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No description available.

In recent decades, behavioural ecologists have contributed to our understanding of the family through extensive studies of animal and traditional human populations. This research emphasises the importance of sibling competition for parental resources and adaptive patterns of biased parental care. In contrast, modern human families are rarely considered by behavioural ecologists, with increases in wealth generally considered to decrease the importance of resource dilution within families and modern cultural rules discouraging of unequal treatment of children. In this thesis, I question the validity of these assumptions and use rich longitudinal data to consider family structure effects on parental investment and child development in contemporary Britain. I consider time-based and financial investment in offspring and measures of physical, cognitive and behavioural development over a 10 year period. The following specific hypotheses are tested. First, parents will face a trade-off between fertility, investment per child and ultimately child well-being. This hypothesis is supported for all measures, except for behavioural well-being. Second, parents will bias investment towards early-born offspring. This hypothesis is largely supported. Later-born children receive lower investment and have reduced physical and cognitive well-being. However, mental health is improved in the presence of older siblings. Third, parents will bias investment towards male offspring. Support for this hypothesis is mixed. Measures of investment indicate a male-bias driven by fathers, while number of brothers relative to sisters is associated with reduced cognitive, but not physical or behavioural well-being. Fourth, children with unrelated father figures will receive less investment. This hypothesis is supported. Unrelated father figures are associated with lower investment from both parents and reduced physical and behavioural well-being. Finally, I test the hypothesis that higher socio-economic status will alleviate family size trade-offs. This hypothesis is rejected, with some evidence that resource competition is of increased importance in relatively wealthy and well-educated families.

Vietnam is an established thoroughfare for illegal wildlife trade, and rapidly growing urban prosperity is increasing domestic demand for wild animal products. Consumer-targeted interventions, including awareness campaigns and social marketing, and supply-side approaches such as wildlife farming to reduce demand for wild animals, are increasingly being used alongside regulatory measures to curb illegal trade. These approaches are based on limited information about wild animal consumers and consumption behaviour in urban Vietnam. In particular, little is known about the characteristics of consumers, the context of consumption, the values associated with wild animal products, the ability of farmed wild substitutes to satisfy consumer demand and current awareness levels and attitudes regarding wild animals. Focusing on the central Hanoi population, this thesis investigates all of these issues using a structured questionnaire survey (n=915) and a series of semi-structured interviews (n=77). There is considerable demand for wild animal products, and for wild meat in particular, amongst the population of central Hanoi. Wild meat consumers tend to be high-income men of all ages working in high-status positions as businessmen, finance professionals and government officials. Consumption of medicinal products is positively related to age and education. Wild meat is a prestige food used to demonstrate wealth and status and there are considerable social pressures to consume it. Preferences for wild-caught products show farmed substitutes will not satisfy demand for wild products; widespread farming may actually increase overall demand for wild animal products by introducing new consumers and encouraging existing consumers to place greater emphasis on the origin of products. Wildlife-related awareness does not reduce consumption behaviour and the population surveyed displayed a largely utilitarian attitude towards wild animals. The thesis concludes with recommendations to reduce wildlife decline driven by overexploitation for trade in Vietnam.

The wartime and postwar Polish emigration allows us to study a ‘parallel’ history of the Polish nation. Poles in Great Britain were free from the restrictions imposed on Poles in the homeland by the communist dictatorship; they were thus better able to continue in the intellectual and cultural paths of interwar Poland. But by the later 1950s it was clear that there would be no early return to a free Poland. Poles in exile had to adapt to their condition, and interact with a rapidly changing British society. As a result, their characteristics diverged from those of Poles in the homeland and – despite their best efforts – from those of their ancestors as well. This dissertation examines the distinctive ‘parallel Polish world’ at the level of everyday life, rather than the central institutions of ‘Polish London’. It focuses on three Gminy (Communities) founded in the 1950s: the Polish Community of West London, the Polish Community of South London, and the Polish Centre in Lewisham. The diverse and enjoyable social activities undertaken or supported by the Communities – dances, Saturday schools, sport, scouting and guiding, charity, religious and national commemorations – were subordinated to the aim of maintaining Polish national identity in exile, and transmitting it to subsequent generations. This kind of ‘Polishness’ was heroic, martyrological, and Roman Catholic. The organizational and fundraising skills developed in the Communities’ pursuit of their own houses proved invaluable in the building of the Polish Social and Cultural Centre in London (POSK). However, among the casualties of POSK were the Polish Communities of West and South London, which effectively came to an end in 1976. Only the more peripheral Lewisham Centre survived. POSK’s benefit to everyday Polish life in London has been questionable. The Gminy may yet offer an organizational model for a new, more numerous wave of Polish emigrants to the UK.

Whilst there have been important publications on material culture studies in recent years, this literature tends to accept the prior experience of objects as given material facts. This thesis aims at providing a contribution to the conception of materiality through an ethnography of production grounded in long-term fieldwork. The research took place in the Sirwa Mountain, to the South East of Marrakech, Morocco, where the best selling carpets in Morocco are exclusively produced by women, and marketed by men. This thesis develops an ethnography of weaving framed within the francophone anthropology of techniques (Technologic culturelle). Particularly, I use the emphasis of the Matiere a Penser group on the role of the moving body mediated by material culture to examine how particular embodied relationships to specific materialities shape particular gendered subjectivities. Grounded in participant observation, I put myself voluntarily in the situation of a learner, as well as observed the motor and sensory actions of weavers. This allows me to explore how women construct their female moral self, partially through the disciplinary techniques of immobility and confinement, involved in the process of making beautiful carpets. In producing objects that are exchanged by men, weavers contribute to shaping male agency. This thesis aims at exploring the specificity of making and the social meaning of carpets for those who produce them and their communities. I thus locate the Sirwa weavers value in an aesthetic and ethic of doing, in which the physical enjoyment and the mastery of matter, is the place of both the construction of a stable and fulfilled self and the production of others.

This thesis employs historical, literary and anthropological methods to show how narratives of identity have been expressed in Croatia since 1991 (when Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia) through popular music and through talking about popular music. Since the beginning of the war in Croatia (1991-95) when the state media stimulated the production of popular music conveying appropriate narratives of national identity, Croatian popular music has been a site for the articulation of explicit national narratives of identity. The practice has continued into the present day, reflecting political and social change in Croatia (e.g. the growth of the war veterans lobby and protests against the Hague Tribunal). The cultural boundaries of the nation were also subject to contestation and challenge according to symbolic value judgements of what was and was not considered 'Croatian'. Various aspects of popular music (e.g. instruments, vocal styles) were constructed as symbols of inclusion and exclusion in this discourse, and several attempts were made by professional interest groups to promote certain genres as a basis for a national style of popular music. The nationalisation of cultural space also entailed the marginalisation of music/musicians from other ex-Yugoslav republics (especially Serbia) with ethno-nationally ambiguous connotations. An examination of what have become transnational cultural flows shows the continued interdependence of the ex-Yugoslav states and markets. The thesis combines analysis of Croatian press sources and song lyrics themselves with ethnographic material drawn from 35 weeks of fieldwork in Zagreb and Slavonia. Interviews and participant observation of musical events are used to analyse the importance of music in narrating individual as well as collective identity.

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This thesis explores the specific practices of group gameplay (called ‘raiding’) in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMO). In particular, it presents ethnographic research conducted by the author between 2009 and 2012 where she studied raiding in World of Warcraft (WoW), a game environment that is a complicated and malleable space with many pathways of play built into it, not the least of which are the particular ways that raiders choose to shape and sustain their play experience. Building on Galloway’s ‘four moments of gamic action’ as a theoretical framework from which to consider gamic representation among raiders and through ethnographic research on raiding gameplay practices, this thesis considers the ways that formation, competition and gamic action have distinguished raiding within the online, persistent game environment, forming to become a set of interwoven principles that work in concert to sustain long-term raiding activity. The objective of this thesis is twofold: first, to contribute to the gap in games research on raiding gameplay practices in MMOs; and second, to consider how the study of online group play through the context of MMO raiding can impact further geographical research into the digital game, particularly within the contexts of the virtual and playful. Conclusions drawn from this work suggest that the study of game raiding (and its persistence) offers an important perspective to understanding the nature of the complex online game environment; an environment that is at once controlled and malleable, multisensory and immersive, engaging yet sustaining, and complex yet localized, creating many simultaneous moments in gamic action where these representations of space, action, formation and competition function not so much to define gameplay but more so to shape and enable it.

As many other ethno-cultural identities in Europe, the collective selfperceptions of Scotland's Gaels and the Sorbs of Lusatia are undergoing considerable changes. Proceding from the post-structuralist premise that discourse plays a crucial part in the generation of knowledge, power and social behaviour (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard), the study addresses the ways in which the Gaelic and Sorbian elites incorporate the language aspect into narratives on cultural continuity and considers the implications of accelerated language shift towards English/German and the survivalist promotion of the ancestral medium for the maintenance of group boundaries. Its primary empirical data corpus comprises more than 100 interviews and a questionnaire survey (n=201) conducted during the late 1990s in peripheral parts of the Ghidhealtachd and bilingual territories of Lusatia, publications by Gaelic and Sorbian organisations, and relevant items from the local and national media. A brief exploration of the ways in which the two communities came to think of themselves as distinct reveals that a substantial legacy of cultural nationalism and pan-Slavism allowed the Sorbian intelligentsia to sustain a strong sense of ethnic difference throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, whereas Scotland's Gaels have never overtly embraced this paradigm in political terms. Their elite was confronted with its premises during their reinvention as Scotland's Celts and combined linguistic patriotism with calls for socioeconomic improvements during the 1880s, but it has been rather reluctant to portray contemporary and future users of the ancestral language as a distinct nation or ethnic group. To the present day, Gaels are inclined to perceive themselves to be a key component, and arguably the kernel, of the Scottish nation. The most significant overlap between Gaelic- and Sorbian-related revival discourses has been the notion that a complete decline of the traditional medium would seal the fate of the associated culture, though the underlying rationales indicate a gradual shift from an essentialising agenda of preservation and exclusion to a more liberal and pluricentric approach. A desire to withstand the homogenising forces of capitalist globalisation fuels purist attitudes with regard to specific cultural forms, many of which are thought to depend on the traditional medium and put native speakers with heartland links into positions of authority. At the same time, the Gaelic and Sorbian heritage are treated as sources of alternative values and wisdom, in which context Gaelic/Sorbian language ability is primarily valued as an access tool. Tensions between essentialist and dynamic perspectives also occur over the development of the languages themselves. They are enhanced by the assumption that the 'survival' of Gaelic and Sorbian depends in part on individuals who acquire and transmit them outside the bilingual districts, where an ability in the minority medium is more likely to generate subcultural, regional and political identities than a radical ethno-cultural reorientation. According to this study's findings, the linguocentric agendas of many Gaelic and Sorbian organisations can neither be attributed to a naive belief in linguistic determinism nor be dismissed as an entirely symbolic ingredient for the restoration of justice and pride where historic circumstances inflicted marginalisation and oppression. They are based on a justified concern that the complete demise of a linguistic boundary would make it impossible to generate separate discursive spaces, to which Gaelic and Sorbian culture have in most locations become reduEce d and for which a separate literature and separate electronic media are indispensable.