the sub-optimal parenting styles of adolescents. The conventional model suggested that the sub-optimal parenting style of adolescents would lead to greater sleep-related risk exposure. However, the data revealed that risks occurred for both groups, although they involved different sleep environments. Implications The findings of this study also contradict the assumption that any sleep environment is inherently safe or inherently risky, and suggests ways in which an evolutionary perspective might be applied to modifying public health policy related to infant sleep. The findings reinforce the idea that parental behaviour affects the risks to which infants are exposed and that nighttime parenting behaviours are shaped by maternal reproductive and parental investment strategies. This study therefore supports the idea that one-size-fits-all approaches to health and behaviour are inappropriate, and that public health recommendations related to infant sleep should be sufficiently elastic and/or tailored to allow for the range of contexts within which infant care occurs. Because mothers arrive at parenting from very different life trajectories, and because each of these trajectories causes them to evaluate and tolerate parenting costs and risks to infants in variable ways, it is incongruous to expect that they should all be encouraged to parent in a similar manner or to structure their infants‘ nighttime routines in a uniform way.

Through ethnographic research amongst farmers in the North York Moors, and through broader historical and political analysis, I examine the importance and role of values in hard work and beneficent change in negotiated interactions between policy-makers, farmers and conservationists. Within the context of a shift in agricultural support away from production to environmental protection, and within the context of a local conservation initiative to protect a population of freshwater pearl mussels in the River Esk, I show the importance of these values for the construction of farmers' personhoods and their symbolic relations and means of expression through the landscape. I show how those values are persistent and pervasive, yet at the same time mutable and open to interpretation. In particular, I examine alternative conceptions of beneficent change through recourse to the words fettle and improvement. Fettling places value in long-term, steady and incremental change, whereas improvement places value in changes more closely associated with productivist ideals such as expansion and profit. I suggest that it is the mutability of farming values that gives rise to their persistence as they come to be used and reinterpreted according to the changing contexts of their application and the differing interests of a range of groups and individuals. By showing that farmers are able to uphold and express their values differently I argue that it is not so straightforward to predict farmers' responses to changing political exigencies or local conservation initiatives on the basis of homogenous values or the categorisation of farmers into defined "types". Through a rhetoric-culture approach I argue that changes in farming values through time do not merely reflect changing political interests and farmers' subsequent accommodation of them. Rather, it reflects the continued negotiation of those values between farmers and others in the play of agents and patients in the construction of personhood and the formulation of arguments. I argue that the persistence of fettling interpretations of a value in beneficent change reflects the agentive actions of farmers as it remains a useful argumentative strategy with which they can make indictments against new policy impositions and, moreover, it remains functional in guiding their practices in ways suitable to the environment in which they farm.

This thesis examines the socio-economic situation of Roma in three Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. It observes that the governments of these three countries, to varying degrees, have failed to develop effective policies for improving the marginal situation of the Roma minority. My hypothesis is that one of the key factors explaining this failure is the fact that ‘the dominant group – ethnic minority’ relations in these countries have been based on a liberal as opposed to a multicultural model. An examination of the academic literature on accommodating ethnic minority rights reveals two main models that deal with the rights of minority cultures. The first, the liberal model, focuses on human rights and advances the idea that the best way to improve the quality of life of ethnic minorities would be to treat their members in the same way as the members of the dominant ethnic group. The second, the multicultural model, demands special protection of the culture of minority groups and views this as an essential precondition for improving the minority group’s socio-economic condition. The thesis argues that both the policies of the Eastern European governments, as well as the monitoring mechanisms adopted by the international community are based on the liberal approach which promotes the implementation of human rights standards. These policies have not been successful which in turn casts doubt on the suitability of the liberal model as a solution to the problematic situation of the Roma in the three Eastern European countries studied here. The thesis examines two other factors that explain the poor socio-economic status of Roma in Eastern Europe: the unique situation of the Roma minority as one lacking an external homeland that could support its minority abroad and the unique geo-political situation of these Eastern European countries whose other minorities do have external homelands and are seen as posing a security threat to the host countries. Thus the Roma suffer the twofold disadvantage of having no external protection and of being the target of the negative attitudes aimed at the other ethnic minority groups due to the perceived security threat to the territorial integrity of these states. The analysis demonstrates that the Roma minorities in Hungary fare better than in Bulgaria and Romania due to the lack of the above mentioned security issues vis-à-vis other ethnic minorities.

The question of the nature of human activity, its specific formulation and function in social production and reproduction is a fundamental one for any theory of social formation, existence and evolution. There are various forces to accounts for which do not remain static as they are categories of human needs and consciousness and they are transformed as society changes. Nonetheless theoretical pre-suppositions in general have rested on the validity of rigid argumentations embedded in a tradition of conservative ideology, with their central feature the a priori reduction of population dynamics and social values to eternal natural laws. In this "Hobbesian society" concepts, categories and methods are the products of the very phenomena they are designed to describe; the effect is empirical closure, artificial separation of the object from its history, and the application in any field of the "true or false” hypotheses, which once categorized remain ever so. However, an understanding of the reality depends on the question we ask. Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms and countings according to some unstated value scheme considered as proven, the Marxist commitment is to detailed study of societies, with written or non-written history, based on the dialectical-historical analysis of relationships and contradictions that must be elaborated, refined and tested both through theory and praxis; and this is the concern of the following thesis.