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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Alejandro Lugo. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-208) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

The moral coloring of eating behavior in the contemporary U.S. reflects the value placed on taking charge of one's health through diet, exercise, and self-control. At the same moment that health promotion efforts focus on individual responsibility, the population is experiencing time famine, or a chronic shortage of time that does not allow people to live as they think they should. In this context, health behaviors such as exercise and a health-balanced diet may be compromised. Vitamin consumption is one way that individuals maintain a moral identity in the face of time pressure. Drawing on twenty open-ended interviews, this paper explores the multiple meanings vitamins have in the lives of vitamin users, including their role as food substitutes and productivity enhancers. Issues related to efficacy and the tension between biomedical sources of health information and localized "embodied" knowledge also receive attention.

During the past few decades, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in how different cultural frameworks come together. One opportunity to view such interactions is presented by travel seminars based on a transformative education model, which aim to educate middle-class people about conditions in economically depressed areas through travel. The task of this thesis is to examine the experiences of U.S. participant groups in one transformative education program, paying particular attention to interpersonal contact, both within groups and between them and local people, and to how participants experience the location of poverty. I argue that multiple factors play a role in terms of whether, how, and why trip participants appear to form new meanings based on their experiences. These factors include the individual's ability to empathize with the 'Other' (i.e. local people) met on the trip and previous experience in and knowledge of economically depressed areas, especially the Third World.

In spite of their ubiquitous presence, the artisans who make serialized souvenirs for the tourist markets in the US-Mexico border and the people who buy these objects are invisible to the academic communities on both sides of the national divide. Simultaneously ignored by the Mexican folk arts canon; borderlands studies; Mexican historiography; and the anthropological literature interested in signs and symbolism, these allegedly low-grade and marginalized objects and people are nonetheless integral to the development of capitalism in Mexico. This work is an ethnography of the system of objects known as "Mexican curios" from the point of view of those who make the objects and those who consume them. It focuses specifically on one family of artisans that makes plaster figurines in Nogales, Sonora and shoppers at a Flea Market in Tucson, Arizona. The ethnography seeks to answer the questions: "Why is the most visible invisible?" and "How does invisibility become socially-installed and contested?" The study argues that instead of considering Mexican curios as the degenerate rear-guard to standards of good taste, or, as affronts to state-sanctioned ideas about folk art, these objects and the meanings attributed to them by makers and consumers must be read "in reverse." That is, as subtexts of fragmented projects of nationalism and social distinction. Curios distort by negation and playful inter-cultural negotiations dominant intellectual ideas about national patrimony and "worthiness." Plaster curio artisans and shoppers invent their own narratives to counter perceptions about their value as human beings and citizens. They appropriate, exppropriate, transform, and invent discourses about aesthetics, work, class, gender, and historical memory to invest meaning into their practices and their identities. The study stresses the importance of vernacular social histories as a mean through which subordinated people can regain a sense of empowerment when they interact with structures of power over which they have no control. In addition, the ethnography attempts to open a dialogue about the limits and the opportunities afforded by the disciplines of Folklore and Anthropology when they are wielded by research participants for their own goals.

This dissertation is concerned with questions of collective identity, political process, and the relationships between one self-identifying community on the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia and the larger systems of institutional power and authority to which that community is subordinated. It examines the practices of representation that are ongoing in the barrio of Villa Sebastian Pagador, the ways in which community leaders and residents elaborate images of and ideas about the barrio and project these to outsiders. The audience for these presentations is broad, but particularly includes representatives of the state and the municipal government, those people with the ability to improve the quality of life of barrio residents. By representing Villa Pagador as a "community," a group of people of shared origins working together for a common future, the people of Pagador hope to persuade the municipal and national authorities to aid them in their efforts to transform local infrastructure, and to negotiate a more positively valued identity for themselves as a community within the greater urban center of Cochabamba. Relying on a triangulated methodology that includes long-term participant-observation in the study community, informal interviewing of barrio leaders and residents, and the collection of a large corpus of secondary-source materials, this dissertation seeks to analyze the processes of community formation in Villa Pagador. In doing so, it conceptualizes community formation as a kind of resistance process, a way to contest the imposition of a pejorative identity that excludes urban migrants from the mainstream of urban national life. People in Villa Pagador resist the identity of a "marginal barrio" imposed upon them within the broader context of Bolivian society, in which urban migrant barrios are categorized as backward, isolated, uncivilized, and unimportant in the larger national social formation. By asserting their own centrality to the Bolivian nation, pagadoredos contest this sense of their own marginality, claiming instead that they are a community fully integral to the Bolivian nation and so deserving of attention from the legally constituted municipal and national authorities.

This work emerges out of a desire to explore cultural production of this place and this time in its broadest interdisciplinary context. A geography of capitalism, since it is an eminently urban form, is what is missing from current critiques of Spanish cultural production and what this project (inspired in large part by the theories of the geographer David Harvey and the philosopher Henri Lefebvre) provides. The first and second chapters of this dissertation explore how Madrid from 1914-1936 was the site of competing discourses of the modern in material and ideological terms and how this tension plays itself out culturally. The third chapter focuses specifically on the writings of Carmen de Burgos that narrate Madrid's urban environment. The fourth chapter locates Jose Diaz Fernandez's novel La Venus mecanica and his collection of essays El nuevo romaticismo within this same urban process. His comments on the dehumanizing effects of the fashion industry question the ideals of technological progress and critique the increased commodification of culture in Spain in general. The fifth chapter is a close reading of Cinematografo, by Andres Carranque de Rios, and its relationship to the fledgling Spanish film industry in the 1920s and 30s.

Local inhabitants risk the loss of ecological resources when land is cleared for cultivation as population densities and the demand for land resources increase. This dilemma is investigated through an interdisciplinary socioeconomic and ethnoecological assessment of 427 households in communities adjacent to four protected areas in Malawi. This study introduces a multidimensional approach that captures baseline socioeconomic information and resource utilization in a quantitative, integrated manner. Household income was derived from a "sum of the parts" aggregation of income elements including species-level agricultural production and resource utilization data. Regression analysis (R² = 0.84) demonstrated that poorer households are more reliant on protected area-based income than are wealthy households. Lorenz curve analysis demonstrated that income distribution equality improves when proceeds from protected areas are included in household income. Poverty threshold analysis indicates that exploitation of protected area resources is a livelihood strategy that halved the number of households that otherwise would have remained beneath a basic needs poverty threshold. Ecological resources are shown to meet demand for more people and for a longer time frame than converting the same lands to agriculture. However, conversion is more likely because per hectare values are 2 to 3.5 times greater for agriculture than for consumptive ecological resource use. Spatial analysis suggests points of negative land cover change (1984-94) were not associated with the proximity of population but with the agricultural suitability of the land. The results suggest the kinds of decisions people will make under extreme stress, when consideration of potential impacts is overwhelmed by the need to survive. This study demonstrates that protected area resources play a pivotal role in poverty alleviation, and by extension, efforts to make sustainable use and sustainable development compatible.

El presente estudio examina el papel de la escuela en el mantenimiento de la lengua y la cultura Arhuaco. Un creciente interes en los procesos de educacion indigena ha llevado a la comunidad Ika a replantear la educacion impartida desde el Estado para hacer una aproximacion al diseno de una educacion propia. Esto ha conllevado un analisis profundo por parte de las autoridades indigenas y los maestros sobre nuevos procesos educativos que contribuyan a la preservacion de la cultura autoctona. Utilizando un diseno etnografico, este estudio tomo como orientacion teorica analisis sobre planificacion linguistica, reproduccion cultural y economica a traves de la escuela y revitalizacion cultural y linguistica. Partiendo de una descripcion historica sobre el contacto con la cultura europea que propicio el desplazamiento cultural en las comunidades indigenas de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, esta investigacion demuestra la importancia de las luchas lideradas por los Arhuacos con las cuales se logro la expulsion de la mision Capuchina, para tomar control sobre sus escuelas. Posterior a esto se inicia el diseno de una educacion mas acorde con la cultura que toma como parte fundamental la lengua Ika. Este estudio articula datos etnograficos obtenidos mediante observacion participante en la escuela, las familias y las actividades comunitarias con la revision de documentos y archivos historicos que los indigenas poseen sobre sus procesos de resistencia. Los datos analizados demuestran que el Ika es una lengua cuya vitalidad se debe no solo a la transmision de esta en los ambitos familiar y comunitario, sino tambien a los procesos de revitalizacion linguistica y cultural que los indigenas vienen promoviendo para tratar de contener los procesos de aculturacion occidental que todavia se presentan con fuerza dentro del espacio escolar. Basado en los anteriores hallazgos este estudio propone el diseno de un programa de educacion bilingue dentro de la escuela que contribuya tanto al mantenimiento de la lengua Ika como al desarrollo de competencias en espanol por parte de los ninos. Igualmente recomienda un mayor acercamiento entre comunidad y escuela de tal manera que incremente la participacion comunitaria en el fortalecimiento y apropiacion del espacio escolar.

Although international business-to-business marketing is pervasive, little systematic empirical work has been conducted on face-to-face interactions between channel members from different cultures. Greater knowledge regarding cross-cultural communication strategies (e.g. verbal and non-verbal language choices) and behavioral adaptations (e.g. rapport building, increased flexibility with timing, and contractual format) will enhance the strength, efficiency and longevity of relationships between channel partners from distinct cultures. More importantly, a lack of this knowledge seriously jeopardizes cross-cultural understanding and the ability to develop and maintain intercultural exchange relationships. This dissertation presents an empirically derived conceptual framework of cross-cultural communication and behavioral processes. This framework is drawn from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in two intercultural channels of distribution and from academic literature. Acculturation moderates the influence that culture of the producer and the power situation have on the choice of communication strategies and behaviors in interactions between intercultural channel partners. The more the choice of communication strategies and behavioral adaptations is consistent with cultural traditions of the channel members, the higher the levels of trust engendered through the relationship. Hence, trust was expected to be a critical predictor of satisfaction and performance. This was consistent in the interview data, but not in the observation data. The conceptual framework is tested using survey research in the same industries. Power and acculturation were found to have limited effects on the choice of communication strategies. Trust was shown to play a very limited role as a mediating variable. However, significant correlations between the communication strategies and behavioral adaptations and the business outcome variables were revealed. In the conclusion, implications for marketing managers are discussed, limitations of this research are outlined, and future research ideas are proposed.