The dissertation focuses on the WoDaaBe Fulani in Niger, seeking to understand identity in a global context, analyzing streams of power and desire that have characterized the life of the WoDaaBe. The first part of the dissertation discusses expressions of WoDaaBe identities and desires in the contemporary world, as well as identifying the present situation of the WoDaaBe as one of great marginality. The WoDaaBe ethnic identity is created through processes of exclusion and inclusion within social and natural environments. The WoDaaBe perceive themselves as both separated from and a part of nature, depending on the context in which their identification is placed. They maintain strong boundaries from other ethnic groups in Niger, through specific visual markers of identity and by identifying WoDaaBe-ness as attached to certain moral qualifies that are combined with various social practices. The ideas of herding and control of one's feelings and desires remain key symbols in WoDaaBe social and ethnic identity. Many young WoDaaBe work in cities because they lack animals for basic subsistence in the bush, thus negotiating their identity in these new circumstances. The second part of the dissertation traces the history of WoDaaBe involvement in an interconnected world, showing that WoDaaBe have been connected to State and global processes for a long time. Various factors have led to an expansion of cultivated land, pushing herding communities further north and reducing available grazing land. While the WoDaaBe are becoming increasingly marginalized within the national economy of Niger, they have become popular in the West as symbols of the "native." Similarities can be observed between the dominant development ideology's conception of the typical herder and of the popular imagination of the WoDaaBe, characterizing them as unproductive, traditional and simple. The WoDaaBe representation is placed in a broad historical context of images of the Other, demonstrating that the encounters between WoDaaBe and Westerners take place within fields of unequal power relations.

Since earliest contact, Europeans have projected myriad qualities onto the being they erroneously named "Indian." Through text representations, Euramericans have constructed and reproduced profound distortions of indigenous peoples that have shaped political and material realities for Native Americans by reducing them to delimiting "types." Simultaneously, Native writers have a parallel history of representing whites as the embodiment of confusing and "uncivilized" strangeness. In writing which resists colonial definitions of externally imposed "Indianness," contemporary Native writers have increasingly recast historically racist representations by asserting authentic self-descriptions while depicting whiteness as "Other." This thesis examines the ways in which two contemporary Native writers---Simon Ortiz, Acoma, and Carter Revard, Osage---use humor as a literary strategy to subvert the Euramerican stereotypes of the "Indian" as "noble" or "wild savage" and "unscientific primitive" in order to reconstruct authentic Native identity from the true center, that lived by Native people themselves.

I conducted a management assessment for the conservation of benthic resources harvested by small-scale hookah divers in the northern Gulf of California (NG), Mexico, and analyzed the reproductive ecology of the black murex snail. Open access to the fisheries, combined with national and international market pressure, fishing methods, and the timing of fishing activities have caused an evident decline in production, the use of new fishing zones, and a shift of fishing effort towards deeper areas. However, the organization of the diving sector and its initiatives to establish forms of regulation provide an opportunity to alleviate this situation. I conclude that comanagement has the potential to be an effective management system for the benthic resources of the NG, a system that could be facilitated by the sedentary and semisedentary nature of these resources. An informal type of co-management arena is already in place with the possibility of being formalized and solidified.

While federal deregulation of the trucking industry had little impact upon the truck drivers serving the Acadian oilpatch, recent legislation deregulating intrastate transportation yielded vast changes in the structure of the occupation. In the past, success as a trucker in the oilpatch depended upon an individual's entrepreneurial drive, as well as the social and familial networks upon which that individual could rely. Intrastate deregulation allowed several truck companies to dominate the industry; these companies grew via a complex series of alliances between transportation companies, service companies, and large oil concerns. These alliances disrupted the process by which individuals transformed social capital into economic capital. The foremost impact of these changes is a rapid drop in trucker's income---many now exist on the brink of insolvency. At the same time, the period of crisis has opened the sector to previously inconceivable options, including forays toward unionization, as well as the entry of women, blacks, and outsiders into the labor pool.

Secondary prevention activities are used to decrease the incidence of complications to an already present disease process, through ongoing monitoring, patient education and early treatment This research was a descriptive ethnography that studied the Mexican-American's perspective (N = 6) on the use of early secondary intervention of health care services. The theoretical framework used was Leininger's (1991) conceptual model of Cultural Care and Diversity. The dimensions used in the Sunrise Model were religious and philosophical, kinship and social factors, and cultural values and lifeways, A semi structured interview guide was used for the interviews. The taxonomies that were identified were: (a) illness related beliefs; (b) health related behaviors; (c) health promoting support or nonsupport; and (d) cultural values and lifeways related to health promotion/prevention. There were three cultural themes that emerged from the data: (a) Support comes from multiple sources in the Mexican-American family and is very important in their lives when dealing with illness; (b) a strong faith in God's Will help the Mexican-American family deal with whatever results/consequences come from the illness; and (c) in the Mexican-American in particularly, knowledge about a disease does not necessarily cause a change in behaviors; a change only occurs when symptoms create consequences that negatively affect a personal sense of well being. Nursing implications from this study include understanding the importance of support for the Mexican-American individual and the strong faith in God's will which could explain the delay in seeking treatment. The title Si Dios Quiere (if God wills) signifies the strong belief of the Mexican-American in their way of dealing with their lives.

This research documents and discusses the reactions of a family of Dine (Navajo) weavers who were asked to examine selected Dine textiles in the Arizona State Museum's collection. Although the ways Dine weavers perceive their creations is not the focus of many studies, this research explores their aesthetics to gain a greater understanding of the weaving tradition. Building on cross-cultural interviewing techniques that originally used photographs, this study uses a selection of museum textiles to explore Dine aesthetics. The results address Dine weavers' views of the meanings and changes in Dine textile designs, the significance of the process of weaving, and the motivational forces that fuel this tradition.

This dissertation studies the works of four writers who attempt cross-cultural advocacy through writing fiction based upon their fieldwork or other travels. In order to explain cultural differences, however, all four writers inadvertently rely upon the very Orientalist stereotypes, the "ethnographic fictions," which they seek to undermine. Three underlying causes for this dynamic are identified and traced through works by the authors as well as contemporary post-colonial, queer, feminist, and ethnographic interdisciplinary scholarship. First, in order to explain the significance of native cultures in the language of the mainstream or dominant one, cross-cultural advocates must balance novelty with intelligibility. A critique of an epistemology of empire, then, better taps "ethnographic fictions" through mimicry, mockery, and minstrelsy, rather than appealing to abstract, ahistorical universals. Second, Odysseun myths remain a powerful set of presumptions about the relationship between travel, individuality, and empowerment. Yet the idea that freedom and free thought are both the goals and consequences of travel fails to account for the history of pilgrims, refugees, and community-based activists. Third, Orientalism and Anthropology are organized around the idea that sex/gender roles reveal the essence of indigenous cultures. The result is a disproportionate focus upon women's living quarters (harems, zezanas, huts), and indigenous sexuality (berdaches, hijras, shamen). For the four authors, the relationship between advocacy and self-identification is a crucial element. Close reading of the writers' texts reveals how they each seek validation of their sex/gender identities through investigations abroad. As queer, feminist, and/or bi-cultural people, the writers are particularly sensitive to conventions of belonging and exclusion. This study reveals how advocacy and alienation interact in 20th-century literature and scholarship of the Other.

During the early 1920s, Old Colony Mennonites emigrated from Canada to Chihuahua, Mexico in order to continue their traditional ways of life in nearly isolated, agricultural communities. As their ancestors had done for centuries, they continued to live in opposition to "the world." While the Old Colony Mennonites basically succeeded in living their distinct, conservative ideology, economic necessities and real world opportunities caused internal disagreements, excommunications and the formation of a new, liberal church, the General Conference, among their midst. North American Mennonite and some European scholars have recorded the history, political economy, socio-religious organization, linguistic and cultural characteristics of these so-called "Mexican Mennonites." What their large-scale perspectives have failed to capture is the everyday lives of the cultural group, the lives of women in particular. Women's worlds have been invisible in the official discourse on Mennonite history, most of which is male-dominated. This dissertation explores the everyday lives of Mennonites in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua through Mennonite women's eyes. Women's multiple roles at the household level in times of health and illness, and women's moral identities are its focus. Women's habitus and discourses are central in perpetuating Mennonite gendered and moral identities. These identities, expressed in everyday moral living, are the foundation to Mennonite women's health work and local meanings of health. The ethnographic descriptions of women's lives demonstrate how ideology becomes operationalized, and the contrasting of existing literature with my findings exemplifies the articulation of ideology and gender. As an understanding of local Mennonite women's lives requires an appreciation of Mennonite history, socio-economic structure, and the values and norms reproduced by women during their everyday lives, this dissertation has a comprehensive, four-fold structure: Part I summarizes the history of the Mennonites near Cuauhtemoc and analyzes its representational politics; Part II lays out the anthropological processes of fieldwork and writing; Part III describes the contemporary everyday lives of Mennonite women with a focus on their gendered work, including health work, and socializing practice; Part IV discusses the socialization processes of Mennonite women, inherent challenges in Mennonite social structure, and the ways in which Mennonites cope with these challenges.

This dissertation investigates the medical treatment of the female body in medieval China based on the women-related sections of a pivotal work in the history of Chinese medicine, the second through fourth scrolls of Sun Simiao's Beiji qianjin yaofang (completed ca. 652 C.E.). This text provides central evidence for the emergence of gynecology as a separate medical specialty in medieval China and reflects the highest level of elite medical knowledge regarding women at its time. It is the first text in the Chinese medical tradition to clearly define the parameters based on which the gender-specific treatment of the female body was conceptualized in the medical practice of the literati tradition. Its comprehensive nature shows that women's medical treatment in the seventh century was performed by and contested between large variety of practitioners, including literate male elites, professional midwives, other female members of the household or community, and religious specialists. The core of this study consists of an annotated translation of this text, covering the topics of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, postpartum recovery, supplementing and boosting, menstrual problems, vaginal discharge, and miscellaneous conditions. The translation is preceded by an introduction which discusses the author and his work, then summarizes and explains the contents of my text, and lastly indicates topics for future research and potential interpretation in the areas of women's health in general, reproduction, physiology, and issues of the gendered body. Lastly, this study includes two indeces for materia medica and for symptoms, syndromes, and diseases.

The purpose of this dissertation study was two-fold; (1) to discover the health culture, or explanatory model of latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) for Mexican immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border who have been diagnosed with LTBI; and, (2) to identify those coercive and/or oppressive elements unique to this setting and population, embedded in power structures and worldviews that may shape both the conditions and social responses to diagnosis and treatment of LTBI. The viewpoints of nine Mexican immigrants diagnosed with LTBI and their spouses in their every day struggles within the historical, sociocultural, political, and economic context of the U.S.-Mexico border were explored to address the three research aims. This critical ethnographic study provided a full and systematic account of the popular and professional explanatory models that underpinned the Mexican immigrants' cultural construction of LTBI and preventive therapy. Informants participated in three in-depth interviews conducted primarily in their homes with a bilingual interpreter during a four-month period. Kleinman's Explanatory Model of Illness provided the conceptual underpinnings and critical theories provided the theoretical perspective for this study. Data sources included interviews, a demographic data questionnaire, participant observation, and field notes. Data analysis was directed toward the inductive generation of subcategories, categories, and domains that answered the research aims. The results of the study illuminated several points including the: (a) multiple conflicting viewpoints between the Mexican immigrants' popular explanatory model of TB and the diagnosis of LTBI; (b) powerful and dominating Mexican popular explanatory model of TB and how it influenced the informants' understanding of LTBI; (c) lack of folk knowledge and exclusive use of the formal health care system for producing household health during preventive therapy; and, (d) the macro-level social, political, economic and historical factors that influenced adherence to preventive therapy in the Mexican immigrant diagnosed with LTBI. This research has significance for nursing in three areas, it: (a) elicited the Mexican immigrants' popular explanatory model of TB; (b) identified points of departure with the U.S. professional explanatory model of TB and LTBI; and (c) provided essential information that the immigrants' used to inform treatment decisions for LTBI.