The purpose of this study is to investigate language attitudes towards the Greek Cypriot Dialect (GCD). This however, can only be achieved if language attitudes towards GCD are examined in relation to language attitudes towards Standard Modern Greek (SMG), the official language of the Republic of Cyprus. Empirical studies in the Greek-Cypriot (GC) setting demonstrate that GCs evaluate their peers more positively when they speak in SMG and less so when they use GCD (Papapavlou 1998, 2001). Hence, the primary questions guiding this research are why GCs evaluate their dialect and its speakers less positively than speakers of SMG and what are the factors contributing to this devaluation. This research is important as not only does it add to the existing literature as regards language attitudes in Cyprus, but it also attempts to examine whether negative language attitudes towards GCD are developed in primary and secondary education and supported by teachers in those settings. Consequently, to study GCs' language attitudes towards GCD it is vital to examine what goes on in the learning environment and whether teachers indeed contribute to GCs' devaluation of the dialect. A variety of mixed research methods were employed in tertiary, secondary, and primary education to examine language attitudes towards language variation and language use. The findings arising from this project suggest that SMG is associated with competence dimensions, whereas GCD is more closely connected with social attractiveness (see Chapters 5 and 6). Nonetheless as proposed in later Chapters, these findings are not merely an outcome of the stance education holds towards the non-standard variety, but also partly an outcome of GCs' bonds of brotherhood with Greeks, the love for their “mother land” ([Mu][eta][tau][epsilon][rho][alpha] [Iota][iota][alpha][tau][rho][iota][delta]) Greece, and the religion they strongly profess to the Orthodox Christian Church (see Vanezis 2000). Hence the need to ‘be’ and ‘feel’ Greek encompasses the need to ‘speak’ Greek.

This thesis examines the children of Kingston's poor during the middle decades of the nineteenth century by bringing together a number of inter-related themes which in many previous studies have been treated separately. Through applying partial reconstitution techniques to a wide range of source materials, various aspects of children's lives in poverty are analysed and given greater context and meaning. Rather than viewing the child simply as an element in workhouse history, or as a slum-dweller or in employment, this research, by studying individual childhood experiences, focuses on children as members of the wider community. The research findings emphasise the value of a local study, as generalisations and received ideas can be tested against the practical experience of a market town during the mid- to later- nineteenth century, when the country as a whole adjusted to rapid population growth and economic progress. The Kingston-upon-Thames Poor Law Union, the administrative and geographic locality for this research, developed from being broadly rural in the opening years of the study into an increasingly suburban and retailing area, whilst the surrounding villages varied in character, whether purely rural, river-focussed, or concerned with a local industry. Research into the lives of children living in poverty within this diverse locality offers an opportunity to consider and compare strategies, both formal and informal, to deal with child poverty in use throughout the country. The range of choices and decisions open to parents, officials, administrators and children themselves, plus the effect of differing local conditions, geography and employment, remind us that there can be no typical experience which can speak for the whole of England. Within this thesis appear individual experiences of poverty, abandonment, overcrowded dwellings, disease, ill-treatment, and much suffering. Yet also highlighted are acts of benevolence, understanding, chance opportunities, and successful futures. Above all, the thesis has set out to rescue otherwise historically absent individuals from obscurity and give them a meaningful place in the historical record.

<p> This thesis explores the extent to which Twitch.TV streamers and viewers influence each other and the social and economic capital exchange that occurs between the parties. For this study, influence will be defined as the extent to which streamers and viewers affect each other&rsquo;s behavior and emotions. Bourdieu&rsquo;s (1977) theory of practice is combined with Goffman&rsquo;s (1959) dramaturgical analysis to analyze how both parties perform in ways to gain social/economic capital. The limited amount of studies conducted on live streaming video gamers has typically occurred outside the field of anthropology or has not specifically focused on the viewer/streamer relationship. This study contributes to the expanding body of anthropological research on live streaming websites and how influence occurs in relationships that are formed online. The main finding being that monetary gain is not as large of a factor in streamers incentive to stream as does social capital and connecting with others.</p><p>

<p> &ldquo;Heartbreak and Precipitation&rdquo; confronts an affective position that in its articulation and representation defeats and defines the limits of its possibility. Performing a theoretical ethnographic position, voice, and imagination, the work/labour of the project is trying to navigate itself successfully (ethically) through the affective, class, and aesthetic registers it crosses in the cities its finds itself in as it makes sense of them as spaces and has them come to be as objects of knowledge. As cartographic method, it tries to find itself from the inside by marking out a range of texts &ndash; from Benjamin&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Arcades Project&rdquo;, Marx&rsquo;s &ldquo;Capital&rdquo;, to C. W. Mills &ldquo;On Intellectual Craftsmanship&rdquo; &ndash; these knotted up with fields of artifacts such as Red Wing boots, Dial liquid hand soap, non-dairy coffee creamer, and a roomful of palm trees; together a speculative mapping of affective territories with well contained limits of potential and possibility.</p>

When a biomedical curriculum is exported from the First World to the Third, what embedded cultural values come along? Do locally specific historical, political, religious, or socioeconomic associations of the “physician” as signifier shape the professional values students take on? Or is professional identity, like most of the rest of the curricular content, imported from the North? To date, empirical research on professional socialization has been restricted almost completely to North America. In the twenty-first century, when biomedicine is learned and practiced worldwide, the universality of socializing processes cannot be assumed. The project described here was collaboratively designed to assess the socializing function of medical education in Malawi. This cross-sectional qualitative research explores the acquisition of professional identity in students at a new medical school in Malawi, documenting changes during medical training in the values and norms that make up professional identity. I used a sequential research method involving focus group discussions, interviews and a questionnaire, moving from open-ended and general to more specific questions. This method was supplemented by archival research and “observant participation” at the university's teaching hospital. The homogenizing process of basic science education during the first two years of medical school in Malawi appears similar to that found by researchers in North America. When students reach their hospital training, however, their nascent scientist doctor identities crash into a clinical reality in which the tools of science are largely unavailable. Responding to the resulting crisis, they may preserve the Northern doctor-scientist identity by seeking a geographic or occupational location in which its execution is possible. They may also reject the identity of detached technocrat to claim instead the dual roles of political activist and loving witness to suffering. I address historical and economic conditions that shape these responses, and discuss their implications for health in Malawi, for medical pedagogy, and for anthropological research on identity in an era of globalization. I use Gramsci's notion of contradictory consciousness to show how discrepancies between hegemonic cognitive frameworks of identity and real conditions of work have the potential to create a revolutionary new consciousness among doctors working in poverty.

This dissertation investigates the emergence and development of cause-of-death registration in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. I examine the historical, demographic, sociopolitical, and theoretical conditions that gave rise to the first state-implemented cause-of-death registration system in the United States, Massachusetts's vital registration system. Developments in almost every arena of social life during the nineteenth century were shaped in some fashion through disease. The disease ecology changed dramatically during this period shifting from acute infectious to chronic degenerative diseases, which marked the beginning of the epidemiological transition. Registration systems were key components in this transitional period, providing the raw data on which nineteenth-century public health policy emerged. The greatest challenge that public-health reformers faced in implementing and regulating cause-of-death registration was standardizing the language and practice of disease and cause-of-death reporting. I look closely at issues of implementation and regulation and examine the relative impact that standardized nomenclature and reporting practices had on cause-of-death registration in Massachusetts from 1850 through 1912. Efforts to standardize disease and cause-of-death terminology in the United States and internationally did not, however, successfully emerge until the late nineteenth century. While many disease terms were in common, their diagnostic applications were not. I argue that certain constitutive and regulative features of death registration did not match up with the institutional mandate of Massachusetts's vital registration system until forty years after its implementation. The institution-building process required the alignment of these features as normative practices, culminating in the organized efforts of European and American medical professionals to instruct physicians in proper nomenclature through explicit references and sanctions in the 1900 International Classification of Diseases. The pragmatic conditions out of which both Massachusetts' cause-of-death registration system and the International Classification of Diseases emerged did not consist of special circumstances or unique cultural practices. The social meanings of mortality in nineteenth-century Massachusetts reflected the public commitments of a diverse set of communities and practices that shared similar resources in working out the struggles and triumphs of communicating the language of death and disease.

In this dissertation, I examine how biological data practices enable researchers to interact with and enact biological life in statistical ways, and how this poses challenges to the use and integration of biological knowledge with clinical practices. Instead of considering data as a pre-existing cognitive representation of the world, I combine scholarship on the anthropology of science with scholarship from science and technology studies to consider data as a form of material practice. I consider, in other words, how data is intertwined with technologies, people, and values, such that data is used to make normative and naturalized claims about biology and disease. To explore the generation, interpretation, and use of biological data, I focus on the field of “metabonomics”—the post-genomic study of metabolism—as it is carried out within the Biomolecular Medicine Laboratory (BMM) at Imperial College London. In doing so, I examine how metabonomics researchers use biochemical techniques and multivariate statistics to investigate metabolism and disease. After providing an overview of the literature, central questions, and methodology that frame this dissertation, I examine how multivariate statistical practices are central to the historical identity and epistemic culture of metabonomics research at the BMM. From there, I demonstrate how multivariate statistics require and enable metabonomics to enact metabolism as an inherently complex entity. Consequently, I examine how researchers struggle to assign the categories of “normal” and “abnormal” to dynamic notions of metabolism and health. I then explore how the translation of metabonomics knowledge into clinical practices places value on multivariate forms and large volumes of information, eclipsing the importance of human interpretation and judgment. Finally, I examine how metabonomics research is used to develop personalized medicine, but in ways that make it difficult to address the health of individual patients.

This thesis proposes elements for a cognitive anthropology of visual art. Most works of art are human-made objects that cannot be approached in purely functional terms, and as such they frustrate important cognitive expectations that people have about artefacts. For this reason, it is hypothesised that art triggers speculation about the artist’s intention, and that it is intuitively approached as a form of communication. By application of Bloom’s (1996) theory of artefact categorisation, and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) relevance theory of communication, a series of predictions are generated for art categorisation (or definition), art appreciation, and art cultural distribution. Two empirical studies involving more than 1,000 participants tested the most important of these predictions. In study 1, a relationship was found between how much a series of works of art were liked and how easy they were to understand. Study 2 comprised four experiments. In experiment 1, a series of hyperrealistic paintings were preferred when they were labelled as paintings than when they were labelled as photographs. In experiments 2a and 2b, a series of paintings were considered easier to understand and, under some conditions, were preferred, when they were accompanied by titles that made it easier to understand the artist’s intention. In experiment 3, a series of artefacts were more likely to be considered “art” when they were thought to have been created intentionally than when they were thought to have been created accidentally. The results of studies 1 and 2 confirmed the predictions tested, and are interpreted in the framework of relevance theory. The art experience involves speculation about the artist’s intention, and it is partly assessed as a form of communication that is constrained by relevance dynamics. Implications for anthropology of art, psychology of art, and the art world are discussed.

[Truncated abstract] Rational order and play are often conceptualised as oppositional forces. In modern urban life especially, rational order is presented as destructive of a playful orientation towards life eschewing mystery through coherence, spontaneity through predictability, and contingency through systematic planning. In turn, the postmodern debate often asserts the reinvigoration of free, playful, and contingent individuals whose collective acts are destructive of the rationality of modern order with the present, in contrast to the past, offering a condition of enduring and unremitting uncertainty. This thesis explores the dynamic relation between rational order and play in urban society through an ethnographic account of a public commuter railway in Perth, Western Australia. Notwithstanding this ethnographic setting, the thesis addresses questions of broader significance through an analysis of the railway as an instance of public space and state techno-bureaucratic order. I investigate the creative process through which the state attempts to standardise the various operational components of the railway as well as the reasons underpinning the state's desire to produce what I term a 'clean machine'. In turn, I investigate how differentially positioned actors live within this carefully crafted machine. I do so by following the stories, experiences, and practices of: government administrators charged with building the railway; the managers who oversee the network's operation; the staff members who operate trains, clean stations, and discipline passengers; and the railway's end-users, including passengers and graffiti artists. ... In examining the two tensions of rational order/play and revelation/ concealment, I attempt to explicate how it is that people experience life as simultaneously coherent and serendipitous. In the thesis, I document the ways in which railway officials, passengers, and graffiti artists express a pervasive ambivalence towards their experience of the railway system. On the one hand, these actors experience the railway as a system of constraint that produces 'robotic' behaviours and automated transactions. On the other, they see the railway as a liberating space that enables autonomous expression and spontaneous interaction. By examining these contending experiences and associated sentiments, I highlight the railway as a stimulating site within which to explore the meaning and significance of urban modernity. Lastly, this thesis contributes to debate on the challenges posed by the character of contemporary social processes to anthropological research methodology. I illustrate the utility of such methods as written and photographic diaries as well as mental-mapping exercises, but primarily advocate the documentary and analytical advantages of participant observation in a mobile field-site. I assert that while participant observation poses a number of personal and professional challenges in this setting, these challenges uncover the stimulating complexity of contemporary urban life. To this end, I contest emergent academic commentary that propounds the destabilisation of anthropological techniques in what is frequently described as an equally destabilised world.