Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 9, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1931. Advisers: John Johnson; Portia Maultsby.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Clark University, 2007. / (UMI)AAI3292110. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4817. Adviser: Colin Polsky.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Anthropology, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 7, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3915. Adviser: Anya Peterson Royce.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2005. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-04, Section: A, page: 1455. Adviser: Beverly J. Stoeltje. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Nov. 15, 2006)."

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 2006. / "Title from dissertation home page (viewed July 12, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-10, Section: A, page: 3929. Adviser: Henry Glassie.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Anthropology, 2006. / "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 27, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2213. Advisers: Gracia Clark; Richard Wilk.

Recent literature has assessed the particular circumstances of Palestinian children, generally attempting to conceptualize them as either politically-charged and violent, or as marginalized citizens, victimized by dominating Israeli practices. This research attempts to broaden these conceptualizations, by exploring the relevance of Cynthia Enloe's (2000) concept of militarized maneuvering. Enloe postulates inter alia that militarization is a process which involves the obfuscation of the military's problematic nature for civil society and the almost taking for granted of military's (often violent) strategies; it occurs as societal conditions, discourses, definitions, attitudes, thoughts and expectations are produced (and re-produced). This thesis has employed an inductive qualitative study to explore the means through which Palestinian children may progress through the process of militarization, employing a coding approach to data analysis. It has studied Identity Card (1964), considered to be the "Palestinian national poem", written by "the Palestinian national poet", Mahmoud Darweish and has drawn reference to secondary literature detailing the impacts of the newly-constructed Israeli Separation Barrier on Palestinian populations. Palestinian populations may undergo the process of militarization through some of the available nationalist poetry, which offers discourses commemorating the historical connection of Palestinians with the land lost in 1948, and emphasizes the need for steadfastness, nationalism and resistance. This thesis has found that the barrier is a force which both directly and indirectly militarizes children's social conditions, exemplifying past (perceived) victimization, obstructing daily life, and oppressing Palestinians' future nation. It may also be interpreted to reinforce the desire for resistance, and therefore potentially garner support for militarized retaliatory acts against Israelis. This approach has illuminated an important and unexpected finding; the two seemingly disjoined realms of Palestinian society are undergirded by the abstract themes of collective memory and nationalism, suggesting that these are significant elements to the study of the militarization of Palestinian society, thereby offering a means to broaden the aforementioned traditional conceptualizations of Palestinian children.

This dissertation is an ethnography of the building and real estate construction industry in India’s National Capital Region (NCR). It is a cross-class study based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in NCR with real estate developers, planners, contractors, architects, engineers, foreman, migrant laborers, and locals. Within the dissertation, I excavate creativity from its relegation to artistic realms and examine the politics of creative action in real estate. The building construction industry, I argue, deploys creativity as a fetish through the celebration of creative terms and actions such as jugaad, improvisation, fixing, corruption, innovation, and quick thinking. This discourse enables social mobility and survival, but at the same time enhances unequal conditions of work and life. Chapters play with the human and non-human duality of tropes such as plans, money, labor, love, and roads to demonstrate the processes of creative destruction. A critical phenomenology of life in the industry serves as a critique of its political economy. / Anthropology

This dissertation examines and compares the epistemologies of two of the most popular West African intellectual traditions: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing theories native to the traditions themselves and contemporary oral and textual sources, I examine how these traditions answer the questions: What is knowledge? How is it acquired? And How is it verified? Or more simply, “What do you know?,” “How did you come to know it?,” and “How do you know that you know?” After analyzing each tradition separately, and on its own terms, I compare them to each other and to certain contemporary, Western theories. Despite having relatively limited historical contact, I conclude that the epistemologies of both traditions are based on forms of self-knowledge in which the knowing subject and known object are one. As a result, ritual practices that transform the knowing subject are key to cultivating these modes of knowledge. Therefore I argue that like the philosophical traditions of Greek antiquity, the intellectual or philosophical dimensions of Tijani Sufism and Ifa must be understood and should be studied as a part of a larger project of ritual self-transformation designed to cultivate an ideal mode of being, or way of life, which is also an ideal mode of knowing. I further assert that both traditions offer distinct and compelling perspectives on, and approaches to, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, psychology, and ritual practice, which I suggest and begin to develop through comparison. / African and African American Studies

In this dissertation I trace the formation of citizens of the information age by comparing visions and practices to make children and the general public computer literate or cultured in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union. Computer literacy and computer culture programs in these three countries began in the early 1970s as efforts to adapt people to life in the information society as it was envisioned by scholars, thinkers, and practitioners in each cultural and sociopolitical context. The dissertation focuses on the ideas and influence of three individuals who played formative roles in propelling computer education initiatives in each country: Seymour Papert in the United States, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in France, and Andrei Ershov in the Soviet Union. According to these pioneers, to become computer literate or computer cultured meant more than developing computer skills or learning how to passively use the personal computer. Each envisioned a distinctive way of incorporating the machine into the individual human’s ways of thinking and being—as a cognitive enhancement in the United States, as a culture in France, and as a partner in the Soviet Union. The resulting human-computer hybrids all demanded what I call a playful relationship to the personal computer, that is, a domain of free and unstructured, exploratory creativity. I trace the realization of these human-computer hybrids from their origins in the visions of a few pioneers to their embedding in particular hardware, software, and educational curricula, through to their development in localized experiments with children and communities, and finally to their implementation at the scale of the nation. In that process of extension, pioneering visions bumped up against powerful sociotechnical imaginaries of the nation state in each country, and I show how, as a result of that clash, in each national case the visions of the pioneers failed to be fully realized. In conclusion, I suggest ways in which the twentieth-century imaginaries of the computer literate citizen extend beyond their points of origin and connect to aspects of the contemporary constitutions of humans in the computerized world. / History of Science