<p>In contemporary public debate there is currently a great deal of focus attached to environmental problems and social responsibility. This trend is noticeable within the clothing industry, where it has become increasingly popular for new brands to market themselves with an environmental and ethical profile. An anthropological approach has been used to investigate how individuals understand ethical dimensions of clothing, and relates to the consumers’ ideals that are pronounced by clothing companies with an environmental and ethical profile. Interviews have been conducted with young men, a group often absent in accounts of ethical consumption. From these conversations, it is possible to discuss wider processes going on in society at large. Contemporary discourse on ethical shopping appears to rest on the assumption that the individual is able to freely choose among merchandise available on the market, and is placed in a central position of responsibility towards human and non-human others. There is a need for research that challenges this view. From the material it became visible that there existed a strong boundary from the informants´ point of view of what was mentioned as social problems or global issues, and of what they considered reasonable of themselves to bear responsibility for. Distrust was expressed against ongoing public debate that was considered to be too one-sided. Barely any references existed of ecological and fair made fashion, suggesting a generational gap in experiences of this kind of clothing. The study is considered to stimulate for further research in the area of ethical shopping of clothes.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Riverside, 1993. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-03, Section: A, page: 0987. Chairman: Eugene N. Anderson, Jr. Includes bibliographical references.

In contemporary public debate there is currently a great deal of focus attached to environmental problems and social responsibility. This trend is noticeable within the clothing industry, where it has become increasingly popular for new brands to market themselves with an environmental and ethical profile. An anthropological approach has been used to investigate how individuals understand ethical dimensions of clothing, and relates to the consumers’ ideals that are pronounced by clothing companies with an environmental and ethical profile. Interviews have been conducted with young men, a group often absent in accounts of ethical consumption. From these conversations, it is possible to discuss wider processes going on in society at large. Contemporary discourse on ethical shopping appears to rest on the assumption that the individual is able to freely choose among merchandise available on the market, and is placed in a central position of responsibility towards human and non-human others. There is a need for research that challenges this view. From the material it became visible that there existed a strong boundary from the informants´ point of view of what was mentioned as social problems or global issues, and of what they considered reasonable of themselves to bear responsibility for. Distrust was expressed against ongoing public debate that was considered to be too one-sided. Barely any references existed of ecological and fair made fashion, suggesting a generational gap in experiences of this kind of clothing. The study is considered to stimulate for further research in the area of ethical shopping of clothes.

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The ideology of weight control as evidenced in the discourse of American adolescent girls is explored via a cognitive approach to discourse analysis, and focuses on the teasing out of cultural models through evidence in natural language. It is hypothesized that a cultural model exists which equates weight control with a moral code reflective of the Protestant ethic. The research examines how the cultural model frames experience by supplying interpretations of that experience, and how it influences behavior by supplying goals for action. The cognitive salience of the model within the belief system of the individual regulates the degree of influence the model has on behavior. Four levels of influence are proposed, ranging from cultural cliche to motivation of disordered eating. The predominant influence is found to be as an occasional guide to weight controlling action or discourse about such action.

In response to the anthropological literature on old age and ageing that remains largely isolated from more contemporary anthropological theory, this thesis re-focuses anthropological attention on the experiences of ageing. Towards this end, I examine the way macro- (history, politics, economics) and micro-level processes (social relations, intergenerational relations, local contexts, individual histories) intersect to frame the cultural construction of old age, personal experiences of "being old", and the self. A central point of intersection between these processes comes from the recent history of social transformation in my fieldsite, Dodworth, a former coal-mining village. Since the late 1980s, this is an area that has been grappling with the rupturing effects of the closure of the coal-mining industry. Attending to these conditions and how they inform the everyday reality and the experiences of ageing and of the self are critical concerns in this thesis. My approach to the ageing self is one that privileges narrativity and temporality as key constitutive elements and which considers the potentially different position of older people in relation to time and to the self. Growing older is a complicated mixture of bodily and social change, and negotiating these shifts has crucial implications for one's sense of self and subjectivity. While "old age" is a category which is readily used in daily discourse and living, what old age is and who is old nevertheless resists anchoring. What old age, being old and ageing meant to my research participants are key questions in order to understand the experience of growing older in Dodworth. Throughout the thesis, I focus on the dialectics of interpersonal interactions in order to speak meaningfully about how the experience of old age is organised and constructed. Emerging in tandem with these issues is another major topic of this thesis: social memory. Talk in Dodworth about places, absences, and relations continually brought the past and present together and was involved in how a sense of self is created. What emerged was a three-dimensionality of memory, an individual and collective way of placing oneself and others in relation to spatial aspects of the villagescape.

This thesis investigates native speaker attitudes towards English loanwords in Japanese and the ways in which these loanwords are used. The imperialism and hegemony of English can often cause anger or worry for the preservation of the cultural identity of the borrowing language. However, the results from a 9-page sociolinguistic questionnaire suggest that English loanwords are overwhelmingly seen as useful and necessary and are generally associated with positive attitudes. Additionally, many native Japanese speakers feel that loanwords provide more options for expression, both functionally and as a possible pragmatic tool for performing Japaneseness. On the other hand, overuse of loanwords—especially less common ones—can also exemplify the power imbalance between Japanese and the powerful and hegemonic English. The study also revealed how powerful the Japanese linguistic systems are at assimilating English into the Japanese language. With established and institutionally supported phonological and orthographic conventions in place, foreign-derived vocabulary can easily become nativized, assimilated, and considered to be Japanese in the minds of speakers.

Photocopy of typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1978. / Bibliography: leaves [295]-303. / Microfiche. / xiii, 303 leaves ill. (some col.), map. 28 cm

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of European Studies and General Linguistics, 2003. / "June 2003" 2 maps in pocket on back cover. Bibliography: leaves 285-308.