<p> This study examines whether 500 solid copper bullets fired from a 9mm firearm would have a significant effect on the individual rifling characteristics of the barrels of a Glock Model 17, a Beretta Model M9, and a Taurus Model PT 92 AF. Five silicone casts of each barrel bore were prepared over the course of this study. The casts were used to compare and evaluate the wear on the rifling of each barrel and note any changes that may have occurred during the progression of the study. The bullets were purchased as reloading components and were tested for hardness in addition to Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS) analysis. The bullets used for examination were collected at the start, throughout the experiment, and after the firearm had been cleaned following the 500 firings. The bullets, as well as barrel casts, were analyzed using a Leica FS C comparison microscope. Results from the analysis indicate the bullets do not obturate and they do not engage with the grooves of each barrel. Analysis of land impressions show striations that deteriorate or disappear completely; while others appear over the course of firing the 500 copper bullets. Regarding the influence of the bullet wear on the individual rifling characteristics, the striations of each firearm barrel were permanently changed to the point where bullet identification no longer was possible.</p><p>

<p> Anthropology has a long history collaborating with artists to understand their artwork. However, little research exists in the discipline that focuses on artists as a group, their creative process, and what may influence that process. In particular, how artists use nature and place has not been studied; instead, anthropology has generally considered nature and place as merely a backdrop for culture rather than for its impact on cultural expression. Identification of diverse aspects of the interdependence of ecological and social systems can inform our understanding of how people address issues of environmental concern. Managers, scientists, creative people, and others working at the nexus of disciplines, management needs, and ecological and social systems can facilitate this understanding through knowledge sharing. In my research I examined how two groups of visual artists process their interaction with the environment through what I term &ldquo;experiencing with&rdquo; nature and how this may influence them as artists. </p><p> I employed phenomenological inquiry methods and interdisciplinary analysis to investigate the ways in which artists develop a sense of experiencing with nature and a sense of place. I developed an experiencing formula framework representing relationships between variables involved in the act of experiencing in order to analyze artists&rsquo; narratives and actions as a way to examine their perceptions of their experiences with nature. The analysis made evident six primary categories of findings: artists&rsquo; sense of experiencing with nature, their purpose of experiencing, their process of experiencing, their conceptual definitions of nature, their access to nature, and how they experienced nature through the artist residency programs. I propose the experiencing formula framework may be suitable for describing human-environment relationships beyond the boundaries of artists and nature. </p><p> The artists&rsquo; experiences were individual and influenced them to varying degrees. They experienced nature with purpose and encountered both tension and inspiration while gathering resources for their work. They were not so concerned with defining nature as seeking to tell their story of place through their sense of experiencing to communicate their experiences with nature through their works. Experiencing with nature provided them with a language for expressing themselves. Nature was a place for journey and exploration for the artists.</p>

Homelessness has become widespread in the United States over the past 20 years. Despite vast amounts of money and resources focused on resolving this problem, homelessness continues to grow. Based on three years of ethnographic research on the sheltering industry, I argue that a hypothesis of deviancy provides a hegemonic conceptual framework within which responses to homelessness operate. As a result, routine practices treat disorders within homeless people while marginalizing strategies of collective resistance against systemic inequities as unreasonable. Chapter 2 examines the political-economic context within which homelessness prospers. I explore responses to homelessness on the level of social policy and concrete actions undertaken locally by homeless people and advocates. Despite data suggesting a correlation between systemic inequality and homelessness, responses focus on developing more services to treat disorders within homeless people. Chapter 3 analyzes "helping" practices within the homeless shelter. Discourses of self-help and the medicalization of social problems guide efforts to detect and treat disorders. I argue that an effect of these actions is the production of self-blaming and self-governing homeless subjects unlikely to engage in collective resistance. The subject effects of statistical record-keeping practices re-producing "the homeless" as a category of subjects to be governed are also analyzed. Chapter 4, focusing on the experiences of one homeless woman, further analyzes how homeless people, even those who are non-compliant, remain enmeshed in a discourse of deviancy. Through examining staff hiring, training, and responses to increasing homelessness, Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate how the proper role for shelter staff is defined as a helping professional managing and governing homeless people within a therapeutic relationship. Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss the potential of an explicitly oppositional ethnographic engagement. Through an activist ethnographic intervention which explicitly takes sides against "common sense" conceptions, I explore how dominant discursive practices may lose their dominance as "normal" through engaging with social actors in problematizing routine practices and perceptions. New understandings become conceptually possible, creating space for new resistance practices to emerge within the shelter and in the local community.

This dissertation examines the cultural and political forces that shape and direct AIDS policy in the United States. Through a multi-sited, ethnographic research project in Springfield, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city with the 11th highest per capita AIDS rate in the nation, this project investigates the political culture that informs and directs needle exchange legislation. With a move toward a more politically engaged ethnography, this research blends political activism, participant observation, open-ended interviews and political analysis to provide an “insider” study of the policymaking process as it unfolded on the ground –from the Massachusetts State House and Springfield City Hall to an illegal needle exchange program operated by local AIDS activists. The political antagonism at the center of my investigation is a conflict between, on the one hand, the scientific consensus on the efficacy of needle exchange, and on the other, the moralizing discourse associated with injection drug use. Here, the often-contradictory forces of science and morality form a paradox within the policymaking process: although there is scientific consensus on the efficacy of needle exchange, needle exchange legislation is continuously defeated on moral grounds. Locating this paradox in the propensity of the American state - beginning with the Reagan administration in the early 1980s - to calibrate social policy through a juridical combination of an enhanced liberal individualism with neoliberal economic reforms, this dissertation interrogates the means by which policymakers harness a particular worldview of human nature–individual will, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, economic man–to make sense of the AIDS epidemic. To what extent can we locate the present role of moralism in American social policy as indicative of our contemporary political culture? Do social policies operate as forms of moral regulation to govern people in alignment with “the common sense of our age?” If so, can we then argue that social policies are an essential feature of liberal statecraft, a system of moral governance that is reconfiguring the contemporary relationship between individual and society? The immediate concern for democratic politics is the prospect that social policies directed at the needs of politically marginalized groups may not motivated by social concerns alone but based on the cultural stigma associated with their practices.

Madagascar is one of the richest sites of biodiversity in the world. During the last two decades, it has been the recipient of large amounts of foreign aid in an effort to halt biodiversity depletion. Despite these efforts, deforestation continues unabated and the conservation activities undertaken to date have been largely ineffective. To better understand the reasons for continued environmental degradation in Madagascar, a political ecology research framework is used to identify different social actor groups vying for access to natural resources and the extent to which their actions influence biodiversity conditions on the island. The application of this framework in a region on the central highlands of Madagascar reveals that local actors (most of whom are subsistence agriculturalists) resent conservation programs that fail to consider them as part of the “biodiversity” that international environmental nongovernmental organizations (IENGOs) are laboring to conserve. Local actors are frustrated by state-sponsored conservation programs that simultaneously victimize and penalize them by taking away traditional lands and then giving them “protected area” status. At the same time, elite and extralocal interests (e.g., politicians, businessmen), in collaboration with government civil servants, exert their power and influence to mine state resources for their personal benefit. It is this inequality in power and influence that permits extralocal actors to continue the pillaging of state resources without any accountability, as IENGOs and their donors willfully turn a blind eye to these activities. This research posits that contrary to the conventional wisdom of IENGOs working in the country, it is extralocal actors, and not local ones, who are primarily responsible for biodiversity depletion in this region of Madagascar. The behaviors of all of the actors in this situation assure the continuation of the status quo, which includes current patterns of biodiversity elimination. If this situation continues, the Malagasy rainforest and associated biodiversity will surely be eliminated within this century. To be more effective, IENGOs in Madagascar and elsewhere must take a more vigorous stance in undertaking activities that genuinely address local needs as well as the fundamental causes of biodiversity depletion.

The Transition movement is a grassroots movement working to build community resilience in response to the challenges of climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and economic insecurity. Rather than focusing on the state as a site for contestation or change, the movement adopts a "do it ourselves" approach, prioritizing autonomy and prefigurative action. It also places importance on relationships and community in the context of local places. It is open-ended and characterized by an ethos of experimentation and learning. Transition shares these place-based and prefigurative features in common with many other contemporary movements, from the Zapatistas to alternative globalization movements, to popular movements in Latin America, to most recently the Occupy movement. Though often not seen as "political" by conventional definitions that understand social movements in relation to the state, I argue that Transition's choice of practical, place-based forms and commitments is an ethical-political one, based on the state's failure to meet crises of our times, and it has political effects. In exploring the movement in its own terms, this ethnographic study of the Transition movement in the northeast US demonstrates the ways in which activists are locating power and possibility in the local and the everyday. Operating in the terrain of culture and knowledge production, the Transition movement is engaged in an effort to shift subjectivities and social relations, and to resignify power, security, economy, and democracy. Paying attention to the Transition movement's specifically place-based, prefigurative features provides a better understanding of the potential of this approach and its political significance. It also sheds light on tensions, which in the US context include challenges in addressing racism, inequality, and the neoliberal state.

The political entity of the County of Franklin, Massachusetts was created in 1811 and exists at the pleasure of the state legislature. In 1986, Franklin County politicians were given the opportunity to write a charter for the county, an event which was unique in 300 years of Massachusetts political history. I investigated the political processes by which Franklin County politicians articulated and put into operation their ideals of democracy, representation, and other dominant political concepts. My emphasis was to explore these processes anthropologically in order to discover the cultural and social processes at work in political arenas. I also document a historical moment. I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Franklin County (1986-1988) utilizing participant-observation techniques, formal and informal interviewing and archival research. My focus of attention was on the development of political conflicts between two factions who struggled to gain control of Franklin County's future. In addition, I focused on how such political operators excluded and silenced public voices and professional staff which sought to interject themselves into the conflicts. This dissertation contains representative segments of political discourses as they were framed within specific struggles. I identify such dialogues as the chief symbolic capital which was mobilized, domesticated, and used to produce various documents containing plans for the future of the county. In addition, I present my observations and information gleaned from interviews in order to describe the larger social contexts which contained this particular struggle. In my discussion, I locate my investigation of the charter process within theoretical treatments of power relations. I also discuss the implications of the charter commission in terms of public policy. And finally, I point to epistemological and methodological implications and challenges of conducting traditional anthropological fieldwork among powerful peoples.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation explores why Puerto Rico’s primary stakeholders’ participation in fisheries management is tokenistic at best. While participation discourses are present in Puerto Rico’s fisheries management, a parallel discourse about ‘overfishing’ and the ‘tragedy of the commons’ has created an irreconcilable gap between primary stakeholders and the management institutions. As part of this study I collected data in an arena where various key actors (commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen and agency experts) face each other in the consultation processes, i.e. scoping meetings and public hearings. These encounters proved to occur on an (un)common ground where participation in fisheries policy-making was nearly impossible due to: 1) knowledge conflicts between users and institutional experts/scientists, where each party claimed to possess a more reliable body of knowledge about the marine resource, and 2) a generalised distrust based on different conceptualisations about marine resources and different views of whom, how and why it should (or should not) be managed. I argue that the tensions between the actors involved have led to at least two mechanisms to give the fisheries management apparatus an appearance of stability: 1) the institutionalisation of ignorance and 2) the use of fisheries regulations as a ‘boundary object’ to align the actors, and to fix their identities and responsibilities. In short, participation praxis has been reduced to a minimum given the fissures between scientific knowledge and the primary stakeholders’ knowledge and between marine resource conservation and fishing activity. But above all, participation has been restricted because primary stakeholders distrust institutions that restrict small-scale/artisanal fishing while at the same endorsing construction development in vital coastal habitats. Such development, as understood by the fishermen, is against sound environmental management, given that it impacts negatively on essential ecosystems that are crucial to the fisheries well-being.The majority of the ethnographic research was done in a fishing community in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, over an eleven-month period. I collected qualitative data about commercial fishermen’s views on the marine resource and its management. I also documented how these fishermen negotiated ‘space to manoeuvre’ in the non-participatory environmental management scenario outlined above. The ‘greening’ of commercial fishermen’s discourses is a formidable example.Three months of ethnographic research were also conducted on nearby Culebra Island in an attempt to understand the Marine Protected Area (MPA) of El Canal Luis Peña (CLP) that is ‘marketed’ as a community-based natural reserve and a no-take zone. Although the MPA does not necessarily fulfil all the requirements to be considered a community-based environmental management programme, its creation was definitely a breakthrough in marine resource management participation processes when compared to the main island. Culebra’s MPA is an interesting and challenging case-study that not only contributes to the understanding of how environmental management and policy-making is done and transformed, but also contributes to the question of how, if at all, to put together the pieces when informants disagree.

This study examines the embeddedness of Spanish delivering technologies in networks constructing Latina/o linguistic and racial identity. It assesses potential impacts of technology on linguistic diversity, cultural continuity, and racial divides in the post 9-11 American context. Applying autoethnographic, multi-sited methodology, it critically examines discourses generated at (a) the SpeechTek tradeshow, and (b) three non-profit agencies in Holyoke, MA. Drawing data from participant-observation and structured interviews, it found residents of racially and linguistically endangered Holyoke had diminished access to these technologies, and they employed innovative cultural logic to reconstruct them as English language learning tools by opting instead for English. Implicated in white technological space, middle-class Spanish application producers attempted cultural brokerage. The study posits Spanish options as a contested digital borderlands, contact zone, dialogue, and cyborg technoscientific landscape where rhetorics of power pit Anglo-European universalist genres of language, race, and technology against hybrid voices of excluded populations of color.