This dissertation presents participatory ethnographic research, which was conducted with the Aymara Indians of the northern Chilean Andes, from November 1998 through January 1999, in an attempt to understand Aymara perspectives of recent development that has taken place within their ancestral homeland. A study design was developed that would engage Aymara people directly in the assessment of their cultural and natural resources along an altitudinal gradient from the coastal city of Arica to the Altiplano, the high plateau at Lago Chungara. This interdisciplinary study in Arid Lands Resource Sciences draws upon the fields of ethnoecology, American Indian studies, applied cultural anthropology, botany, agriculture, history, physical and cultural geography, and social and environmental impact assessment. Ethnographic interviews with Aymara people were conducted in sixteen Aymara villages along an attitudinal transect from sea level to 4600 meters. A systematic social and environmental impact assessment was executed along International Chilean Highway 11, which connects Arica, Chile with the highlands of Bolivia. For Andean people, economic, spiritual and social life, are inextricably tied to land and water. The Chilean Aymara comprise a small, geographically isolated minority of Tarapaca, the northern border region, who are struggling to maintain their sustainable and traditional systems of irrigation waters distribution, agriculture and pastoralism in one of the most arid regions of the world, the Atacama Desert. Ethnoecological dimensions of the conflict between rapid economic growth and a sensitive cultural and natural resource base are explored through participatory research methods. The recent paving of Chilean Highway 11, the diversion of Altiplano waters of the Rio Lauca to the arid coast for hydroelectricity and irrigation, and Chilean national park policies regarding Aymara communities, their natural resources and cultural properties within Parque Nacional Lauca, the International Biosphere Reserve, are examined from the perspectives of the Aymara people. The potentiality of indigenous resource management of this protected area is discussed within the context of human-land reciprocal relations. The findings of this study, based on Aymara Indian perspectives, are designed to aid in understanding and appreciating the cosmological vision, and the needs of Andean communities in the poorest province of Chile. The Aymara showed great interest in having their perspectives and cultural concerns expressed and incorporated into historic and cultural preservation legislation.

In this dissertation, I explore health care movements as social movements which are complexly embedded in history, culture, and political economy. In order to illuminate issues of power, gender, economics, and modality and practitioner politics, medical pluralism and health movements are examined from nineteenth century eclecticism to the current interest in integrative medicine. From the Thompsonian health movement of the 1830's to the fluorescence of alternative healing in the 1960's and 1990's, the dissertation takes the reader through the multifaceted health and healing landscape. This winding path leads up to the current immense interest in and use of non-biomedical therapies in the United States. Using theoretical orientations from phenomenology to critical medical anthropology, the dissertation examines integrative healing movements in local and national contexts. Locally, ethnographic work was based in Ithaca, NY, through participant observation with Ithaca's Integrative Community Wellness Center, a nonprofit grassroots initiative that aims to provide comprehensive wellness care in community contexts. Nationally, I examine the roles of institutions such as HMO's and hospitals. Alternative, complementary, and integrative healing movements have become a profound part of popular and medical cultures, yet they have heretofore not been a major focus of anthropological or social science research. The dissertation is a contribution to understanding the nature and dynamics of these phenomena and what the future may hold for the use and combination of pluralistic approaches to health and wellness care.

The Waimiri Atroari people, who call themselves kinja 'people' and whose language belongs to the Carib family, live today in an area in the northern part of the State of Amazonas and in the southern part of the State of Roraima. Like many other languages of the Carib family, Waimiri Atroari is a chronically underdescribed language. There are few linguistics studies about Waimiri Atroari, most of them being phonological sketches (Hill and Hill 1985; and Lacerda 1991, 1996). Taking this situation into consideration, this dissertation intends to describe some phonological, morphological, and syntactic aspects of the Waimiri Atroari grammar. First, in the introductory chapter I provide some information about their language and culture, and I discuss their experience with formal education. Second, I describe the segmental phonology and analyze the syllable structure and reduplication process under Optimality Theory. Next, I present the word classes and a description of their morphology. Then, I investigate the system of case marking. Finally, in syntax I analyze the phrase structure and the word order under the framework of X-bar theory. The appendices contain a set of verbal paradigms and a collection of texts.

This dissertation is based on ethno-historic fieldwork in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). In the CNMI there is a complex interaction of customary law within the framework of an American legal system. By studying land disputes in a historical context, I examine how custom is represented, reconfigured, and constructed through law and the dispute process. Law reflects and reproduces ideology through its relationship with the state while at the local level of the case one can analyze the specific ways individuals access, affect, and are affected by the legal system. Courts are a site for the production of meanings that includes state-level forces, such as the law and procedural rules, as well as the impact of individuals, such as attorneys, litigants, and witnesses.

The central objective of this paper is to investigate how the experience of living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. impacts an individual's sense of identity and to what extent this identity is influenced by the institutional ideologies of AIDS service organizations and the "dominant discourse" of AIDS these organizations help produce. My analysis is based upon three years of participant-observation at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), a major AIDS service organization in New York City, as well as in-depth semi-structured interviews with 34 HIV positive individuals, all of whom are clients of either GMHC or another AIDS-related service agency in New York. In addition, I juxtapose the interview-derived speech data of HIVers with an examination of various kinds of textual material about AIDS--written texts that constitute what I characterize as a "dominant discourse" of AIDS. As my primary unit of analysis, I examine the narratives of self-transformation articulated by interviewees, stories that are quite literally about identity reconstruction. Through these narratives, HIV positive individuals construct their HIV diagnosis as a significant turning point in their lives, interpreting this event as an opportunity to refashion themselves into "better" people and to begin their lives anew. Narratives of self-transformation function to rehabilitate HIVers' identities since the new identities many interviewees claim to have achieved after their HIV-impelled journeys of self-reinvention are crafted in accordance with the normative model of HIVer identity established in the dominant discourse.

This project involved instrumental neutron activation analysis of 428 ceramic vessels and clays, typological analysis of 1135 vessels, and stylistic analysis of more than 400 bowls. Most of the items analyzed were recovered from the Homol'ovi villages, a group of eight Pueblo III--Pueblo IV (circa A.D. 1250--1400) sites located near Winslow, Arizona. These studies were conducted in order to address the question of the origin(s), geographically speaking, of the ancient inhabitants of the Homol'ovi villages. The results of the compositional analysis indicate local production of Winslow Orange Ware at Homol'ovi and in the Petrified Forest. Circulation of Winslow Orange Ware to the Anderson Mesa area, the Tonto Basin, and the Verde Valley is also evident. Furthermore, among the earliest ceramic assemblages from the Homol'ovi sites were found locally-produced versions of ancestral Hopi pottery types and vessel forms. The compositional data also point to local production of Roosevelt Red Ware at Homol'ovi and in the Petrified Forest. The whole vessel study resulted in the observation that most Winslow Orange Ware vessels represent attempts to produce Jeddito Orange Ware using materials indigenous to the Middle Little Colorado River Valley. An examination of the dating and distribution of different kiva forms revealed that Homol'ovi ceremonial architecture reflects western Kayenta and Tusayan patterns, supporting the ceramic-based inference of ancestral Hopi migration. Placing these results in broader context, it is possible to discern an ancestral Hopi migration horizon which corresponds with what has been called the Salado archaeological culture or the "Salado phenomenon." By examining Hopi oral texts, it was observed that many include information that correlates with archaeological and anthropological models of Hopi origins. By hypothesizing that these accounts represent significantly restructured texts, it is possible to resolve apparent disconformities between Hopi oral tradition and anthropological inferences. This conception of Hopi migration accounts allows resolution of conflicting interpretations of Homol'ovi, i.e., the idea that it is an ancestral Hopi place because its inhabitants moved to the Hopi Mesas circa A.D. 1400, versus the notion that it is an ancestral Hopi place because its inhabitants were immigrants from the Hopi Mesas.

My dissertation addresses a lacuna of contemporary scholarship by utilizing South African Indian literature as a lens through which to view South African culture in a different light. Drawing on South African Indian writings emerging post-1976, I explore this fiction as a cultural history that investigates how race is negotiated in Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa. I have found that the seemingly marginal construction of South African Indian identity is central to understanding the ideological underpinnings of South African culture as it destabilizes rigid constructions of race. In part because of its location outside of the dominant black/white taxonomy in South Africa, this literature problematizes bounded notions of race by undermining culturally constructed oppositions that establish difference and sameness. Ideas of "Indianness" are therefore crucial to understanding cultural and institutional relations in South Africa more broadly as they reveal how race, power and politics operate outside of dominant racial oppositions, thereby repositioning the terms of the debates. Narrative in post-Apartheid South Africa forms a dialogue with both the silences of Apartheid and those of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. My work therefore investigates how literary texts undermine culturally constructed oppositions that establish difference and sameness, in dialogue with the re-textualizing processes of the TRC. I concentrate on contemporary South African Indian fiction of the last twenty-five years, including Achmat Dangor's Kafka's Curse (1997) and Bitter Fruit (2001), Farida Karodia's Other Secrets (2000), Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds (2001), Agnus Sam's Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989), Jayapraga Reddy's On the Fringe of Dreamtime and Other Stories (1987), Imraan Coovadia's The Wedding (2001) and Shamin Sarif's The World Unseen (2001).

This dissertation draws on the specific case-study of post-war Lebanese political rhetoric in order to take a close look at the ways in which a complex amalgam of distinct and varying histories is articulated linguistically under one national rubric. Research was conducted largely in the urban Beirut region of Lebanon from 1999 to 2001. By analysis of specific linguistic strategies for maneuvering within and between interpretive frames (in particular, Arabism, Lebanese Nationalism and Sectarianism) I have illustrated how Lebanese political actors are able to draw on language, in both its form and content, in order to establish and define their political identity. I also argue that these political actors are able to accomplish social work: they modify relationships, incite discussion, and motivate change through their talk. Through various forms of linguistic incorporation speakers actively work to redefine or to reaffirm authority in the public sphere. I have tried to illustrate how the historical situatedness of the interpretive frames that they utilize affects and limits their ability to do so in a uniquely post-war Lebanese fashion, by drawing on the points of contested meaning in an environment of active political re-configuration. This focus moves away from definitive interpretations of discourse and instead concentrates on interpretive flexibility, with an eye to understanding how that flexibility is constrained. The discursive space of the Lebanese public sphere, then, becomes a primary site for political and civil identity construction through the use and re-use of political discourse.

Northwest Mexico, often characterized as a vast gulf (the so-called Chichimec Sea) between the complex societies associated with the Mesoamerican superarea and the middle-range societies of the American Southwest, remains poorly understood by both Mesoamericanists and Southwesternists. This research analyzes funerary remains in order to reconstruct aspects of social, political, economic and ideological organization of the Huatabampo/Guasave culture, a prehispanic complex in northern Sinaloa and southern Sonora, Mexico. The data are primarily derived from Gordon F. Ekholm's excavation of a large burial mound situated on an abandoned meander of the Rio Sinaloa, approximately six kilometers from the modern town of Guasave, Sinaloa. Whereas previous models have traditionally considered this area as a marginal periphery of both Mesoamerica and the American Southwest, this study directs attention to the role of indigenous developments in culture change, inter-regional interaction and integration. The results support the interpretation of this region as an environmentally, spatially and culturally intermediate area between West Mexico and the Southwest.

Aggregation, which includes village formation, refers to the concentration of population into larger settlements or communities from previously small, dispersed settlements. An outgrowth of studies of aggregation is explaining the social organization of aggregated communities. This study examines the impact of aggregation on Anasazi social organization and community dynamics in the northern San Juan region using information from milling tools. Milling tools (manos and metates) are usually associated with studies of subsistence. By considering technology to be imbedded in social contexts and taking a technological approach to milling tool (mano) analysis, this project produced new insights into mano variability and the relationship between technological behavior and social change. The theoretical basis of this study are design theory and ideas about changes in the structure of organizations. Theories of organizational change in response to growth such as that entailed by aggregation, propose that one way in which unranked societies with no formalized leadership positions mediate scalar stress and promote community integration is by elaborating the ritual-ceremonial system. Another proposed consequence of aggregation is an increase in the size of households. Both of these consequences have implications for grinding activities such as maize milling. This study uses information from a technological analysis of manos to refine models of household milling activities and the organization of aggregated communities inferred from architecture and ceramic analysis. The research focuses on investigating (1) whether there were differences in milling between households in aggregated and unaggregated settlements and (2) whether there were differences in milling among households in villages. By using design theory as a framework for the technological analysis, technological profiles of mano assemblages from households in unaggregated and aggregated Pueblo I and Pueblo III period communities were developed. The analysis results suggest that milling was more intensive at aggregated settlements than unaggregated settlements, and that the level of this activity in different households in aggregated settlements varied with the household's inferred status and participation in the ritual-ceremonial system. The household was identified as the locus of technological change, and the study suggests that changes in grinding technology are linked to household differentiation.