Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, San Francisco with the University of California, Berkeley, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-02, Section: A, page: 0611. Adviser: Vincanne Adams.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Anthropology, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1414. Advisers: Richard Bauman; Wesley Thomas. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 19, 2007)."

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Anthropology, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2211. Advisers: Anya P. Royce; Eduardo Brondizio. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 21, 2007)."

Frederick Jones, Minister of Defence during World War II, was responsible for the transportation to New Zealand of the foreign-born wives and fiancées of New Zealand servicemen. Between 1942 and 1948 servicemen returning from theatres of war in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific brought over 3000 wives and 700 fiancées to New Zealand. Portrayed as homogeneous, young, working-class British housewives who made hasty ill-considered marriages, war brides, in fact, proved to be varied in origin, age, occupation and education. Whirlwind romances and short courtships were not the norm. This thesis examines the consequences of the decision to marry a New Zealander and migrate and the impact of the journey and settlement. The full glare of publicity that greeted war brides on arrival focused attention on their compatibility with, and adaptability to, the receiving society. Adjustment was however fraught with difficulties. Memory and loss are implicit in the experience of migration. War brides expressed this in terms of the rift with their pasts and a lack of shared memories. On arrival in New Zealand war brides dispersed around the country in an extreme 'pepper-potting' pattern. When their only connection with New Zealand was their locally-born husband they suffered social isolation and sometimes a devastating sense of loneliness. The resulting marginalisation they experienced was evident in their oral history narratives. Ambivalence and recourse to serendipity as an explanation for past actions were elements of the dis-composure discernable in narratives. In spite of their varied religious, social and class backgrounds, this diverse cohort formed a war bride identity based on shared experience rather than national or ethnic origin. Far from dissipating, their war-bride identity has been consolidated into an enduring image most tangibly expressed in the extant war brides' clubs, although club attendance is not a prerequisite of war bride identity.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the lives of Okinawan women and American military men involved in long-term intimate relationships. The United States military has maintained a large-scale presence in Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture, since the Second World War, and more than 50,000 military personnel, civilian employees, and family members are stationed there today. Within Japan, Okinawa Prefecture consistently has the highest rate of international marriage, but unlike in the country's northern urban centers, transnational sex and romance continue to be associated with the largely unwanted U.S. military presence. For their part, the individuals I interviewed eschewed such political symbolism, emphasizing instead the everyday successes and failures of living together and raising children, surviving in the military community, and building friendships and family relationships in off-base environments. Their stories speak volumes about on-the-ground relationships between Okinawans and U.S. servicemen, as well as processes of identity formation that blur the boundaries between on-base and off-base communities. On a conceptual level, the dissertation explores the military's impact on local processes of cultural production and reproduction. Specifically, it focuses on the transformation of popular ideas concerning intimacy and family, investigating (1) changing understandings of sexual morality, especially with reference to interracial relationships and broader conceptions of class difference; (2) the flexibility of ideas concerning family responsibilities and obligations, with particular attention to the ways in which American husbands and fathers are incorporated into actual families and communities; and (3) the influence of military institutional concerns on local families as Okinawan military wives are integrated into the global U.S. military community. I argue that military-related social transformations can be discerned within the most intimate situations involving self, sexuality, and family. Furthermore, changing understandings of intimacy and family have become integral to formulations of Okinawan identity and difference, particularly through the appropriation of military transnational couples and their children as symbols of Okinawa's continuing subjugation to both the U.S. military and the Japanese nation-state. The dissertation concludes with questions concerning the impact of the U.S. military, conceptualized as a transnational institutional complex, on similar aspects of cultural production in host communities worldwide.

Many acute infectious diseases found in tropical countries share a set of non-specific symptoms in common, making distinctions between them difficult and diagnosis in clinical settings complex. The high prevalence of comorbidity in developing nations further adds to the difficulty of clinical diagnosis. For families living in rural communities, evaluating symptoms in the home prior to choosing a course of treatment action is even more difficult. Not only are families faced with ambiguities in symptom presentations, their decisions about how to interpret a particular illness episode are influenced by a complex combination of public health messages and ethnomedical models of illness. Furthermore, since cultural illness classifications do not necessarily correspond in a one-to-one relationship with biomedical disease categories, concerns and behaviors associated with a particular cultural illness category may have implications for many different diseases. From a health communication, education, and prevention perspective, it is therefore important to consider different diseases and illness categories not only as individual, separable entities, but also in terms of how they are interpreted and acted upon in relation to each other. In this dissertation, I provide an overview of major, acute infectious diseases found in northeast Thailand, including diarrheal diseases, acute respiratory infections, malaria, and dengue fever. I then examine cultural models and responses to these diseases in detail. I subsequently discuss a cultural illness category prominent in northeast Thailand known as khai makmai ('fruit fever'). I demonstrate how the classification of diverse illness episodes (resulting from a variety of biomedical diseases) as khai makmai, combined with cultural concerns about health practitioners' mismanagement of khai makmai, has important implications for both the treatment and prevention of various infectious diseases. I conclude by arguing for the need for more integrated, ethnomedical approaches to health education and interventions that take into account the impact of cultural models and responses for multiple infectious disease problems simultaneously.

This dissertation argues that community policing--which police describe as a form of policing centered around the principles of partnership, prevention and problem solving--is an illusion which serves to legitimate the police without fundamentally changing the way police do their job. Community policing, I argue, is a logical extension and refinement of the basic technics of policing. This is evident in the ways that police hope to organize city residents into a policing body within which civilians serve as the eyes and ears of the police. It is evident also in the ways that police are dominating urban space. A second argument is that because of its emphasis on partnership, community policing contains within it a mechanism--unintended by its architects and unrecognized by police--by which communities can shape police practice even as police strive to shape, control and in some cases dissolve communities. Thus community policing is one such instance in which the very means by which a repressive agency of the state bureaucracy exercises its power can serve not only as a point of resistance to state projects but may even provide a mechanism for shoring up and reconstituting popular traditions--in this case, community. In Boston, civilians hope to use community policing as a means for capturing and thereby shaping police practice and for (re-)building neighborhood-based communities. My discussion draws upon twenty months of field experience in Boston where I interviewed community activists and engaged police and communities through intensive participant observation.

In 1959, Christopher Oliana and Walter “Serge” King took a historic journey to pre-revolutionary Cuba that would change the religious trajectory of numerous African Americans, particularly in New York City. They became the first African American initiates into the Afro-Cuban Lucumi orisha tradition opening the way for generations of African Americans who would comprehensively transform their way of life. This dissertation examines the inter-diasporic exchanges between African Americans and their Cuban teachers to highlight issues of African diasporic dissonance and differing notions of “blackness” and “African.” I argue that these African Americans create a particular African American Lucumi religious subjectivity within the geographical space of an urban cosmopolitan city as they carve out space and place in the midst of religious intolerance and hostility. The intimate study of these devotees’ lives contributes new understandings about the challenges of religious diversity within contemporary urban settings. These African Americans cultivated a new religious subjectivity formed through dialogical mediation with spiritual entities made present through material religious technologies, such as divination, spiritual masses, and possession. Through the lens of lived religion, I examine the experiences of African American Lucumi devotees to better understand how their everyday lives reflect the mediation between a private religious life, defined and structured by spiritual entities, and their public lives in the contemporary sociocultural, economic and political context of urban American society. Based on more than 8 years of intense participant observation and semi-structured interviews and discussions, I analyze how religious subjectivities and religious bodies are cultivated as these African Americans leave their mark on this religious tradition, their geographical surroundings, and African American religious history. / African and African American Studies

This dissertation examines the explicit and implicit currency of indigenous religious thought on political, moral, and social formations from precolonial through colonial to postcolonial Ghana. It advances new answers to debates in Ghana about the role, if any, indigenous religion has to play in a modern Christian-dominated public sphere that simultaneously defines itself as secular by situating these debates in the history of the suppression and appropriation of so-called “undesirable customs” and their agents by both British and Ghanaian government officials. Based on archival research (colonial reports, government records, legal documents, newspapers, diaries, etc.,) and a dozen oral interviews (with former and current politicians, indigenous religious priests, chiefs, and elders), (Un)Desirable Customs argues that despite its “unpopularity” and decline, indigenous religion critically shaped the construction of the colonial and postcolonial Ghanaian state. I highlight the inherent paradox in how the state morally and culturally stigmatized indigenous religious beliefs and practices, in an attempt to perform certain conceptions of secular modernity and Christian morality, yet, at the same time, appropriated indigenous religious rituals and symbols. These contradictory measures, I argue, are better understood as strategies of purifications that the state has enacted and continues to perform on itself in its attempt to define itself as “modern.” My study fundamentally shifts the attention from Christianity and Islam in relation to politico-moral formations to a focus on indigenous religion. This historical project complicates current scholarship on secularism in both the West and non-West. It challenges us to examine the political, ethical, and conceptual limits of secularism and religious tolerance in the modern period. My research makes clear that the debate about the place of indigenous religion was, and continues to be, couched as an issue of public morality and wellbeing. This approach to the study of indigenous religion also calls into question the longstanding perception about its irrelevance, showing how various elements of indigenous religious beliefs and practices have left their imprint on the political, moral, and social fabric of society. I also attend to how Africans, particularly traditionalists, responded to their marginalization, the appropriation of their symbols, and the changing religious landscape. This work responds to the necessity to complicate the triumphant narrative of the implacable dominance of Christianity and Islam in the African political and public sphere. / Religion, Committee on the Study of

In Africa, the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, rapidly expanding industrial and extractive economies, uncontrolled economic growth, environmental and lifestyle changes, and the rising age of populations with better access to medicine have occasioned rising rates of cancer. Rwanda’s national cancer program has been hailed as a unique example of how to build clinical oncology into a public healthcare infrastructure. Using ethnographic data, interviews, and historical archives, I address three sets of questions: 1. What historical, economic, social, and political factors have shaped the development of the country’s cancer program? 2. How do local clinicians and patients experience cancer as a treatable chronic disease? And how is that experience affected by the development of a national oncology infrastructure and new biomedical technologies? 3. As an instance of the transnational private-public partnerships characteristic of global health interventions in postcolonial Africa, what successes, limitations, and challenges does this cancer program present for envisioning oncology programs elsewhere in the global south? What are the ethical, political, and epistemological stakes involved in different models of cancer care? This project contributes to a new chapter in medical anthropology, one focused on rising rates of cancer in contemporary Africa. I argue that Rwanda’s cancer project is an exercise in the construction of a new sense of sovereignty, rendered through the politics of life as onco-nationhood; that it is an effort to create a postcolonial polity whose citizen body is gifted care of a international caliber provided by a paternal state. In a critical moment of post-traumatic social reconstruction, national biomedicine is becoming the entity through which government seeks to fuse sovereign statehood and nationhood in the cause of a healthy Rwandan future. Theorizing this relationship holds at least one key to developing an anthropology of cancer in contemporary Africa. / Anthropology