This dissertation is an analysis of the policies, practices, and effects of a number of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Bangladesh. My work focuses on micro-credit NGOs, the Grameen Bank model in particular, and on the strategy pursued by them to "empower poor women." I look at how the extension of credit to "poor women" intersects with existing gender and community relations to produce results that are often in conflict with the stated goals of "empowerment" and "development." While credit can be a source of capital, and often is such a source for established market agents in Western societies, the extension of credit in more traditional societies, such as Bangladesh, can often become an additional site of stress and exploitation. My research highlights how these new forms of violence in which poor men and women find themselves implicated, sometimes as victims and sometimes as aggressors, are linked with the social stresses and dislocations produced by modern development agencies, the NGOs in particular. My dissertation documents how NGOs have become channels through which globalization enters the most private space of rural society---the home---and how it begins to dissolve the private/public distinctions that regulate rural life. This modernizing agenda of NGOs often disrespects the norms that local people live by. By alienating the very people they seek to empower, NGOs surrender critical ground to Islamic militants who move into occupy moments of social disruptions. Finally, I argue that the development NGO sector in Bangladesh have inducted various groups into its self-perpetuation, thereby, making it difficult for alternatives to the NGO's way of doing things to emerge. Similarly, the Grameen Bank operates as a form of symbolic capital for Bangladeshi national elites and diasporans, and as a financially viable tool for Western aid agencies, thus making it difficult for critiques of the micro-credit model to emerge as a constructive dialogue. My dissertation places these instances in a theoretically developed anthropology of "women in development."

This ethnography addresses how former Italian radical activists of the 70s negotiate their militant past with their present predicament. This is done by comparing and contrasting the public discourse (historical texts and legal proceedings) with the activists' own interpretations of their past. Since most of the historians of these social movement are themselves former activists, their contrasting versions of the period contained in their texts are seen as expressions, at the level of intellectual discourse, of the inherently conflictive legacy of the 70s. It is widely acknowledged that the emergence of left wing armed struggle and the ensuing state repression prevents a balanced evaluation of this period. By examining the "Sofri case", I argue that the emergency legislation adopted by the state to convict members of clandestine organizations, has determined what counts as a normative history of the period. I also argue that such normative implications re-actualize a conservative view of Italian national identity, which sees the state as pastoral authority. I thus suggest that "terrorism" is a symbolic marker consistent with this moralizing project, since, by essentializing the subjectivity of the "terrorists" it also prevents former activists who did not engage in clandestine violence from publicly articulate a balanced version of their own past.

Based on twelve months of fieldwork from August 2001--July 2002, the dissertation analyzes of the venture market in South Korea which, at the time, had undergone a significant depreciation of its national currency and instituted a series of market reforms, which included a novel experiment with an emergent financial organization in the form of venture capital market. This project is an anthropological inquiry into the events that followed. My ethnographic project analyzes the full arc of development and the present demise of venture industry in South Korea from 1997--2002 through two enduring points of reference: venture firm and venture capital firm. I place this development within the context of interaction between a new global financial form and articulation of Korea's social imaginary in its anxiety with celerity as an immanent expression of its modernity. In the end, I outline how venture industry fits into this narrative and give an overview of how the notion and practice of rapidity functioned in the making of the imaginaries and instantiation of venture not only as a market phenomena but as an immanent expression of the structure of rapidity itself as a cultural form. In doing so, I identify celerity as one of the central preoccupation of Korea's modernity. I frame my inquiry by placing the objective phenomenon of explosive growth and quick demise of venture market within the collective cultural idioms of hurriedness, or celerity. While taking into account of the local institutions and larger global reasons for failure of the venture market, I argue that, in Korea at least, two interacting logics were at work. First, instantiation of new financial technologies---in their conception and implementation---cannot be reduced to the logic of these technologies alone. In this case, the logic of the financial form was absorbed into a socio-structural logic, transforming both in the process. As such, celerity is seen as part of the mechanics of the structure of the market itself, and not only as an explanatory framework ex post to events. To open up that language of "mechanics" is to understand celerity as a cultural tempo, a structural component to the actual characteristic of the market. Second, drawing from the participant observation and interviews with venture participants themselves, as well as from my own cultural knowledge, I found that celerity has a thick social imaginary particular to the narrative of Korea's history and modernity. Or, put in another way, much of the discourse of venture market pointed to two spheres: the narrative of Korean history as an economic unfolding of troubled ascent into modernity, and the logic of what Koreans call pali-pali (hurry, hurry) syndrome, what I have chosen to call the problem of celerity. By this, I mean: the rush to and out of venture industry was seen as the manifestation of a long-standing historical problem of the uncertain status of Korea's modernity resolved through an intense but episodic engagement with signaling practices, practices that briefly absorb the attention of many in the middle and elite classes in Korea. This is the social and cultural manifestation of rapidity as a cultural phenomena that partakes polythetically in the language of speed but, at the same time, expresses the particular history of Korea in its engagement with modernity.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the Menil Collection, a formerly private art collection in Houston, Texas opened to the public in 1987 as a museum designed by Renzo Piano. It addresses the collection as an object, and as a technology of self-fashioning, but also, in the context of modern museums, as an instrument in the formation of a public. I show how the Menil Collection participates in these processes, while pursuing a distinctive project of critique. The 10,000 piece collection has significant holdings of surrealist work; New York School painting; Byzantine icons; African and Oceanic objects; and antiquities. In 1995 it opened a freestanding gallery solely for the permanent exhibition of the work of Cy Twombly, and this year, construction was completed on a chapel built and consecrated to house 13th century Cypriot frescoes that were bought and restored by the collection. Each of these initiatives furthers an intricate moral, political, religious and aesthetic agenda that Dominique and the late John de Menil had given early expression to in their commissioning of the Rothko Chapel in 1964. Their projects are underpinned by a critique of the pervasive disenchantments of modernity, read particularly through the French Sacred Art Movement of the 1930s and 40s and Catholic Ecumenicism. The de Menils embraced a radical religious aesthetic--a sacred modern--by which they sought to rehabilitate an engagement with the material world that at once would allow for an immediacy of experience while fostering the possibility of spiritual transcendence. Hence, I argue, the organization and the exhibitionary practices of the Menil Collection are committed to a poetic rather than a didactic experience of art and they self-consciously seek to foster uncanny traces of the unseen, offering up these realms in the form of incantations.

This dissertation draws upon performance theory and new historicism to read Victorian literature and culture. By fusing the gender consciousness and social constructionist agenda of the former with the rigorous dedication to historical specificity of the latter, I am able both to ground potentially amorphous theoretical assertions and, through readings of novels, nonfiction prose, and other historical documents, to comment upon the constructedness of what the Victorians fought to maintain as "natural" aspects of character. The focus on gender that defines so much work in performance theory is a prominent concern here, but it is not the organizing principle of the dissertation; rather, following the lead of recent feminist criticism, I explore masculinity and femininity within the contexts of other social categories such as class, work, sanity, and race. The first chapter locates Victorian antitheatricality within the context of industrial culture. Reading political tracts alongside conduct books, I attribute Victorian antipathies to visibly repetitive or rehearsed behavior to the monotonous actions of the machines that increasingly replaced human labor. The second chapter reads the Victorian fantasy of class transcendence against the fear of fraud, focusing on the conflicting pressures in narratives of upward mobility to reshape oneself to conform to a new class standing and yet to maintain a "genuine" self. The third chapter explores the performances that constituted professional identity and the tremendous latitude the Victorians allowed theatricality so long as "acting" was troped as "activity." The fourth chapter focuses on the demise of moral treatment (a form of therapy that sought to cure the mad by teaching them to behave sane), to examine sanity and shifting strategies for treating and explaining madness. My final chapter unsettles the stability of skin as a reliable determinant of racial identity, exploring the performative aspects that enabled white Victorians to seem racially invisible and the acts and attributes that risked that invisibility. The dissertation examines texts by many authors, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and Mrs. Henry Wood.

This thesis is based on six-months of archaeological field research in the upper Senegal/Lower Falemme region aimed at reconstructing patterns of social and economic change during the past 1500 years. The target area was a 50 kilometer-segment of the lower Falemme river that was directly opened into an important ancient gold trading zone. This area is economically marginal today but had important links to both the trans-Saharan and Atlantic systems over the past thousand years, offering great potential for the study of the changes triggered by incorporation into wider economic networks. The main objectives of the research were to recover data on change in subsistence, trade and technology to provide preliminary direct empirical evidence on processes of change over the 1500 years. Archaeological excavations carried out at three sites and regional survey permitted recovery of local and imported artifacts, paleoeconomic data and information on context and chronology. The data accumulated suggests the incorporation into the trans-Saharan international trade beginning AD 700 of small-scale societies with a subsistence economy dominated by agriculture, herding and occasional hunting. Significant changes were noted beginning in the fifteenth century, which corresponds to a period of increased contact with the Europeans and the expansion of Islam. These changes are reflected in the growth of imports and important changes in the nature and location of archaeological sites. While the region was incorporated into the wider Atlantic market economy, African initiatives were a key component of system until the imposition of colonial government in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The importance of Islam as a religious, cultural, and political force has been too evident in the last decades of the twentieth century to need any emphasis. To reach an understanding of the position and influence of Islam in the world today, it is necessary not only to understand "classical" Islam, but to recognize that Islam is a transforming force. It is more than an old religion, it is a modern day ideology for "changing". At the same time it is, itself, a "changing" ideology. As it attempts to transform its own abode (as well as the entire world), it becomes transformed by the delimiting forces which surround it. Currently Shi'ite Islam deserves particular attention. It is no longer a traditional/traditionalist force vis-a-vis secularist "social reform" confined in its abode (mainly Iran), but an expanding "revolutionary" force. It is revolutionary in its call to all Muslims of the world to "return": to "original Islam", to "self" (from cultural disalienation, dis-assimilation), and to the world which the "eroding acid of modernism/modernization" has severely damaged but not totally destroyed. This study draws attention, through a variety of interpretive techniques, to this complex change and transformation. Part 1 explores individual growth and education in Iran through a series of autobiographical sondages set in the postmodern world. Part 2 features the life and works of an important Shi'ite ideologue who reinterpreted his old faith into a practical ideology in light of modern thought. Part 3 interprets ethnographic observations among Muslim immigrants (and converts) in Houston, Texas. The study concludes by addressing the issue of minority adjustment in exile.

The ethnographic core of this dissertation is comprised of the body stories of American acupuncturists and their clients. I posit a notion of embodiment based on "feeling the qi." A unique bodily sensation during acupuncture treatments, "feeling the qi" also opens up the relationship between embodiment and storytelling. This is a paradigm of embodiment that is enacted in a process of disclosure and requires a revision of the notion of appropriation. The four central chapters are structured in terms of four relational bodies of appropriation: social bodies of translation, technocratic bodies, mediating bodies, and emergent bodies. I open with social bodies as the discursive realm of making sense of bodily being, in that social bodies trace the "translating channels" through which acupuncture is culturally translated into American contexts. Technocratic bodies exert control and act as general gatekeepers in biomedicine's encounters with acupuncture. Acupuncture practitioners are mediating bodies within the social realm in which practitioners, clients, technocracies, and emergent bodies all encounter one another. Emergent bodies in the stories of individual clients of acupuncture evoke thematics of gender, care, partnership, and bodily recovery. This dance of translative, technocratic, mediating, and emergent bodies revises conventional abstractions of "the body" as a metaphor. "Feeling the qi," initiates a movement in this dissertation through these four storied and relational bodies of appropriation, closing with an analysis of issues of positioning and reflexivity.

This dissertation investigates the social, political and historical dimensions of the American theme park industry. Specifically, the research seeks to ethnologically analyze the "American theme park" as a multi-faceted space of socio-cultural formation, reformation, contestation and representation. Through a multi-sited approach, the thesis investigates theme parks, both extinct and extant, from the everyday perspectives of patrons and workers, in the closed rooms of designers, managers and elite decision-makers, and in the numerous spaces of material culture, multi-media representation and design which so makeup the place of study. The ethnographic research is based on two-years of participant-observation at a major American theme park, where the author was a trainer, as well as two years of subsequent research in over twenty additional theme parks and amusement venues, like Las Vegas casinos, throughout the country. As "edge work," the author investigates the complexities of representation, authorship and fieldwork as they emerge in a textual and performative scene of writing and evocation, ultimately challenging distinctions of ethnography and fiction.

Based on my fieldwork and research in Beijing and other Chinese urban cities in the 1990s, this dissertation focuses on urban Chinese lifestyles caught up in historical and momentous dynamics of continuity and transition. It is to study how lifestyles are embodied by urban men and women in the 1990s and played out in the bars, coffee shops, teahouses and Karoke halls in Beijing, as well as Shanghai and Zhengzhou. In general, this dissertation tries to explore how lifestyles become both reflexive and performative bodies in a complex of historical, political, social, cultural phenomena in a flow of fluxes and trends, a flow of information, a flow of history, a flow of modernity and a flow of globalization.