The thesis is a multi-vocal and localized history of the destruction of ancient Malakulan society through depopulation, migration and conversion, of the salvation of some people who gathered around Christian communities, and of the relationship of these people and their descendants to the places they have left and to the communities in which they now live. The thesis brings a historical perspective to Vanuatu anthropology. Compared to earlier work in anthropological history in the Pacific by Sahlins, Dening and Bronwen Douglas, the main innovation in method is that all historical statements are set in their context, emphasizing the multiplicity of view points and revealing the significance of even minor variations which refer to important local issues, from land disputes to conversion to Christianity. Innovative use is made of funerary inscriptions, local maps and court archives, reflecting local forms of historical literacy. The research is part of a growing interest in Christianity in Oceania, after a long neglect by anthropologists. This is the first historical anthropology of Vanuatu and perhaps Melanesia to consider the long-term social impact of the dramatic depopulation that accompanied the colonial expansion of Europeans. The abandonment of the interior of the island of Malakula and the weakening of traditional links with other islands have reduced the social space of Malakula to the original zone of contact with Europeans, the coastal areas and nearby small islands. I argue that Christianity allowed the people of Malakula to create a new form of sociality in response to these events. The new society has its own time and space organized around the nuclear family meal and Sunday service, which were the two cornerstones of the conversion process, symbolizing the abandonment of former ritual activities and of the segregation of cooking fires according to ritual status. This process of cultural adaptation continues with the appropriation by villagers of the historical perspective of official courts favouring material evidence and legalistic principles in land disputes. Earlier research on Vanuatu was dominated by the themes of 'kastom', a discourse on tradition opposed to Western ways, and of the rootedness of people in place. This double emphasis is linked to the fact that most fieldwork in the country was done in the 1970s before a fifteen years ban on foreign research after Independence in 1980. In the context of the struggle for Independence and the restitution of alienated land, Vanuatu people needed to emphasize indigenous values and attachment to land. Today, priorities on the ground have changed and new types of discourses have come to the fore emphasizing conversion to Christianity and adopting new concepts reflecting a shift in preoccupation from recovering colonial land to the relation between indigenous Christian migrants and original owners.

This ethnography examines the processes in which rooted but overlapping forms of cosmopolitan engagements implicate the Tausug imagination of collectivity. It investigates Tausug expression of connection and belonging as they find themselves entangled into global cultural flow and caught up in the state and secessionist politics of attachment. Utilising methodological and theoretical approaches engendered by visual and material anthropology, the ethnography locates rooted cosmopolitan imagination in the works and lives of creative but marginalised and often silenced Tausug cultural agents engaged in street-based production, circulation, and consumption of popular music and dance videos on compact discs. The ethnography follows these cosmopolitan expressions as they are being imagined, embodied, reproduced, and shared by and across Tausug communities in the Zamboanga peninsula, the Sulu archipelago, and beyond through the digital spaces of the internet and cross-border flow of the videos. How the translocality of imaginaries reflected on the videos play out in everyday life and the broader politics of representation are demonstrated here as vital to the understanding of Tausug imagined community as an open, flexible, and dynamically engaging Muslim society despite long-standing political turbulence and economic uncertainty in their midst. Saliently, the thesis argues that Tausug cosmopolitanism cannot be reduced into a phenomenon driven by the expansive currents of Western-led globalisation. Rather, Tausug cosmopolitanism constitutes both continuity of and departure from past forms of translocal connections of Zamboanga and Sulu, which as a region was once integrated to a pre-colonial Southeast Asian emporium and continually through varying ways of connectedness. Old and new global processes come into play in shaping the everyday production of Tausug imaginaries inevitably rendering Tausug identity formation as a trajectory rather than an unchanging fact of being. Drawing from the Tausug ethnographic experience, the thesis contends that rooted cosmopolitanism does not necessarily constitute a singular condition but rather a contested and distinctively multifaceted phenomenon.

This thesis is a study of attitudes to regional and national identity in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking region in northeast Algeria, and among Kabyle migrants in Paris. I illustrate how Kabyles nurture a fragile balance of nationalism and regional particularism through a primarily moral notion of local community, and extend it to an alternative vision for an Algerian nation which they believe has been debased by a corrupt state regime and Arabo-Islamic ideology since national independence. The thesis is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork divided between two places – Paris and a large village in Kabylia – and reflects my interest in how people ‘imagine’ national community through their experience as members of smaller social groups. Many Kabyle activists today formulate an alternative vision of Algerian national politics as a federation of several regionally based affective communities, each maintaining internal solidarity. This echoes a tendency in French colonial writings on Kabylia, discussed in the opening chapter, to conceive of the region as an island, intensively connected yet defensive of its autonomy. As citizens of the existing Algerian state, many Kabyles contest assimilation by claiming to represent Algeria’s ‘true past’, and investing contemporary governance initiatives with its values. They represent the radical difference that this implies with metaphors of the Kabyle community as a family within ‘public’ national life, and accuse the state regime of reversing this relationship by adopting a language of coercive authority appropriate only within the family. The transmission of Kabyle values today relies heavily on music, and especially political song, which I demonstrate – beyond its role in disseminating dissident ideas – acts as a vehicle for a type of secular revealed knowledge widely seen as the purest embodiment of Kabyle morality. Beyond the hollow rhetoric of Western liberalism that some see in Kabyle activism, I set out to demonstrate that the particular narrative of identity that I examine, in stressing regional uniqueness at the expense of recognition from a centralized state, also reflects anomalies inherent in the concept of ‘nationalism’ itself as a compromise between the requirements of external co-operation and internal allegiance.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of a little documented indigenous group, the Warekena people, who live on the Xié River in north-western Amazonia. Examining the mythic histories of the animate riverscape, my work offers an overview of the emergence of riverside dwelling: starting with a macro view of Xié river lifestyles, I explain how seasonal and distinguishing historic-mythic narratives tie in to wider idioms, and to experiences of social reproduction. I focus on reproductive processes and the perinatal period, highlighting methods used by Xié dwellers to nurture healthy, quality-conscious lifestyles, and I examine Xié aetiologies and pathologies. Mindfulness, or awareness, is viewed as a key component of good health. In this context, healthy childbirth is for the birthing mother an art form, a practice for which her total life experience has prepared her. Childbirth is ranked with such other painful experiences as snakebite, and both childbirth and snakebite are opportunities for personal growth. Infant care is seen through the lens of specific, hands-on techniques that promote mindful states in both the carer and the cared for. Mindfulness emerges as a heuristic device that allows us to scrutinize the Amerindian soul and body, also elucidating soul-loss in the ‘animist’ lived world. I argue that mindfulness is a core characteristic of the ‘cool’ hydrocentric and status-conscious lifestyles of Xié river dwellers, and that it defines what it means to be a person, the Xié way.

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore how uninstitutionalised female preachers, or dā'iyāt, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia construct authority in a context in which male ulama dominate the production of religious knowledge and represent the apex of the religious and social hierarchy. The study was broad, descriptive, and explanatory and drew primarily on the framework known as ‘accountable ethnography’. Data collection occurred between June and December 2009 and consisted of observations, interviews, and collection of literary artefacts, which were reviewed alongside literature published internationally. A flexible mode of inquiry was employed, partly in response to constraints on public religious discourse imposed in Saudi Arabia after September 11, 2001. The study concludes that the dā'iyāt construct authority predominantly by relying on male ulama as marji'iyya diniyya (religious frame of reference) when issuing fatwas, as pedagogical models, as sources of charismatic inspiration, and as providers of personal recommendations. The dissertation also addresses a set of 'alternate' strategies of authority construction employed by Dr Fāṭima Nasiīf. Almost uniquely, this dā'iyā is found to construct authority that goes beyond reproduction of institutionalised views by developing scholarly arguments to support interpretations of Islamic texts that are responsive to women’s perspectives and needs. In doing so, she expands the parameters of religiously permissible practice while remaining, for her part, within the confines of orthodox practice. Thus, although her society and most researchers perceive knowledge as a masculine attribute in the Saudi religious sphere, in matters relating to women, as well as through active leadership in ritual practice, Dr Fāṭima demonstrates that the dā'iyā can become the authority. Nevertheless, for her and for the other dā'iyāt, the study finds that legitimatising female religious authority depends upon maintaining the established social order, including the hierarchy that places women in a subordinate position to men.

This thesis is an ethnographic analysis of a collection of field recordings of music from sub-Saharan Africa: The Sound of Africa series made and published by Hugh Tracey between 1933 and 1973. I analyse the aims, methods, value and potential use of this collection, now held at the International Library of African Music (ILAM), in order to address a gap in the ethnomusicological literature and to begin to develop a critical framework for an evaluation of field recording and aural ethnography. An archival analysis of the collection enables me to trace the scope and intended uses of Tracey’s recordings. Identifying a primary intended audience that has not to date been engaged, I argue for the need to develop a new way to circulate recordings among a source community that has never before been reached through institutional archival practice. I use a small sample of Tracey’s archival Xhosa recordings and develop a method of sound elicitation designed to take the recordings back to urban Xhosa communities in the townships located near ILAM. By circulating archival recordings using local mechanisms in township communities, rather than institutional archival methods, I assess the potential relevance of historical recordings to an urban source community more than fifty years after the recordings were made. Having collected and analysed contemporary Xhosa responses, I consider the limitations and the potential for the recordings to connect with indigenous audiences and generate value. I argue that non-analytical responses to historical recordings may contribute to ethnographic understanding, to people’s own sense of Xhosa identity, and to archiving practice in future. Such responses may help increase our understanding of the relationships between music collectors in the field and the people recorded, whether fifty years ago, today or in future.

The individual's experience of inner authority takes centre stage in the majority of scholarship on New Ageism, with many writers highlighting this theme as a defnitive characteristic of the spiritual culture. The aim of this thesis is to explore this topic and to ascertain the place of the individual and the collective within two commercial New Age feld sites in London. The qualitative data which lead this investigation were collected from a yoga centre called Shanti and a Suf dance organisation called the Suf Order. From this data, the thesis identifes an individual-collective dialectic, one which manifests in particular forms and with divergent orientations; the result is a multiplicity of types of individualisms which include collective forces. The study makes the case for this argument by focusing on four modes in which, at both sites, the individual and the collective co-produce each other. One, the (collective) class culture of the practitioners informs and is informed by the (individual) ideologies of self that the informants assert. Two, the (collective) capitalist context of the organisations infuence and are perpetuated by the ways the (individual) representatives of those organisations express themselves. Three, (collective) shared principles regarding 'positivity' and 'energy' enforce and are sustained by the (individual) feelings of the student. Four, the (collective) communities of practitioners depend on and contribute to the (individual) set apart status of the teacher. These four manifestations of the individual-collective dynamic appear with different orientations in each feld context; in all versions and in both settings, individual and collective are both present and mutually- constituting forces, but at Shanti the dialectics lean more towards the personal and at the Suf Order, the 'same' dialectics lean more towards the social. Each organisation refects and adds to the intersections, both in their forms and their orientations. In so doing, the two New Age centres present divergent balances of the individual-collective dynamic that correlate with the personal and social dispositions of their respective student bodies.

A questão principal que a presente tese procura investigar é se os corações artificiais produzem instabilidades ontológicas em termos do que é humano e não-humano. A atenção dada às práticas experimentais laboratoriais, clínicas e cirúrgicas permite iluminar os arranjos heterogêneos por meio dos quais tais dispositivos médicos emergem. Nas três etapas de pesquisa testes in vitro, testes in vivo e avaliação em humanos foi possível observar uma modulação entre a boa participação e um envolvimento não produtivo que deve ser evitado para o sucesso das intervenções. As relações instituídas nas práticas médico-científicas evidenciam a participação como um dado fundamental para a produção das tecnologias cardíacas, assim como a imaginação que diz respeito não apenas à idealização, mas também aos processos criativos emergidos na concretização/realização de procedimentos laboratoriais e clínicos, sendo, portanto, corporificada. O primeiro capítulo trata dos testes in vitro e tem como foco a problematização do eixo natureza e cultura. O segundo capítulo parte dos testes in vivo para problematizar as relações entre animais humanos e não-humanos. E por fim, o terceiro capítulo tem como foco a avaliação em humanos, problematizando as fronteiras entre a vida e a morte. Trata-se de uma divisão temática esquemática, embora a permuta ontológica entre natureza e cultura, humanos e não-humanos e vida e morte percorra todo o trabalho. Diante do alto índice de mortes associadas à insuficiência cardíaca, os corações artificiais são projetados como alternativas ou soluções auxiliares ao transplante de órgãos para pacientes que se tornam refratários aos tratamentos medicamentosos. Além de produzirem novos corpos e corporalidades, os corações artificiais trazem novos dilemas e recursos para a gestão da vida, podendo operar como uma pedagogia e preparação para a morte, na medida em que a suspende/prorroga, porém mantendo-a próxima. / The main question that the present thesis seeks to investigate is whether artificial hearts produce ontological instabilities in terms of what is human and non-human. The attention given to experimental laboratory, clinical and surgical practices allows to illuminate the heterogeneous arrangements through which such medical devices emerge. In the three stages of the research in vitro tests, in vivo tests and evaluation in humans it was possible to observe a modulation between good participation and an unproductive involvement that should be avoided for the success of the interventions. The relationships established in the medical-scientific practices show participation as a fundamental fact for the production of cardiac technologies, as well as the imagination - which concerns not only to idealization, but also to creative processes emerge in the accomplishment of laboratory and clinical procedures, being, therefore, embodied. The first chapter deals with in vitro tests and focuses on the problematization of nature and culture. The second chapter address the in vivo tests to problematize the relations between human and non-human animals. Lastly, the third chapter focuses on human clinical assessment, problematizing the boundaries between life and death. It is a schematic thematic division, although the ontological exchange between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and life and death runs through the work. In face of high death rate associated with heart failure, artificial hearts are designed as alternatives or auxiliary solution to organ transplantation for patients who become refractory to drug treatments. In addition to producing new bodies and embodiments, artificial hearts bring new dilemmas and resources for the management of life, and can operate as a pedagogy and preparation for death, inasmuch as the devices suspend/extend the death, keeping it close.

Submitted by Irene Nascimento (irene.kessia@ufpe.br) on 2016-07-08T17:49:19Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertação_de_mestrado_Julio Antunes Barreto Lins 1.pdf: 1178353 bytes, checksum: 037cedb3694724a34ebe3b2109f0538f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-08T17:49:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertação_de_mestrado_Julio Antunes Barreto Lins 1.pdf: 1178353 bytes, checksum: 037cedb3694724a34ebe3b2109f0538f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-04-29 / Programas chamados de Mindfulness Based Therapy, de meditação atenção-conscientização, têm apresentado resultados significativos em meta-análises. Devido a isso, diversos estudos qualitativos têm investigado as transformações pessoais e construído teorias, sendo a principal a teoria da transformação da situação perceptiva. Mas apenas recentemente, em 2014, foi publicada a primeira investigação qualitativa investigando transformações interpessoais consequentes de tais intervenções. Já no Brasil, a Política Nacional de Práticas Integrativas e Complementares no SUS incentiva o ensino da meditação para promoção da saúde. Localmente, o programa Atentamente de ensino de práticas no SUS compõe, com outras práticas integrativas, as abordagens do Núcleo de Apoio em Práticas Integrativas (NAPI) SUS Recife. Nesse programa o aprendizado de atenção-conscientização é apresentado em consonância com as vivências dos participantes. Quanto à metodologia, o presente estudo de caso construiu roteiro de entrevista qualitativa semi-estruturada e dialogada a partir das teorias fundamentadas. Foram entrevistados seis informantes chaves sobre as experiências com os estágios de desenvolvimento em intenção, atitude e atenção. Além disso, foram acompanhados quatro turmas do curso com observação participante. Quanto aos resultados, as categorias mais importantes elencadas no processo de transformação intrapessoal foram Aceitação, leveza, permitir mudança e deixar os pensamentos irem. Já na compreensão das transformações interpessoais as de maior significância foram Estar presente com o Outro, reagir menos, pensar melhor e autoconfiança. A teoria da dádiva se mostrou potente na elucidação da mudança de atitude frente ao outro a partir das práticas contemplativas, e recirculação de dádivas fundamentais. / Programs classified as “Mindfulness Based Therapies” have shown significant results in meta-analyzes teaching attention-awareness meditation. Because of this, several qualitative studies have investigated the personal transformations building theories, the main theory being the transformation of the perceptual situation theory. But only recently, in 2014, was published the first qualitative research investigating interpersonal transformations related to such interventions. In Brazil, the National Policy on Integrative and Complementary Practices in the SUS encourages the teaching of meditation for health promotion. Locally, the mindfulness-awareness based educational program Atentamente (“mindfully”) is part of the governmental strategy, the Center for Support in Integrative Practices (NAPI) SUS Recife. In this program attention-awareness of learning is presented in line with the experiences of the participants. As for the methodology, this is a case study built with qualitative interviews based upon the grounded theories. 6 key informants were interviewed about the experiences with the development stages in intention, attitude and attention. In addition, were followed four courses with participant observation. As for the results, the most important categories listed in personal transformation process were “Acceptance”, “lightness”, “enable change” and “let the thoughts go”. In the understanding of interpersonal transformations the main categories were “present with the Other”, “less reactive”, “better thinking” and “self-confidence”. The Gift theory proved powerful in elucidating the change of attitude from the other contemplative practices, and recirculation fundamental gifts.

This thesis examines the Templo Santa Muerte in Los Angeles, a small, loosely organized spiritual group dedicated to the veneration of La Santa Muerte, or the Holy Death. Although originating in the urban barrios (neighborhoods) of Mexico City, Santa Muerte is now venerated in the southwestern United States as well, primarily among working-class Mexican Americans. Although Santa Muerte has been condemned by the Catholic clergy and vilified in mass media and popular culture for its ties to crime and gang violence, my fieldwork at the Templo Santa Muerte demonstrates that not all devotees of Santa Muerte can be characterized in this way. For Templo members, Santa Muerte is foremost a supernatural instrument whose appeal is in large part derived from her singular commitment to satisfying their corporeal needs and material wishes. While this quality is also attributed to many Catholic saints, Santa Muerte is believed to operate independently of Church orthodoxy and is viewed to be more powerful because of this. The Templo Santa Muerte, on the other hand, incorporates some features of formal Catholic liturgy while simultaneously organizing its services around the individual petitions of its members. In doing so, the Templo’s founders maintain an effective balance between liturgical features familiar to their mostly Catholic members and the fundamentally instrumental relationship they have with Santa Muerte. I argue that this balance is central to the appeal of the Templo and to the logic of its founders, who took advantage of the tolerant and diverse cultural atmosphere of Los Angeles to establish a spiritual enterprise that is truly the first of its kind. My methodology and theoretical approach acknowledges this, favoring an ethnographic examination grounded in respondent testimonies, direct observations, and relevant ethnohistorical interpretations of the symbolism and ritual behavior associated with Santa Muerte. At its most general, my analysis of the cult and Templo of Santa Muerte is framed around three separate but mutually interactive and informative dimensions: the instrumental and social manifestations of the cult and Templo, respectively, and the structuring influence that Catholic soteriology and cultural materialism exerts over both.