This dissertation is the result of ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Slovakia in the village of Kojsov during the year of 1993. The goal of the dissertation is to examine issues of the household economy in light of the "transition from communism to capitalism". At the level of the household differences between consumption and production can be revealed and reaction to opportunities from the 1989 Velvet Revolution are made lucid. Household composition, production, and consumption form the basis for the second part of this dissertation. I point out how individuals consume significantly less, produce more in kitchen gardens, and endure the financial stress of economic change. Of prime importance during this period of transition is the process of decollectivization and reprivatization of land in rural Slovakia. This process is the focus of the third and final section of the dissertation. Villagers in Kojsov are extremely slow to reprivatize their family lands. This behavior is tied to a village ethos of egalitarianism, an antipathy for stratification, and overall lack of capital necessary to take the risks integral to entrepreneurial activity. Thus both ideology and limited finances determine the fate of Kojsov's land. This dissertation is a case study which examines contemporary issues surrounding peasants, the moral economy, the "transition" to capitalism and entrepreneurship.

This dissertation is based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban, working class neighborhood or kampung. Research concentrated on the work of women as housewives and mothers within the community and specifically on their roles within the national housewives organization, PKK (Pembinaan Kesejahateraan Keluarga, or Support for the Prosperous Family). One of the central arguments of this dissertation is that to be a good citizen in Indonesia is to subscribe to a particular gendered idea of community--community that is virtual, incremental, and cumulative. PKK and the system of local governance are analyzed as residues of Dutch colonial control, Japanese occupation, and post-Independence infrastructural development. It is argued that state-sponsored domesticity and community have been overdetermined by a government that seeks to absorb excess female labor dispossessed by changes in agricultural production, to ameliorate the bottleneck in employment for the young and educated, and to support under-employed males. Women's work as community social workers as well as informal sector workers helps support unemyloyed and under-employed family members, while simultaneously keeping the cost of reproduction low and providing low-cost infrastructural improvements. Moreover, fieldwork shows that the structures of governance, social control and state ideology become lived practice when used as resources by local women to make do within their specific lived communities. Domestic space as it is mapped by kinship practices, economic production and reproduction, and kampung morality are used to show that the domestic is implied within the community as well as vice versa through the daily reproductive work of women which involves them in flows of resources and labor between and within households. The contributions of this research include refocusing attention on the inconsistencies, cleavages, and contradictions in the center rather than just on the margins. The effects of this refocusing emphasize the quotidian over the aesthetics of Javanese court culture and bring the gendered facets of cultural power into view. State formation was and is a cultural project producing not only the "state" as all idea and a set of practices but the citizen and the political culture within which she moves.

Traditional interpretations of ancient Maya social organization formulated more than half a century ago persist in current reconstructions. These proffer an ancient culture dichotomized into two distinct groups, elites and commoners, based on distinct social or economic characteristics. Recent research has shown that this theoretical dichotomy is unrealistic. A continuum in artifact assemblages and quantities, architectural sizes, styles and construction techniques, burial and cache contents, and other data sets indicate that interpretations identifying specific contexts as either elite or commoner are difficult to make. This has led some Mayanists to propose the existence of a middle class in ancient Maya society. This separate class is identifiable in the archaeological record by certain architectural units and limited access to restricted items. A multiple class reconstruction of ancient Maya culture more easily explains the diversity found in the archaeological record, and offers alternative models of Maya social, economic, and political systems. The Basal Platform Mound Project investigated a particular architectural type, the basal platform mound, that was hypothesized to represent the middle class. Excavations were undertaken at the site of Chau Hiix, in northern Belize, between 1993 and 1997. The four goals of the project were: (1) to identify and define a middle class within an ancient Maya community; (2) to determine the economic and social roles of this class within the ancient society at Chau Hiix during the Late Classic through Postclassic periods; (3) to determine the internal variability within this stratum as an indicator of the complexity of social systems among the ancient Maya; and (4) to determine if using the intersection of particular architectural styles and select artifact categories to identify social class is appropriate. This dissertation reports the results of the Basal Platform Mound Project, and offers a reconstruction of ancient Maya social, economic, and political trajectories that incorporates a middle class as a dynamic factor. A model is presented in which the middle class played a crucial role during the transition from the Late and Terminal Classic to the Postclassic periods, participating directly in the economic system as producers and perhaps as distributors. The flexibility and variability documented within this social group may be key to understanding the diverse developmental trajectories exhibited by different sites across the Maya Lowlands.

This study posits reading as a trope for meaning-construction and considers the thematized act of reading in American literature as a self-reflective phenomenon that reveals, questions, and complicates the state of America's cultural consciousness in and through literature. Against the institutionalized New Critical practice of explicating texts in a vacuum, the paradigmatic shift in recent decades to contextualized modes of criticism has promoted a performance-oriented view of textuality that immerses texts in a number of problematic relations with the past and with social reality. This "new" perception of reading has been with us all along, I suggest, and my study is an attempt to recuperate the major writers of the American Renaissance for the ongoing work of revisionist scholarship. The canonical writers of the mid-nineteenth century recognize an unstable view of textuality endemic to the American cultural imagination, and indeed centralize its destabilizing effects in their work. The struggle to find and maintain meaning in such a milieu largely informs Melville's ideas about reading, as I describe in Chapter Two, and it also becomes a compelling way to consider American identity and culture in terms of process rather than product. In Chapters Three and Four, I address Whitman and Dickinson as two particularly influential figures who discover, challenge, and even attempt to harness the liminal power from which a process-oriented conception of identity arises. In their ambitious attempts to achieve a freedom of the imagination, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson consciously and unconsciously construct and reflect the American will to freedom. Their liminal conception of reading reveals a liminal sense of being, both of which extend to the present day as a primary trait of American literature and of American cultural consciousness. My concluding chapter considers the implications of a culture based on liminality and arrives at the hard fact that America is doomed by its own dream. The endless American mission to make possible in both fiction and reality the impossible experience of pure freedom inevitably leads to dislocation, frustration, and meaninglessness, as our most powerful and lasting literature consistently illustrates.

This study presents the results of an analysis of mortuary practices as reflected in 637 burials from 19 Natufian and Pre-pottery Neolithic sites in the southern Levant. The analysis focuses on selected dependent variables such as primary or secondary state, position, orientation, location, skull presence or absence, and grave goods presence or absence. It analyzes their frequency against such independent variables as age and sex of the deceased, period, and site. The analysis reveals that Natufian burial practices differed fundamentally from Prepottery Neolithic practices in that they reflect a much lower level of ritual involvement in disposing of the dead than is seen in the Pre-pottery Neolithic. The unstandardized burial practices and seemingly expedient nature of Natufian burials are found to be consistent with, but not exactly parallel to, the types of practices found in Woodburn's (1982a) "immediate return" societies and Douglas' (1970) "weak grid and group" societies. Increased standardization of burial practices in the Pre-pottery Neolithic, and greatly increased emphasis on skull removal and reburial, indicates a greater emphasis on ritual through which the body was a symbol of society. In the Middle and Late PPNB, mortuary practices emphasized an increasingly "group" oriented society with well defined social boundaries with respect to outside groups. Internal differentiation, however, was slight: some difference based on age is present but differentiation based on sex is not reflected in burial practices. Skull removal practices accelerated through the PPNA and Middle PPNB. Such practices represent ancestor cults that may have provided mechanisms of social negotiation over control of critical but restricted resources in an otherwise egalitarian society. With the advent of the PPNC, the ancestor cult symbolized by the skulls disappeared. This undoubtedly reflects the disappearance of the PPNB agricultural and herding way of life and the advent of a more pastorally based economy. In the face of new economic opportunities presented by such a shift, ancestors were less necessary in attempts to control local resources.

This dissertation documents the valorization of gender differences in urban Yunnan, particularly as it affects women in their twenties and thirties. Urban women of this generation are expected to appear feminine and family-oriented in order to be considered normal/moral. Such expectations are underscored by popular commentary on the "strong woman." The strong woman, or nu qiang ren, is admired for her success in the business world or in academia, but is reviled as unfeminine, negligent of her family, and cold-hearted. Despite pressures to appear feminine and family-oriented, many urban Yunnanese women achieve financial independence. I found that women outwardly embody "gentleness" and other norms of femininity, while practically subverting such norms by focusing on their careers, or by voicing criticism of the hypocrisies surrounding contemporary gender relations. Furthermore, most men appear to prefer that their wives work outside the home, regardless of economic need. Such contradictions reveal how dominant ideologies are never reproduced completely. Nor are dominant ideologies applied evenly across social classes. I argue that the current valorization of a Confucian gender hierarchy is linked to the formation of middle-class subjectivity. Talk of "weak men" and the need for a men's movement in China reflects several different preoccupations, most prominently employment anxiety generated by the "market adjustments" associated with economic liberalization. Magazine articles about "weak men" also articulate a sense of urban anomie, the burdens of male emotional repression, and a variety of fears centered on women who are perceived as threatening in one way or another. Generally, however, the tone and content of the magazine articles analyzed suggest that talk about "weak men" is largely about male resistance to women's empowerment. Such articles, as well as popular commentary that ridicules strong, autonomous women, reveals that women have become scapegoats for men's anxieties. Popular gender commentary is linked in a dialogical relationship to notions of tradition, authenticity, modernity and progress. The tensions between change and stability provoke many paradoxes. Growing commercialization, generational differences and changes regarding marriage and sexuality are some of the other themes I explore as they enter into this network of referential meaning and practice.

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of family-making in Italy, where women in the 1990s reached record-low fertility rates. Gender, kinship, ethnicity, race and nationalism have become foci of social and individual conflicts in the context of Italian reproductive patterns. This interdisciplinary project, based on 22 months of anthropological fieldwork, explores the effects of this demographic transition on the everyday lives, emotions, memories and family-making practices of women and men in one historic central Italian comune (county) in the Province of Prato. Located in a rural-industrial region of Tuscany, individuals there recount the shift from a peasant agricultural economy based on sharecropping and straw weaving to an urban industrial economy based on rag regeneration and textile production, and link this to the ongoing "crisis" in the patriarchal family. It examines relations between productive and reproductive labor from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and offers a historical corrective to scholarship on globalization. Integrating methods from sociocultural, linguistic and historical anthropology, this ethnography contributes to the understanding of fertility decline in a way that analyses of aggregate statistics alone cannot: namely, it reveals how ideologies about class and gender create social identities that lead couples to make small families. Influenced by feminist anthropology and political-economic approaches, the project places attention on power relations associated with old and new meanings of domicile labor, social space, marriage, patriarchy as well as parenting; a persistently intense role of motherhood is connected to the "culture of responsibility." Discourse analysis is used to examine demography narratives, which depict the very low birthrate as "irrational" and as a "problem." In the context of immigration into Europe, such scientific authority enables elite racism and sneaky pronatalism. Hence, this research participates in the movement of scholars committed to critical population studies and, as such, adds much-needed depth to global debates about changing family dynamics, population politics and women's status.

This dissertation explores the connections between the institutions of work, family, and school as revealed through a team ethnography study of two southern Louisiana communities. The study focused on the gathering of first-hand accounts of the cultural, social, and economic continuum of changes that local households and individuals are experiencing in relation to the vicissitudes of employment in the oil and gas industry and the various ways in which household members negotiated, accommodated, and resisted the impacts. This dissertation also reports on a collaborative research methodology that employed a "funds of knowledge" approach that situated public school teacher-researchers as crucial local members of the project team. Their position as insiders within the local schools and households grounded the research process and provided the team with multiple member checks that helped to validate and authenticate the research. As a background to the analyses undertaken here, this study reviews the relevant literature on structure and agency as well as critical educational studies of social reproduction and cultural production. Finally, suggestions are made as to possible directions public schools might take to critically connect schools to work and communities.

The comunidades agricolas of Chile's Norte Chico are unique entities/systems of indivisible communal land, inherited land use rights, democratic decision-making, and diverse economic strategies that are closely linked to changing environmental conditions. Families reproduce their livelihood in this semi-arid region where drought is chronic and poverty is widespread through a combination of pastoralism, dry land farming, and temporary labor migration. Because this research is based on fieldwork that spanned three years of extreme climate change, the reader is presented with an opportunity to observe a full range of flexible risk management strategies and co-operative mutual assistance that these people make use of at both the family and community level. One particular family's story is given as illustration of the extraordinary resiliency that these communities have shown despite the harsh ecological and, at times, social and political environment in which they are situated. Although government attention to the problems that the comunidades, face has increased during Chile's transition to democracy over the past decade, one of the goals of this dissertation is to bring to light the specifics of their cultural livelihood so that economic development programs that limit their options and conflict with community ideals and practices can be avoided. The material presented here will also address questions concerning the persistence of peasant culture in Latin America in general.

The Belizean export sugar industry is dominated by small family farmers who produce the nation's most important cash crop in terms of area under cultivation, employment, and export earnings. These peasant farmers control both cane cultivation and the harvest transport system and receive the lion' s share of the proceeds from the sale of Belizean sugar. The origins of this anomalous industry can be traced to the regions' long history of peasant resistance to exploitation. Sugarcane was brought to Belize by refugees of the Mayan Caste Wars in the mid-nineteenth century who began producing sugar for the local market using swidden technology. Sugar production was briefly taken over by British plantations; however, the peasants were never fully proletarianized despite attempts to turn them into a plantation labor force. The peasantry's historical resistance to proletarianization is the result of several factors. Colonial officials and capitalists found it difficult to control either the movements or the labor of these independent cultivators. Low rural population density, peasants' refusal to give up subsistence farming, sugarcane's compatibility with swidden farming practices, and the peasantry's politicization all contributed to the dominance of small-farmer cane production during this century. During the 1950s plantation production was resurrected in order to meet the colony's recently acquired Commonwealth Sugar Agreement export quota. Colonial planners assumed that plantations were more efficient and competitive than peasant farmers. Nevertheless, in 1972 the state sponsored plantations were forced to shut down due to competition from independent small cane farmers. Peasant sugarcane farming has proven to be remarkably resilient in the face of crises spawned by chronic fluctuations in the price and demand for cane sugar. Most farmers depend heavily on family labor to minimize their production costs. Because they have minimal capital inputs to production, they can sustain negative profits from cane and still survive by deploying family labor into other income and/or subsistence producing activities. The viability of peasant farming families that allows them to compete successfully with large-scale capitalist sugarcane farmers contradicts the Marxian notion of the inevitability of polarization into capitalist farmers and proletarian workers.