Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Anthropology, 2006. / "Title from dissertation home page (viewed July 12, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-10, Section: A, page: 3875. Adviser: Nazif Shahrani.

In this ethnography, I examine select artists’ expressive endeavors and the contexts that cordon off their possibilities for engagement in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Artists are self-aware social critics, and as such, these subjects express disaffection with Vietnam’s trajectory of political economic development since its official adoption of the reform agenda of “market socialism” in 1986. Amid the one-party Communist state’s selective approaches to controlling potentially subversive activities, these young visual artists, musicians, and writers also contend with the shifting exigencies of market-driven modes of valuing and circulating. These critics diagnose a social anomie arising from the misguided conduct of ruling authorities and the corruption of sociocultural infrastructures. In the process, the artists forge new alliances and networks, wielding the resources of market opening in service of social and personal ambitions. I convey these middle-class intellectuals’ subjectivities and “worlding,” as they endeavor to make themselves both as Vietnamese and globalized citizens. Meanwhile, their attempts to circumvent the state’s restrictions on expression constitute efforts at “becoming-minoritarian,” challenging majoritarian regimes of truth. But the occlusions and potential that surface are not just byproducts of pervasive governmentality or neoliberal encroachment. Through intimate regard for the social spheres in which artists circulate and with close attention to the works that they produce, this ethnography is a curation of the varied weights of creative impulses, from Confucian and Buddhist obligations to liberal and Communist ideologies to spectral relics of war. Acknowledging the diversity of structural influences allows us to assess late socialist contexts with more nuanced consideration for the agents of cultural production, without subsuming their trajectories to the telos of capital and its associated liberalisms, while accounting for the insidious yet capricious nature of political repression. / Anthropology

This dissertation is based on the analysis of humor in rakugo, a traditional genre of comedic storytelling in Japan. This project tackles the question: How does highly structured rakugo humor contribute and shape the Japanese society’s perceptions of the city of Tokyo in an age where the major social trends are dominated with a highly mediated and digitized lifestyle. In analyzing humor in rakugo, I argue that the farcical encounters, by refracting certain domains of human experience that cannot be articulated otherwise, provide a spectacle through which to view the deeper nuances in the sociocultural panorama of city life in Tokyo on the scale of individual interactions, institutions and neighborhoods. Rakugo and its mode of oral storytelling plays on the intricate discursive dynamics, by means of which tradition and modernity are imagined, represented, and the relationship between them negotiated. Additionally, the performance of rakugo, which has a long history that goes back to Early Modern Japan, triggers an affective imagination of the neighborhood life of the city’s past, where such imagination influences the Japanese society’s perception of the present. Rakugo’s popularity in the twenty first century is, in part, a result of the ideology of the Japanese state, on the other hand, it is mostly due to the power of the humorous folk narratives and mindfulness of the performers that the genre maintains a sense of coherence and agility, and urges the audience to embrace the patterns and lifestyle of the past, while remaining tuned with the prevailing trends of ambiguity and conspiracy in the aftermath of the recent triple disaster. My dissertation consists of eight chapters: After providing introductory statements and questions regarding the importance of humor in generating an analytical view of the Japanese society, in the first chapter, I map out the layers of memory and imagination transmitted through the story-telling voice and embodiment in a rakugo performance. The oral storytelling of rakugo activates an auditory perception of the neighborhood life of Tokyo that is characterized by simple, informal conversations and playful interactions, where such ease of direct interactions leads to a construction of the ancient neighborhoods as a sanctuary from the hyper mediated matrix-like lifestyle of contemporary Tokyo. Rakugo’s parodic tone gives the impression that, although times might change, human situations do not. Hence the humorous content of rakugo helps maintaining a sense of continuity within the rapidly changing trends of urban life. On March 11 2011, my fieldwork was interrupted with a big earthquake, which was followed with a tsunami hitting the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. Therefore, the second chapter questions the limits and possibility of humor and the rakugo performers’ reactions in a time of ambiguity and conspiracy in the aftermath of Japan’s recent triple disaster. While exploring the contemporary interpretations of ghost stories (kaidan banashi) and gallows humor, this chapter focuses on the binary tensions between the causes of fear and its humorous modification, and gets tied-up to the contemporary society’s fear and anxiety toward technology and the humorous interpretation of such fear in rakugo. The third chapter focuses on the changing notions of fame and stardom by comparing the generation of the legendary performers with contemporary ones in the light of the changing rhythms of urban life, which has an impact on the production of humor on the contemporary rakugo stage. The fourth chapter has an analytical perspective on the rakugo audience as fans and patrons, while engaging in the discussion of connoisseurship in relation to iki and tsū, (indicating stylishness and expertise, respectively). The fifth chapter focuses on the portrayals of foolishness while providing an analysis of mockery of the scholastic knowledge of modernity in rakugo stories. This chapter provides an analysis of Japanese modernity through the humorous perspective and mockery of the Edo commoners, their masterful use of the nonsensical logic, and the way such perspective is interpreted by the contemporary rakugo performers. The sixth and final chapter tackles the importance of voice projection in the performance of rakugo. While problematizing the so-called incompetence of female voice, as an accepted norm by the majority of the community of rakugo performers, this chapter also problematizes the issue of voicing culture and tradition. / Anthropology

This dissertation is a history of origins. It tells the history of “reyes de la papa,” potato farmers of peasant origins from the Peruvian Central Highlands, who took advantage of the “potato boom” of the 1950s and established a position for themselves in the region. It is also the history of how the Green Revolution’s ideas arrived to the Peruvian Central Highlands and introduced improved potato varieties, transforming the livelihoods of many peasant families. I should also say it is the history of how my grandparents started the venture of sowing potatoes for the market and started a journey of economic and social mobility. Through the telling of these multiple stories, my dissertation claims that the emergence of “potato kings” in the Peruvian Central Highlands is crucial to understand social transformations in the region because they challenge multiple boundaries and are involved in various struggles of recognition. By acknowledging the multiple tensions that emerge with “potato kings,” I demonstrate that economic and social transformations entail claims of racial and spatial mobility and belonging. Establishing bridges between political economy and critical studies of race and identity, my dissertation contributes to an understanding of the rural world as diverse and dynamic. / Anthropology

Given the rapid urbanization of Shanghai in the past three decades, how might we attempt to understand the changing meanings, usages, and values of urban space and the built environment, as occupied, lived, and experienced by its residents? In this dissertation, I use ethnography to explore the complex processes of urbanization and globalization in Shanghai – China’s largest and most urbanized city – examining the myriad ways that space orients and even determines the actions, commitments, and everyday sociocultural practices of the various agents and stakeholders involved in this transformation. By investigating how residents, planners, and local officials variously conceive of historic preservation and urban renewal programs, and by eschewing the artificially coherent image of the city promoted by state planners, I paint a more nuanced picture of the specific challenges faced by the populace and their creative methods of negotiation, adaptation, and appropriation in the face of a rapidly changing landscape. My primary case study is the Shanghai’s traditional alleyway neighborhoods (known locally as the lilong: 里弄) through which I investigate issues arising from their restoration and preservation: state discourse and law enforcement, globalization and local heritage, place-making, and aesthetics. What my research demonstrates is how knowledge of the global not only informs but encourages pragmatic residents to "foresee" a different future and voluntarily get involved in the process of urban renewal to enhance their interests. In this dissertation, I develop new concepts such as "gentrification from within," to explain this unique process of demographic change involving capital investment and cultural reproduction, in which the original residents themselves are agents. Also developed in this dissertation are the concepts of "traditionalism as a way of life," and "emancipatory masculinity," which explain the undergirding tension between the traditional belief of homeownership and the economic reality of modern life resulting in unprecedented patterns of social reproduction and familial formation. / Anthropology

“Caged” is an ethnographic investigation of intimate partner violence in Usme, a peripheral district of Bogotá, Colombia, where 37% of women report having experienced physical violence by a partner and 80% report some form of controlling behavior. The purpose of this research has been to understand the exercise of this violence through the lives and positions of those who survive it, those who respond to it, and most of all those who commit it. What their experiences from the margins of the city illuminate is that in the intimate dynamics of violence—the perpetrations of it and the resistances against it—are reverberations of the same spatial inscriptions and social logics that have shaped relationships of power and control from the municipal to hemispheric scales. The intricate webs of contradiction and paradox that this produces are what have provided the apertures for engagement, as well as the means by which to appreciate the tensions that cut across, connect, and constitute these acts of violence. In the context of ever-expanding legal apparatuses to address these forms of abuse, these junctures have become sites of rethinking sovereign relationships and the spaces that they have created, how consciousness emerges from them, and they have raised new questions about the place of subversion and aspirations for transformation of the self and society. / Anthropology

This dissertation analyzes how changes in infrastructure interact with cultural programming and rhetoric in a multi-faceted urban redevelopment project by examining social interactions, physical construction, and symbolic productions. Once part of Marseille’s port, the J4 Esplanade was bequeathed to the city as a barren swath of concrete and stone in the 1990s and has since been used by working-class and other Marseillais, many of whom hail from other nations, for recreation and socializing, with many of its regular users’ activities oriented towards the sea. A redesigned public space opened in 2013, anchored by two institutions, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM), and the Villa Méditerranée, a structure dedicated to cross-cultural dialogues. From 2010 to 2014, I have tracked the J4’s transformation from a non-purposed common space to one that maintains public access and use, but that in the process has reconceived which publics are welcome, when, and how. I consider the particular stakes when a transitional urban space’s end product occludes preexisting categories of spatial use while purporting to preserve them in coded discourses of cultural valorization, in this case through the term “Mediterranean.” The recent widespread use of this label on the J4 and in Marseille entails seemingly paradoxical processes that simultaneously open and close, celebrate and confine, construct and eject under the banner of Mediterranean socio-cultural unity. / Anthropology

Chapter one describes who the Yawo people are; how they became involved in slave trade and acquired the Arabs' religion, Islam; and how they entered Malawi from their original home. The introduction of Christianity into Malawi is described. While the Protestants were the first to introduce Christianity into Malawi, it was the White Fathers, as far as the Catholicism is concerned, who initiated the work of evangelization there, soon followed by the Montfort Fathers. Chapter two analyses the reality of marriage according to the Yawo's world view. Yawo society is matrilineal, uxorilocal and matrilocal, founded on the most important kinship relationship between the sister and the brother who eventually becomes the maternal uncle to the sister's children. The kinship relationship between maternal uncle and the sister's children is another feature with its own importance in the Yawo society. The sisters and their eldest brother form the nucleus and basis of the Yawo village community, creating a sorority-group under the brother's charge; their marriages come under the brother's guardianship. This function is by no manner of means surrendered to the husband who is accepted into the village merely as a worker in the sense of a begetter of children for the increase of the sorority-group. The Yawo progressive marriage comes into being through a long dynamic process with three main stages. Chapter three assumes the responsibility of identifying one problem area. It is shown that the very progressivity of the Yawo marriage already constitutes a problem, in that the traditional theology regards the first stage or the phase of acceptability as nothing less than concubinage, despite the fact that the people themselves recognize it as a valid procedure for the commencement of marriage. Progressive marriage is believed to go counter to the teaching on the absolute inseparability of the contract and sacrament. This chapter attempts to show that the problem may simply be a cultural rather than an evangelical one, in view of the fact that the separability of contract and sacrament seems to have been taught by a considerable number of theologians in the Church and that the canonical form was employed in the formation of Christian marriage. Chapter four aims at discovering whether the local African magisterium of Malawi and the African local magisterium in general together with their theologians have been able to identify the problem of the progressivity of the African marriage and, if so, what action has been taken to wrestle with the situation. It may be affirmed that the majority of the episcopal conferences seem to indicate that they have been able to identify it and have taken action to address it, albeit only by way of statements and recommendations. In Chapter five, we try to search for the possibility of an African local theology of marriage, at least in one of its aspects. Our first task will be the attempt to identify the gospel core with which culture is supposed to confirm. Then, we will investigate the possible values of which the progressive marriage may be in possession. However, inculturation is also dependent upon the attitudes of the evangelizers who can bring it about. We will therefore try to examine what these attitudes may be. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

The purpose of the present study was to explore the role of imagery in a positive birth experience, specifically with respect to the experience of vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC). The quantity and quality of imagery used and its perceived value were explored. A VBAC Imagery Questionnaire was developed and sent to Ontario women known to have had a VBAC. The following types of imagery were explored; healing imagery, vaginal birth imagery, repeat cesarean imagery, "block point" imagery, "augmenting" imaging, other "uplifting" imagery and imagery experienced during the actual VBAC birth. Many women described their images as very positive and absorbing, and women rated all types of imagery as very helpful in achieving their vaginal birth after cesarean. Imagery was rated by women to be as helpful in the VBAC experience as vital changes made in health care professionals and location of labor and birth. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

In consideration of the prevalence and popularity of tattoos among our prison population, I argue that the disciplinary institution and the carceral experience may have an effect upon the function and value of tattoos for the prisoner. My approach to analysis is informed by the application of discourse analysis in the work of James Messerschmidt on the construction of masculinity, and Michel Foucault on the body of the condemned within the dynamics of the disciplinary institution. Given such insights and theoretical underpinnings, the purpose of this qualitative study is to explore whether the prison and the experience of incarceration has an effect upon the meaning, value and appeal of tattoos among Canadian prisoners, and more specifically, among men serving life sentences. I conducted eight non-directive interviews with incarcerated lifers concerning tattooing and their tattoos. Following the interviews, I undertook a time frame analysis in order to organize and examine the subjects' experiences with tattooing during three different time periods, these being, prior to incarceration, during incarceration, and today. Given the exploratory nature of my study, my research may be more accurately conceptualized as an exercise in logic of discovery rather than an exercise in the logic of verification. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)