Conventional ways of looking at livelihood systems and household food security fail to capture the variations in procurement strategies used by different households to obtain resources. This can be attributed to the fact that the attention of the developers is mostly focused on national food supplies. Aggregate data obscures the local and regional inequality and seasonal disparities in access to food. This is exacerbated by the preconceived notion that peasant societies are a monolithic unit. Thus, our understanding of the internal dynamics of peasant communities, and of cooperation and conflict among their members becomes distorted. Considerable variability exists in Chad and Haiti both in terms of livelihood systems and household resource endowments. This dissertation argues that approaches to food security must address this variability at the household level. Social differentiation exists between households and within households within any given community. To improve our understanding of intra-household dynamics, gender analysis must be used to delineate the economic activities, division of labor, and access to and control over resources that exist among household members. Most food security scholars have assumed that rural households can adapt to sudden crises. This dissertation shows that rural households are always in the dynamic process of coping; crises are not conjunctural but rather endemic. The coping mechanisms they develop are not as well patterned as the literature portrays them. In a context of failing livelihood systems of the last two decades, people's responses to vulnerability vary according to changing circumstances. Another major assumption about food security is that child nutritional status is an indicator of the food and health conditions of child household and of the entire community. Research conducted in Haiti presents a case study which runs counter to this general assumption. Variability, flexibility, adaptability, diversification and resilience are key concepts in household food security. Studies on food security should take into consideration at least five major sources of variations: (1) Contrasts among livelihood systems; (2) Intra-community variations; (3) Differences in household resource endowments; (4) Variation between households or local communities in relation to the "national state"; and (5) Changes in all of the foregoing sources of variation over time.

The "Rabin Ahau," Daughter of the King in Q'eqchi, is elected annually in a pageant in Coban, Guatemala to represent indigenous women before the Guatemalan nation. Although the contest takes the form of a beauty pageant, the criterion on which the candidates are judged is their authenticity as Maya women; their authenticity, in turn, guarentees Guatemala's distinctiveness in the international community of nations. This thesis explores what signifying authenticity requires of would-be Rabin Ahaus, when being Maya at all in Guatemala has historically been life-threatening. It links the aestheticization of Indianness to the ethnocidal racism which literally erases Maya bodies from the national territory, and examines how Guatemalan nationalist discourse uses mimesis and commodification of "the Indian" to create and control an Indian essence; it indicates, also, how the participants in the contest work mimetic excess to triangulate official authenticity and assert different meanings of the Maya.

For twenty five years, during the second weekend of October, El Presidio Park in downtown Tucson has been the site of a folk festival that aims to celebrate southern Arizona's ethnic diversity and create community amongst Tucsonans. Formerly Tucson Meet Yourself, the festival is today known as the Tucson Heritage Experience. Since its inception in 1974, the festival has showcased ethnicity through music and dance, costumes, storytelling, workshops, and craft demonstrations but most importantly through the sale and preparation of food. This thesis examines the role of food in constructions of community and ethnicity at the Tucson Heritage Experience. Situated at the crossroads of wider debates concerned with the nature of ethnicity, community formation, and the relationship between food and identity, this thesis draws on ethnographic field research to argue that the unique, incorporative nature of food makes it a powerful medium in the substantiation of community and ethnic ties.

The purpose of this essay is to let the reader become philosophically aware of the various historical, sociological, psychological, and aesthetic views connected with the word kitsch. The first two sections of this essay are devoted to the research of these outside views. Because of the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon of kitsch, the concluding sections of this essay suggests another approach to what we view as the real problem of kitsch--a lack of understanding for kitschman as he relates kitsch-art to boredom. The method of exploration into the phenomenon of kitsch will be that of existential phenomenology. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-09, Section: A, page: 2706. / Major Professor: Peter Stowell. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1988.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Anthropology, 2007. / Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 25, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0649. Adviser: Anya Peterson Royce.

The point of departure of this dissertation is the identification of the existence of a (historic) realm of affection and eroticism among men in Mexico that have not been accounted for neither by dominant discourses on Mexican men or Mexican homoerotic practices and identities, nor by Anthropological and epidemiological studies of the homoerotic experience: affective and/or erotic relations that take place outside dominant categories like gay, homosexual, joto or mayate (or other terms used for sexual deviants) and contesting the heterosexual ideal of manhood. Far from explaining and identifying this realm of intimacy, the dissertation makes an ethnographically and theoretically informed criticism on how these dominant discourses, and their sexual and gender categories, work to sustain the sex/gender system by render them invisible. The dissertation explores masculinity identity as a heterogeneous space of power and resistance. Masculine identity is considered to be a contradictory space where intimate relations may take place and even where homophobia can be resisted. At the same time, the dissertation shows the heterogeneous character of the homoerotic experience in Mexico; a heterogeneity that contest the theoretical effort to construct a single narrative as pretended by the terms "homosexual subjectivity" or "gay world".