Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4308. Adviser: Nils Jacobsen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 449-494) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2429. Adviser: Christine M. Thompson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-141) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1245. Adviser: Bradley A. U. Levinson. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 19, 2007)."

This study is an ethnography of a frontline culture of neoliberalism. It examines the new rationalities through which Chennai's reforming water utility, Metrowater, defines and categorizes people at its everyday public interface. It analyzes how reforms designed to minimize the state are internalized within a state bureaucracy. The study uses the concept of translation to call attention to the distortions and displacements through which global texts of reform are localized and decoded by local actors. The disciplines of reform in Metrowater produced new boundaries and stand-offs, both within the agency and across its service interface. Internally, they constrained the autonomy of frontline engineers and established close vigilance over their activities. Notions of efficiency based on radical commensuration and quantification reduced all value to standardized, measurable indicators. This culture of audit empowered financial managers and accountants over the traditionally powerful engineering departments. The reforms thus, in the name of public accountability, staged a stand-off between two sets of elitist disciplines, those of the old developmentalist and the new commercial bureaucracy, thereby silencing all alternative options within an overarching common sense. Yet the audit culture also engendered a vision of transformation in which engineers presented themselves as actively reforming, streamlined, and meritocratic entrepreneurs. The punitive effects of the reforms were also passed across the service counter, provoking new effects of categorization: engineers displayed a sharpened hostility toward a certain "public" comprised of demanding, unruly and over-politicized masses of slum-dwellers. The ethnography interrogated the totalizing order of the urban grid, here represented by the underground network of water-pipes. It showed that this sovereign grid was punctured by bypass connections and illegal taps which revealed the contentious and compromised order of a ground-level service. The grid embodied a myth of order, produced by silences, half-truths and euphemisms. Euphemisms constituted a discursive mode through which "corrupt" practices such as bribery were folded into the morality and logic of daily practice in the depots. Water, as the classic commons, demonstrated the leakiness of abstract orders, and provided an insightful lens into neoliberal governance by challenging projects of commodification/privatization as well as bureaucratic channels of state sovereignty.

The field study took place in Dzodze, Ghana, over a period of 4 months in 2009. The data was collected through semi directed interviews and ethnography. The aim of this study was to investigate how localized practices provide a lens to gain larger insights into national and transnational politics of healing and knowledge. Precisely, how are current relationships between informal healers and biomedical practitioners performed in the everyday life of Dzodze, Ghana? The results of the study indicate no direct or institutionalized collaboration between biomedical practitioners and healers, however there is some form of relationships between informal birth attendants and public midwives. It is also apparent that the power relations linked with formal practices decrease possibilities for collaboration with informal medicine and also have a negative influence on any possible medium of innovation. The study also shows that people continue to use informal medicine because it works for them yet government reaction towards integration of informal medicine into national health system remains slow. Keywords: informal medicine, biomedicine, relationships

Entre l'époque coloniale et la décolonisation se développa un dialogue fécond, mais inégal entre les deux disciplines que sont la psychologie et l'anthropologie (grâce à Kraepelin, Freud, Mead, Benedict, Linton et Kardiner, notamment). Une nouvelle discipline naquit alors, celle de la psychologie anthropologique, qui usa de sa scientificité pour développer un discours sur l'homme. Homme parfois ramené à une psychologie aux fondements évolutionnistes (au nègre, à l'homme de la horde), d'autre fois incompréhensible sans l'étude de sa culture (à une personnalité de base), mais, aussi compris comme totalité (l'homme total). Ainsi, grâce à l'École française de sociologie et d'anthropologie (Durkheim, Bastide, Devereux, Levi-Strauss et particulièrement Marcel Mauss), s'instaura une manière nouvelle d'appréhender l'homme, un autre regard à poser sur lui. Regard égalisant davantage les disciplines qui l'étudient. Regard désirant le saisir dans sa totalité, voulant voir l'homme concret socialement institué, la personne telle qu'elle est vécue par le groupe. Du travail maussien sur l'Homme en général sembla émerger une réflexion historico-anthropologique sur la personne, particulière selon la culture où elle se trouve. Ainsi, Marcel Mauss donna naissance à l'anthropologie de la personne, qui saura intéresser bon nombre de ses étudiants et collègues (Dumont, Griaule, Meyerson, Leenhardt), et qui marquera aussi de nombreuses recherches postcoloniales, telles que celles menées à l'hôpital Fann de Dakar. Lieu où, au sortir de la colonisation sénégalaise, les chercheurs (Collomb, Zempleni, Ortigues, Sow) s'inspirèrent de la discipline anthropologico-psychologique pour penser l'Homme africain, et particulièrement, son fou. Ils tentèrent de décoloniser la psychiatrie par la réintégration du savoir et des pratiques traditionnelles. Ils voulurent de plus créer une psychiatrie capable de saisir le personnage africain pour ce qu'il est dans son milieu, l'idéalité symbolique qu'il représente. Un personnage masqué grâce à une triple relation aux ancêtres, à la communauté et a soi-même. Personnage total à l'image de ses pratiques thérapeutiques traditionnelles, incorporant sa culture et incorporé par celle-ci.

This thesis investigates the "Muslim woman" as an ideological construct and what it has come to mean in both Eastern and Western thought. It examines the discourses within the historical, social and political context of Islamism, Orientalism and Feminism. This thesis explores the foundations and influences of Islamic images constructed by the West. It analyzes contemporary feminist thought in order to offer a survey of Islamic feminist approaches to the Islamic woman. There is a consistent, truncated, stereotypical image of Islam in general, and Muslim women specifically, which are overwhelmingly evidenced in popular films in America. In order to contextualize these images, this thesis offers suggestive evidence that these stereotypes are not just in films, but are perpetuated within Islamist discourse, substantiated by Orientalism and repeated by Feminist discourse. Chapter One provides an overview of current relations between the West and the East to show how the image of Islam has come to be understood today. Although the role of Muslim women is generally ignored, it is important to understand how historical and current events have used religious rhetoric to demonize Islam as a religion, and Muslim men as terrorists and oppressors. Chapter Two investigates how the veil has become the "unifying" symbol: a signifier that distinguishes Islam from the outside. It is unique as a symbol because it constantly tells the West to stay out of Islamic issues. Chapter Three provides an overview of Colonialism as a framework for the historical inclusion of the image of Islamic women and of the veil in Western thought. I demonstrate, by examining contemporary theorists such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, how colonial discourse has created a socially constructed colonial subject of the Muslim male and female which is based on "difference." Chapter Four draws on current scholarship in the areas of religion, film and gender to demonstrate the importance of cinematic representations of the constructed Islamic woman and how they have been perpetuated within the discourses of Orientalism, Feminism and Islamism. By examining films and numerous movie guides, this chapter demonstrates the thorough research sampling done to illustrate how the Muslim woman is constantly depicted in American cinema as veiled, silent and invisible. The concluding chapter explores the voices of women writing from within the Islamic tradition who are interrogating the assumptions of the nationalist framework, and its compatibility with women's rights. It explores various eminent Islamic feminist scholars' approaches to the Muslim woman. Leila Ahmed, Fatima Mernissi, and Nawal El Saadawi all claim that the veil is a major element of stereotyping, and that it is among the most visible signs of Islam women's oppression. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

A common narrative in the late twentieth-early twenty-first centuries is that historic rural landscapes and cultural practices are in danger of disappearing in the face of modern development pressures. However, efforts to preserve rural landscapes have dichotomized natural and cultural resources and tended to "freeze" these resources in time. They have essentialized the character of both "rural" and "developed" and ignored the dynamic natural and cultural processes that produce them. In this dissertation I outline an agenda for critical and applied heritage research that reframes heritage as a transformative social practice in order to move beyond the hegemonic treatment of heritage as the objects of cultural property. I propose an anthropological theory of shared heritage: a culturally mediated ethical practice that references the past in order to intervene in alienating processes of the present to secure a recognizable future for practitioners and prospective beneficiaries. More specifically, I develop (1) an ethical framework for shared heritage practice that values social tolerance and future security, (2) a model for the critical assessment of a heritage protection strategy's potential for supporting a shared heritage ethic, and (3) a methodology for scholars, heritage advocates, and community leaders to realistically enact shared heritage. I document two case studies of rural residents implementing heritage protection strategies in the face of suburban and tourism development in Hadley, Massachusetts, and Eleuthera, Bahamas, respectively. I engage with these case studies at three distinct levels: (1) locating and critiquing the potential for a shared heritage ethics in the attempts to preserve private agricultural land in Hadley; (2) developing and applying a community-based heritage inventory assessment in Hadley; and (3) modeling an internet-based communications system for supporting shared heritage development in Eleuthera. Taken together, this dissertation offers an anthropological model for documenting and analyzing the discursive and material productions of cultural identities and landscapes inherent in heritage resource protection and a set of methods that heritage professionals and practitioners can apply to cultivate shared heritage ethics.

I led a participatory action research (PAR) project with the staff and homeless clients of Ahope Day Center in Asheville, North Carolina, which was meant to evaluate client satisfaction with services and attitudes about certain issues. Project is led by an inquiry group consisting of members of Ahope staff and Ahope clients. The project is a co-designed, co-implemented, and co-interpreted mixed-method evaluation of Ahope's services, client attitudes about education and the environment, client adaptive strategies, optimism levels, and a mapping of client daily routines. The data was collected through participant observation, document analysis, surveys, a listing activity, and informal interviews. Documents were coded using grounded theory and themes emerged related to the value of the intangibles of security, community, and ‘being seen' at Ahope while some suggestions were also made. Findings included client attitudes indicating the importance of the environment and education to clients, high optimism levels among clients, and a number of suggestions for the improvement of Ahope's services.

No description available.