This thesis presents a case study of the Dogon CultureBank in Fombori, Mali, a local initiative started in 1997 to conserve cultural heritage through the provision of microcredit loans. Participants obtain credit to support small enterprise by using cultural objects as collateral; the objects are conserved and exhibited in a community museum collection. This innovative approach to microfinance has provided financial incentive for cultural conservation in a rural Dogon community, increased social capital among participants, and heightened community awareness of the importance of cultural heritage as a resource for development. Results of quantitative analysis demonstrate a significant increase in overall income generation patterns among participants; however, male borrowers have consistently benefited from both higher loans and greater increases in income generation than female borrowers who are targeted as the primary beneficiaries. The study concludes by highlighting the contributions of the model to the broader field of microfinance in developing countries.

Alaska Native cultures are based on subsistence fishing, hunting and gathering, which also remain important sources of food supply. The 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) extinguished all aboriginal rights to territory, hunting and fishing, creating Native corporations to own Native land in fee simple, instead of reservations with land in trust with the U.S. government (Indian country). ANCSA led to the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which protects subsistence activities on federal land. Alaska followed ANILCA's subsistence guidelines on state land, until the preference was found unconstitutional in 1989. Subsistence and sovereignty today are linked to a network of interacting institutions such as tribal governments, Native corporations, ANCSA, ANILCA and court decisions. The thesis examines these and argues that institutional changes must occur for Alaska Natives to be sovereign and protect subsistence resources and culture. Suggestions include restoring Indian country to Alaska, resource co-management, and amending ANILCA.

The subject of this dissertation is the negotiation of gender relations and ideologies in the matrilineal communities of Mgeta Division in the Uluguru Mountains of Tanzania. The dissertation revisits social theories that emphasize the importance of hierarchical binaries such as public/private, and production/reproduction in understanding social inequities. The analysis reworks these theories by focusing on the active construction (and dismantling) of these separate spheres. Through an understanding of the multiple, conflicting and intersecting relations of space, work and gender, the research will describe the active negotiations over the division of labor. Of particular interest is the construction of a "rational masculinity," expressed in development discourse as the wisdom, organization and planning necessary to success in "modern," capitalist agriculture. The study highlights the interconnections between this discourse and rural social histories and conflicts, including the creation of a local elite of farming and business leaders, the organization of state power and relations of rule, and shifts in the meanings and relations of kinship. This dissertation also describes a counter-hegemonic gender discourse in Mgeta that is based in the symbolic and material interdependence between husbands and wives. Ideals of reciprocity and interdependence are invoked through the spatial organization of work and other daily activities, challenging, but at the same time circumscribed by, class and gender hierarchies. In this dialogue between the global and the local, gender ideologies are analyzed not as just an effect or by-product of capitalism, but as a central aspect of the meaningful context in which action takes place (Roseberry 1991:42). In Mgeta there is no single gender ideology following from the single determining force of capitalist agriculture. Instead there are multiple and shifting ideologies that express and shape a whole range of social processes. Here I try to examine some of the intersections and conflicts and the different ways in which the farmers of Mgeta create common sensibilities about self, place and history.

This dissertation is based on twenty-one months of ethnographic fieldwork in Damascus and Suwyada, Syria. Research focused on the Druze religious sect. The central focus is on a religious minority's strategies for preserving their sense of separateness and uniqueness while at the same time claiming pan-Arab and patriotic Syrian affiliations. Three broad topics are used to discuss this: reincarnation, marriage, and memory. Because the primary focus is on a religious minority, one of the major concerns has been to elucidate notions of relational identity from a Druze point of view. This dissertation is an argument against any kind of facilely labeled Druze identity, and is an extended discussion of various facets of Druze experience, on what it means to be a member of a religious minority in the contemporary Middle Eastern state of Syria in the mid-1990s. Identity might be best understood as affiliations and affinities, multiply interacting levels of meaning, and a question of frequently adjusting focus and perspective. Reincarnation is not usually associated with Islam, and the Druze belief in reincarnation is one thing that sets this sect apart from the Sunni majority in Syria, even stigmatizes them. This dissertation also explores the nature of the everyday lived experience of Druze reincarnation, and how it is a point of cohesion for the community as a whole, but at the cost of some emotional splintering of individuals selves and families. Reincarnation has concrete social effects on both families and communities. It brings together members of unrelated families who otherwise would never have cause to know one another. Reincarnation also functions doctrinally to support the sect's prohibition against outmarriage. Outmarriage was perceived to be occurring with increasing frequency among the Druze in the 1990s, and was a hot topic of conversation. This dissertation explores the nature of ideologies being reproduced, as well as challenged and altered, through the debate ongoing in the community regarding marriage and outmarriage. Both reincarnation and outmarriage are topics that raise the issue of the Druze's relationship to non-Druze, and relational identity, since they both deal with ideologies of boundary maintenance, and "purity" of sect membership.

The Native American Vendors Program of the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico is a major tourist attraction and a central locus of the Native American arts and crafts market in the American Southwest. Known as the Portal Program for its location under the front portal, or porch, of the Palace of the Governors on Santa Fe's central plaza, the program is descended from informal markets held in the same location since the mid-nineteenth century. The Portal became a regular venue for Native American arts and crafts beginning in the 1930s when the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs (now the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts) sponsored weekend markets during the summer months. The market continued to grow in popularity under the management and organization of the Native American vendors. In the early 1970s the Museum of New Mexico officially recognized the program, and in response to legal challenges in the 1970s and 1980s, the Portal was formalized as an educational program. Today the Portal is closely managed by the program's participants, with strict guidelines regulating participation in the program and the quality of objects sold. The Portal is much more than just a place to buy and sell indigenous art. It is an economically important Native American workplace that supports hundreds of families throughout New Mexico. It is also a socially important community for the program's participants. As a museum program, the Portal is an instructive example of how Native American people and state institutions can work together to promote understanding and to support indigenous cultures. Finally, the Portal is a place of dynamic interaction between a diverse group of Native American artists. As such it is central in the development of new artistic styles and forms while at the same time protecting traditional production techniques. The lives of Native American people are complex, with many dividing time between traditional responsibilities in their home communities and employment and social involvement in the broader national and global society. This work reflects that reality and provides one examination of contemporary Native American experience.

This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of birthing practices among Raramuri women in Northern Mexico. The Raramuri practice of kin assisted birth is consonant with core cultural norms and social practices. Raramuri curers diagnose and treat illness, but they typically do not assist at birth, which is a deemed a normal part of the life course. Health is maintained by adhering to community norms of thinking well and acting well, through such behavioral ideals as non violence, generosity, reciprocity, and modesty. Pregnant women minimize risk at birth by conforming to these ideals. The Raramuri, an indigenous population of northern Mexico, number about 100,000. They live in remote canyon regions of the Western Sierra Madre, engaging in subsistence horticulture and pastoralism. In recent years, increasing numbers of Raramuri are migrating to urban areas, due to the effects of logging, drought, and drug growing, all of which contribute to loss of arable land. As a result, Raramuri are entering urban areas in unprecedented numbers. This dissertation draws upon reproductive histories, birth narratives, and participant observation in two sites: Chihuahua city and a remote rancho. The Mexican government provides health services to Raramuri in both localities, and Raramuri women have their most sustained and frequent interaction with mestizos when they seek health care. Reproductive health interactions are fraught with miscommunication, which Raramuri experience as a loss of autonomy and control, leading to their reluctance to utilize services. High infant and maternal mortality rates among the Raramuri are typically blamed on non utilization of existing services. I provide an in depth and nuanced analysis, which addresses poverty and malnutrition, mistrust of state health and family planning agendas, and forms of institutional racism. I argue that the structural violence the Raramuri experience is glossed over by reports which deflect responsibility and blame the victim. Raramuri birthing practices are an expression of women's sense of agency, a form of resistance to a state apparatus they do not trust, and an important site of social reproduction where key values are transmitted and reaffirmed within families, extended kin groups, and Raramuri society as a whole.

This dissertation explores from an historical and political perspective the rapid engagement and incorporation of the Yanomami of the Alto Orinoco as citizens into the Venezuelan national dynamics. It accounts for the Yanomami's multiple adaptive responses by which they reconcile cultural differences between their habitual ways of life and the new political structures of national society. Specifically, the major concern is to explore the influences on political organization, ethnic identities, and social relationships emerging from the linkage and interaction between the nation-state's structures and the Alto Orinoco Yanomami. The gradual participation of Yanomami men and women in national political institutions such as the Alto Orinoco Municipality, political parties, and electoral processes has led them to develop different strategies of accommodation to these novel governmental entities. This study examines how the Yanomami of the Alto Orinoco, Amazonas State, Venezuela, react to the expansion of the national political structures through diverse strategies of accommodation and negotiation. These strategies refer to the Yanomami's adaptive and selective responses to intercultural experiences undergone because of external agents. These indigenous responses have not just implied collective forms of organization or general consensus in decision-making among community members, but also random and individual actions asserted in order to meet their personal needs and desires within a wider context of the Venezuelan national society. By examining these actions, I analyze from an historical approach the cultural encounters and the cultural resilience displayed by those Yanomami who have lived under the influence of missionaries, criollo groups, and other indigenous peoples. The ultimate purpose is to reveal how Yanomami past and present behaviors challenge the assumptions that "relatively isolated" indigenous peoples are merely passive receivers of assimilation processes provoked by national expansion. On the contrary, they have been very active choosing their means of adaptation to coping with the national frontier expansion.

Relocation, the removal of over 110,000 "persons of Japanese ancestry" from their West Coast homes to relocation centers in the continental interior during World War II, was a culturally critical event in the history of Japanese Americans. While internment has been intensively studied, it has lacked a unifying theoretical approach to the disparate material, behavioral, and symbolic experiences of internment. When viewed through the lens of place, and a particular variety of cultural landscape called an eventscape, the relationships between different scales of experience of gender, age, or factional groups become apparent. An eventscape is a cultural landscape that results from people's participation in culturally critical events. The heuristic value of eventscape is its capacity to depict the multiple spatial, temporal, and social scales of Relocation and to represent the material patterns and social-symbolic relationships between people and places. A persistent theme in the history and anthropology of relocation is shikataganai, the idea that a cultural predisposition toward acceptance of unalterable circumstances precluded internee resistance. Japanese Americans' relationships with the places of relocation demonstrate that many did resist, especially through strategies of everyday resistance. Internees manipulated their built environments in order to create "home places" that defied the imposed identity of "prisoner." Ceramic tablewares from the Manzanar War Relocation Center landfill indicate that some female internees may have attempted to serve traditional meals in their barracks in order to mitigate the effects of the mess hall. Oral history data reveal the ongoing relationships that some Japanese Americans have with the locations associated with the events of Relocation. The "Tucsonians" were young internees who refused to be drafted and served prison terms in the Catalina Federal Honor Camp near Tuscon, Arizona. These resisters use the sites of their incarceration as memorials that instruct Japanese Americans and other visitors, in the suppressed history of resistance to internment. Through storytelling and place commemoration, they challenge the master narrative of relocation that claims that Japanese Americans complied with relocation without protest.

This is a study of an event, the twiza, a form of co-operative work regulated by codified practice ('rf), with the focus being on the way the event is managed (or even created) by talk, especially the talk of the leader or cix. Various kinds of indirection, especially the genre of "teasing" (tqcab), are seen to be crucial to understanding how the cix orchestrates talk in pursuit of his goals, alternating between persuasion and coercion, and how group members at times subvert, at times reinforce, the hegemony of the cix.

In the late 1990s, a 30-year-old decision by computer programmers was translated into "Y2K," a problem that threatened the technological and social infrastructure of contemporary Western society. This work examines that translation from the dominant perspective and juxtaposes it to the experiences of people who believed Y2K was real. In contrast to "mainstream" views that ultimately saw Y2K as a "non-event," these individuals constructed and experienced Y2K as an event with significant impact on their lives. In the dominant view, Y2K was understood through the lens of technology; when the technological failure markers that came to define Y2K in this construction did not materialize, Y2K became a non-event. For believers, who used a different set of markers, Y2K retained significance. This work demonstrates the importance of examining alternate perspectives on events, by showing that Y2K was only a non-event in its dominant construction.