This research is based on fieldwork at a start-up Internet company. The research captures understandings of an emerging ethos of information and the valorization of information technology in the New Economy. The research also captures the notion of the New Economy itself and concludes that it is to be understood as a late-Industrial development within the capitalist circulation sphere. The research explores the organizational dynamics and the corporate culture within the fieldwork environment. In these regards, modalities of disciplinary power, resistance and negotiation within the workplace are identified. In addition, the culture of the "start-up" company is regarded as a foil that contravenes against conventional business practices. The emergence of a new class of professional knowledge workers is also identified. The research concludes that this new class of knowledge workers embraces a constellation of meanings of work that reflect particularized values and ideals. The mediation of technology in everyday life and work, the reconfiguration of power relations in "information society" and the varied interpretations of the Internet medium are also described. The central themes of the research include the promise and possibility offered by the development and innovation of information technology along a changing cultural and economic landscape, as well as the perils associated with such change. At the core of the research reside moods and sensibilities of anxiety and uncertainty along this terrain of transformation. Questions of contradiction, simultaneity and ambiguity are also factored into the understandings and interpretations of the changing landscape of the New "Informational" Economy.

This thesis explores the construction and [re]construction of society on global, national, local, and individual levels. Postapartheid South Africa is in the midst of a transformative nationalist culture project. The extremity of the South African situation facilitates analysis and representation of the problem of [re]construction. [Re]-construction is problematic because it reveals the underlying contradictions of the contemporary cultural condition. Space---both the space of the text and the space of human interaction---are crucial factors in the transformation of society. The analysis of South African [re]construction and [re]spatialization necessitates a new method, and a new thought process---one that re-conceptualizes and integrates discontinuous ideas and experiences. The result is a subversive and re-constitutive text that should be read by all those involved in the study and creation of the human environment.

Ethnographic fieldwork and writing are employed to explore how men in Buenos Aires construct and contest masculinity. The fieldwork is focused on three sites of manly performance: asado (Argentine barbecue), soccer, and tango. Asado serves to construct an Argentine national identity that privileges the masculine over the feminine, but that represents the male as powerless in the face of female flesh. Practices of feminizing male and female flesh are examined in the context of the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Texts pertaining to asado, animal slaughter, and the dictatorship are used to argue that anal penetration precedes vaginal penetration among Argentine practices of feminization, and that the Argentine phallus is marked by its associations with bovinity. Debates concerning the politics of soccer are examined. Vanguardists assert that soccer is an opiate of the people, while populists assert that soccer stadiums are a transgressive and occasionally progressive space. Intellectuals reason that soccer is somehow homosexual, soccer fans cast aspersions on the sexuality of intellectuals, and fans of opposing clubs accuse one another of either sodomy or effeminacy. An argument is advanced that soccer promotes an oppositional, corporeal, working-class consciousness that refuses bourgeois sexual identities. The assignment of sexual identities is examined in the context of tango-dance. Speculations about the sexual identity of tango-dancers appear in tango performances that represent tango's primal scene as homosocial, in rumors purporting the homosexuality of a prominent tango figure, in homoerotic tango literature, in the manly act of men practicing tango-dance together, and in heteronormative tango choreography. Repeated references to written texts in this ethnography and in the speech of informants in Buenos Aires raise questions about ethnographic methodology and about the disciplinary relationship of Cultural Anthropology to Cultural Studies.

Avant-garde artists are among the most broadly theorized sub-groups of cultural producers. Artistic vanguards been theorized in two opposing ways---either as uniquely able to change social conditions through artistic invention and intervention, or, alternatively, as destined to recuperation into mainstream artistic and social structures. Anthropological theories and methods can contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between self-proclaimed artistic experimentalists and broader social, economic and political trends. This dissertation illuminates these relationships by focusing on the cultural ideals, artistic traditions and economic and organizational structures that undergird the production of contemporary experimental choreography in the United States. While avant-garde dance is my primary case study, I also aim to capture some of the overall dynamism and mobility of cultural processes. I do so by means of this ethnography of relationships that tracks the movement of both cultural ideals and resources (including capital in the form of public and private funding) in the production of experimental dance. The sites I examine are the National Endowment for the Arts (both in 1991--92 at the height of the funding controversies and then during the 1995 funding cuts and restructuring), the New York City-based 'alternative spaces' that house and present experimental choreographers, and finally, and the networks of choreographers that perform in these spaces. This research revealed that funding patterns and trends have deeply affect avant-garde choreography in the United States, especially since the founding of the NEA. Not only have artists' career narratives and the organizations they build up around themselves become increasingly professionalized, but the aims and content of their art-works have also responded to the agendas of funding agencies. And yet, I argue, the lived experience of seeing and making experimental dances still offers the possibility of real social critique even (or perhaps especially) if that critique is only implied through the multi-vocal, ephemeral, and non-commodity quality of this contemporary art form.

Based on research conducted over a twenty-four month period in Ljubljana, Slovenia, this dissertation provides an ethnographic study of the role of economists in charting Slovenia's transition process. The project argues that economics as a science is not homogeneous across cultures but that its history and implementation are contingent upon the position of its producers. It examines the practices of economists and the roots of their cultural authority which allows them to occupy influential positions beyond the technical confines of a community of specialized knowledge. The chapters trace the relationship between the history of economics as a discipline and the events that led to Slovenia's process of independence. They focus particularly on the emergence of depoliticized economic discourse as a legitimate critical strategy and track the way that this continued neutralization informed Slovenia's broader processes of change. Finally, this study questions the naturalness of the concept of transition presumed by the depoliticization of economic discourse through an analysis of discourses that contest or subvert it.

This dissertation examines changes in the mode of governance in the contemporary United States using societal responses to child abuse as an example. The phrase "child abuse" is only forty years old yet it has become the center of large public bureaucracies in every state. The history of the child welfare is reviewed with particular attention to the increased legal protection for abused and neglected children and how these rights reorganized the responsibilities of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. The ethnographic section details the crisis in the Illinois child welfare system after the death of a three-year old child in 1993. The creation of an Inspector General's Office is documented and several of their reform initiatives are considered in some detail, including the development of a Code of Ethics and the use of mediation in servicing families. One conclusion is that traditional agency-based services are being displaced by services offered within networks of providers. These network structures are built around a specific subject, the "child at risk." The implications of these developments for modes of governance in contemporary society are examined.

This dissertation, an ethnographic history of urban segregation and popular culture in the 1950s, is based on sixteen months of field research in Memphis and a year's archival work at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. I show that Memphians lived both race and music as part of specific urban rhythms and in changing urban spaces, creating and responding to a rich musical scene and new mass media. The music and its distribution crossed lines of class and race, and black and white people of different classes lived next to each other in many neighborhoods. My research makes clear that residential and musical juxtapositions almost never led to friendships or equal relationships of any sort across racial lines; I turn instead to detail the rich strangeness of this geography of juxtaposition and segregation, and the central place of music within it. Setting in motion a Memphis idiom of call and response, I take ethnography not only as a methodology but a theoretical concern, exploring the interrelations of theory and experience in both music and geography. Similarly, the dissertation attends to both production and reception, not only of music but of local meanings, including how white elites legitimized and in fact increased residential segregation in the postwar era by describing black and poor people as dirty, infectious, and polluting. Thus "culture" in my work denotes not simply music and dancing but the social construction of racial codes, as well as of bodies, ideals of citizenship, and styles of movement.

Magical movement is a distinctive Tibetan practice of physical yoga in which breath and concentration of the mind are integrated as crucial components in conjunction with particular body movements. Present in all five spiritual traditions of Tibet---some more prevalent than others---it has been part of their spiritual training since at least the tenth century C.E. Focusing on the magical movement from the ancient Bon tradition's Oral Transmission of Zhang Zhung and its contemporary representatives and lineageholders, this dissertation will include textual translation and analysis as well as ethnographical research reporting how it is used in Bon lay settings and monastic curricula today. In particular I will use a commentary by the famous Bonpo scholar and meditator Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen, who allegedly attained the rainbow body in 1934 (a sign, in the tradition, of the highest contemplative state). He was also part of the non-sectarian ( ris med) Tibetan movement of his time. Although this aspect does not transpire in his Commentary, I feel that Shardza's example is present as an inspiration to the spirit in which I relate to the context of the practice and material contained in his text. Examining the use of the subtle body in magical movement and the understanding of "magic" in that context, I propose that here magic can have the external meaning of magic, the internal meaning of medicine and the most internal or secret meaning of mysticism. Thus, these magical movements provide the yogin or practitioner an opportunity to break through or go beyond the limitations of the body and to bring forth the mystical experiences together with the magical and healing aspects. Finally, tracing the migration of this practice to the West, both in dharma or Buddhist centers and the contemporary Western medical settings, I report some of the benefits of using these mind-body techniques as part of a CIM (Complementary and Integrative Medicine) treatment for people with cancer. This may allow magical movement to participate in a larger dialogue, one that extends the conversation to the fields medical humanity and integrative medicine, among others.

This ethnographic study combines qualitative and quantitative research methods to examine the relationship between culture and language disability. Nine Cree and nine non-Cree couples, all parents of a language-disabled child, were interviewed. The parental responses from the two cultural groups were compared. Comparisons of interest included language socialization patterns, the influence of culture on the concept of language disability and perceptions of speech-language pathology service delivery. Few crosscultural differences in parental responses about caregiver-child interaction and about language disability were identified. It is hypothesized that a process of cultural blending may account for these findings. However, differences relating to the perception of speech-language pathology service delivery were found. While both groups described poor access to services, long waiting periods for intervention and insufficient quantity of service, there were differences in degree reported between the Cree and non-Cree families. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

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