Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2004-2005) amongst Iranian non-governmental political, civic, human rights, and scholarly organizations in Washington, D.C., this dissertation makes two major observations: One, that many Iranian scholars and activists as well as lay individuals see Iranian political culture as an ailing and malfunctioning body, suffering from fissures, inactivity, personalism, organizational chaos, and sentiments such as fear, distrust, suspicion, submission, alienation, indifference, envy, paranoia, hypocrisy, insecurity, and pessimism. Second, that the two major organizations that I worked with, one human rights and the other civic education, saw the cure in what I call an "ethos transplant" operation through which these traditional structures, affective landscapes, and patterns of socialization are transformed and replaced by new norms and attitudes (beliefs, knowledges, and sentiments pertaining to political processes). Whether through training Iranians in the practical skills of participation in democracy such as voting or petitioning or by teaching Iranians how to reconfigure their understanding of the individual, rights, life, sovereignty, and will in democratic as opposed to totalitarian terms, the sheer feasibility and affordability of becoming (instead of the existentialist concern with being) characterizes these organizations' mission to make American citizens (in their minds, i.e. democratic subjects). Instead of a mere critique of neo-liberalism (teaching docile subjects the norms of the capitalist world order) or resorting to National Character and Culture as Pathology studies, this dissertation aims to evoke and give form, through major native artistic traditions (Persian manuscript paintings, circa 14th-18th centuries AD) as well as non-native literary forms (Bram Stoker's Dracula), to the above-mentioned shifting and contrasting structures, affective landscapes, and patterns of socialization. In doing so, it destabilizes the categories of native and non-native, modern and traditional, democratic and totalitarian, and their utility in conceptualizing and articulating affects, ethics, and socialities. By appealing to artistic styles and writerly sensibilities, this dissertation offers a creative engagement with the age-old anthropological question of life versus mechanisms of pinning down and making sense of it.

A general geographical and cultural survey of BaAka Pygmy exploitation of the tropical rain forest environment in the Dzanga-Ndoki national park of Central African Republic, and adjacent areas of Cameroon and the Congo is presented. The fabric of BaAka society as it pertains to practices and perceptions of land use, land tenure and relationship to the environment is specifically investigated. The data obtained during the fieldwork stage of this investigation are presented herein as an original narrative ethnography with inclusions of tabular and graphic data. A collection of some contemporary experimental genres used in contemporary ethnographic writings are discussed prior to presentation of the ethnography.

This is a study of Third World developers--those involved in the development process in their own countries. Using an integrated development project in the Philippines as an example, it tries to portray the complexity of the position of these Third World elites as nationalists, post-colonial intellectuals and activists engaged in an endeavor which has the potential to make their countries independent but which often reinforces dependence on the First World. What these developers want to accomplish, how they see their work, some of the unintentional consequences of their projects and the criticism leveled against them by their colleagues will be explored. Third World intellectuals engaged in development have come under increasing criticism from a sector of their peers who maintain that modernization theory is based on false Western premises and development, as currently practiced, only serves to perpetuate dependence. They feel that social science theory has aided in the maintenance of Western hegemony and therefore needs to be reformulated i.e. indigenized, in order to rid it of its colonial bias. The literature on modernization and development is perhaps most closely associated with colonialism because of the ideology of progress which underlies both colonialism and development, development's role in pacification campaigns, and the fact that old colonial powers heavily contribute to development projects in their former colonies. Given such a critique of their efforts, why do developers persist? My contention is that a combination of factors contribute to this paradox. As Third World intellectuals calling for appropriate social science models maintain, education based in Western models is important. Theoretical rigidity, however, is mediated by career goals, personal past, bureaucratic milieu and acceptance of government modernization goals.

On the basis of field and archival research, conducted during the year of 1995 and the summer of 1996 in Russia, this project offers ethnographic and historical accounts of Russian intellectual culture in the transitional post-perestroika period of the last decade of the 20th century. The author argues that within this period of time a crucial shift has occurred in the intellectual climate of Russian society, which consisted principally in the emergence and rapid spreading of the so called "historical/cultural paradigm" in intellectual thinking. Focusing on the academic milieu and two important social discourses in Russia and the Soviet Union, that of history and that of architecture, the author explains how this particular paradigm came to be and what consequences it brought about. A set of interrelated issues, such as ideological and political moods among the academics, Slavophile and Westernizing trends, and the general state of the academy in Russia are analyzed.

An ethnographic look at different segments of the vintage clothing and used clothing markets in order to understand the practices of people who sell, purchase, collect, keep, display in museums, and auction used clothes of varying quality and desirability. That the unprecedented popularity and widespread acceptance occurred concomitant with the end of the millennium may not be coincidental. Rather, it may be a manifestation of what might be understood as millennial angst, where people were anxious about the future and needed tangible reminders of their own past or an imagined, ostensibly safer era. Having old clothes that they have saved in their closets or purchasing something similar to what they had in their youths that is either an original vintage piece or a vintage-inspired reproduction is a way for them to find safe haven in pleasant memories and reveries. In this way, collections of clothing that are in a museum, in a fashion designer's seasonal collection, or in one's wardrobe can be seen as repositories of memory where each garment comprises one part of a larger narrative about the past.

In the late 1990's, three interrelated spheres of activities and practices emerged in Poland which either had not existed previously or had only at that moment taken on a qualitatively new status as key players or capital in the political environment: anti-corruption NGO's, expertise, and policy; the Law about Access to Public Information; and investigative journalism. These three spheres appeared simultaneously with a greater public consciousness of a widespread corruption problem in Poland. The main question of this dissertation is: Why did these three interrelated spheres come about when they did and not earlier (or even later)? The dissertation answers this question by ethnographically describing the assemblage of anti-corruption practices in Poland and internationally: anti-corruption NGOs, Freedom of Information laws, and investigative journalism. The problematic of corruption represents the key symbol of an ethos, a system of mood and motivation, emergent in Poland's aftermath following its transition, whether incomplete or not, from communism to democracy and capitalism. This dissertation asks: why has corruption become a common obsession of concerted epistemological concern? Why the rather peculiar obsession with this lingering topic? Further, this dissertation queries why a skeptical reason, paranoid style and hyperbolic tropology is stimulated by corruption and how this subject invokes specters of Polish history. First, this dissertation maps out the key organizations, actors, and discourses that comprise the international anti-corruption arena. In the second section, it follows a coalition of anti-corruption NGO's who came together in the late 1990's to introduce and eventually a pass a Freedom of Information (FOI) law in Poland in 2001. The law embodies the analytic belief that more transparency will lessen corruption, as well as representing an emergent norm for democracy in the late 20th century. The third section ties together a number of seemingly disparate elements in an ethnographic description of investigative journalism in Poland. It demonstrates how journalists triangulate their elusive objects of knowledge while these objects simultaneously deny any such involvement. It asks: what are the conditions, styles, forms, and institutions by which they can assert their stories as true?

From twenty-six months of fieldwork conducted in Athens, Greece from May 2001 through July 2004, this dissertation documents the social and cultural contexts that shape the practices of activists working for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in Greece. Those practices connect to conceptions of friendship, relations of patronage, informal democratic processes, the routinized suspicion of economic profit, and beliefs about the relationships between sexual identities and social identities. The practices in which the activists engage both restrict the kinds of successes they are able to enjoy, and enable those successes they do achieve. These practices are brought to bear by the activists both consciously and not. Furthermore, these practices draw on and are drawn from a diversity of places, times and realms of meaning beyond particular moments of activist practice---a diversity of locations termed elsewheres. Accounting for these elsewheres, which need not be non-Greek, not only provides insights into how Greek LGBT activists imagine the movement, but serves as an allegory of democratic values and processes at a micro-scalar level, an index of reactions to processes of Europeanization, and a study of the localized responses to globally circulating activist forms, sexual and gender identities, and modes of collectivity.

In recent years, there has been an enormous surge in the level of public awareness in the United States regarding female circumcision/female genital mutilation (FC/FGM). These practices, historically portrayed by anthropologists as predominately African cultural rituals known most commonly as female circumcision, have been reconstructed in various discursive sites more frequently as violence and torture against girls and women. In the latter sites, the practices are referred to as female genital mutilation. This reconceptualization has been conducted in large part beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology and at times in opposition to relativistic scholarship in the field, creating a dichotomous ideology that has pitted cultural relativists against political activists aimed at eradicating FC/FGM. These polarized perspectives are played out in the exponential growth of multi-sited representations of FC/FGM within academic, applied and popular culture arenas. Within popular culture, representations of these practices have become ubiquitous and are the subject matter of innumerable print, television and radio "documentary" stories. The production of everyday knowledge has become so mainstreamed that FGM has surpassed being featured on Oprah as a measure of it cultural embeddedness by additionally appearing as the subject matter of television dramas, stage productions, and adult and juvenile literary fiction. This dissertation traces representations of FC/FGM in various Western discursive sites and analyzes the "ideological work" which the debates have produced in arenas of anthropology, law, advocacy and popular culture. Cultural relativists are often charged with condoning the practices, while the "outraged" are portrayed as neocolonial, moral imperialists. I will argue that anthropology has not responded to the "rage" by discarding its relativistic roots, but rater channels its relativistic scholarship to inform "appropriate" change efforts aimed at reducing FC/FGM practices. Laws within the U.S., on the other hand, effectively invalidate cultural relativism by negating "culture" as a reason for FC/FGM and by criminalizing FC/FGM entirely. Finally, popular culture functions to situate immigrants as the "exotic Other" among us, while becoming part of the global discourse to eradicate FC/FGM. Both our laws and popular culture show that we critique others in ways we cannot critique ourselves.

The marked absence of the concept of qi in the academic literature concerning Chinese medicine is highlighted by (1) delineating its importance in the contemporary North American context, and (2) exploring the possible methodological reasons for this shortcoming. The mapping of contexts within which Chinese medicine is received in the U.S. is accomplished by tracking how the concept of qi is translated, understood, and appropriated. Part I explores the North American instantiations of Chinese medicine and situates them within the biomedical context of Complementary and Alternative Medicines (CAMs) and a broader cultural discourse of East-West integrative thought. Part II explores the possible methodological reasons for the neglect of qi in academic discourse. The embodied and tacit nature of qi---as more than an intellectual concept but rather a practical ability---is explored through the concepts of tacit knowledge and orthopraxis. The anthropological literature on embodiment and phenomenology is also reviewed.

Archaeological ruins in Mexico, although juridically mandated as national property, are, in practice, sites of multiple, coexisting claims on ownership, custodianship, and inheritance. Focusing on more than a century of interventions by US/Mexican cultural agencies, foreign archaeologists, and private sector interests, I demonstrate how de jure policies and de facto practices of privatization have affected patrimonial claims to and understandings of "ruins" vis-a-vis (1) state policy regarding cultural materials, (2) jurisdiction and access within archaeological zones, and (3) scientific investigation and international cultural tourism. While the neoliberal state contemplates the relinquishment of territorial control over national properties through privatization, my ethnographic and archival evidence clearly supports the claim that for at least a century, the state has merely assumed---through it laws, policies, and institutional management---that sites of monumental cultural patrimony were within its firm grasp all along. In order to demonstrate this claim, I create micro-level spatial genealogies of two archaeological sites Chichen Itza and Chunchucmil) and their several associated living communities (Piste, Chunchucmil, and Kochol). The results of this study show how, at the local level, the overarching concepts of "national cultural patrimony" or "World Heritage" signal only two forms of patrimonial significance, both based on archaeological heritage's privileging of the "ancient" over and above the modern or contemporary. At Chichen Itza, federally employed site custodians understand the site as an inheritable family patrimony. At Chunchucmil, local residents consider the land coterminous with the archaeological heritage site as their patrimonio ejidal, or ejido land-grant heritage. In both cases, Maya people have been historically constructed, by archaeology, the state, as well as the private sector, as docile descendents and illegitimate heirs. The cultivation of Mexican nationalism required Maya people to be "docile descendents" playing a political and cultural role in the appropriate role in the Nation's articulation ancient ruins to Mexican modernity. Under emergent conditions of neoliberalism, they are joined by private sector entrepreneurs in becoming "illegitimate heirs" in their attempts to reterritorialize the nation's patrimony.