This thesis provides an ethnographic examination of the contribution of recreational hunting in developing a sense of rural identity among hunters in Wellington County, Ontario. Throughout Summer and Autumn 2012, 13 semi-structured interviews were conducted with recreational hunters and their peers, with a total of 17 participants. Using the theoretical framework of anthropology of space and place, this thesis suggests that hunting functions to connect rural residents to a sense of identity in Wellington County, particularly in the context of landscape changes associated with rural gentrification. Hunting provides a means of control over hunters’ experience as rural people, while also providing a mechanism for establishing attachment to place through mastery and sensory experience. The results of this study indicate that hunting provides a reference point for establishing an identity in alignment with what participants recognized as rural values, and in opposition to what participants identified as urban characteristics.

Ce travail, intitulé La peine et le soin : une enquête sur l’espace et le temps des malades en prison, analyse le sens de la peine sous le prisme du soin. L’enquête explore différents mondes juxtaposés : de la peine, du soin et de l’environnement personnel du détenu. À partir d’un ancrage empirique solide, constitué de nombreuses observations et d’entretiens réalisés auprès de détenus malades et des différents professionnels évoluant dans cet environnement,une anthropologie de l’espace et du temps est proposée. La démarche concerne la manière dont les détenus-patients ainsi que les professionnels de la surveillance et du soin tentent d'articuler leurs activités autour de la maladie dans le monde de la prison et dans celui de l'hôpital. Les activités de ces mondes sont aussi analysées au regard de l'horizon temporel de la sortie de prison menacé par le temps de la maladie et de la mort. Contraintes spatiales et temporelles, qualification des personnes, des objets, des lieux et des rythmes sont au centre de cette réflexion "socio-anthropologique". L’analyse apporte des éléments de compréhension sur l’expérience de la maladie grave, bousculant les objectifs attribués à la peine et le sens de la justice. Cette "double épreuve" nous révèle en filigrane les contours de l'humain. / This work, entitled “Sentence and care: an investigation of space and time among sick prisoners”, raises the question of the prison sentence through the prism of illness. The study goes to the heart of different worlds that are juxtaposed: the worlds of prison, healthcare, and the prisoner. With a solid empirical foundation based on extensive observation and interviews with prisoners and the professionals working in this environment, an anthropology of space and time is here in proposed. The approach deals with the way prisoner-patients, the prison staff, and the healthcare professionals attempt to orient their activities around the disease,within the confines of the prison, and in the hospital setting. The activities in these different environments are also analysed with regards to the temporal horizon of the prisoner’s release,which is threatened by the time of disease and death. Spatial and temporal constraints, the qualification of the different persons, objects, places, and rhythms are all at the centre of this“socio-anthropological” reflection. The analysis provides some insights into the experience of serious illness, which upsets the aims attributed to prison sentences and the sense of justice.Through this “dual ordeal” we can see the outline of how humans are constructed.

Recent calls from progressive, subaltern and postcolonial geopoliticians to move geopolitical scholarship away from its Western ontological bases have argued that more ethnographic studies centred on peripheral and dispossessed geographies need to be undertaken in order to integrate peripheralised agents and agencies in dominant ontologies of geopolitics. This thesis follows these calls. Through empirical data collected during a period of five months of fieldwork undertaken between October 2014 and March 2015, it investigates the ways through which an Indigenous community of the Canadian Arctic, Tulita (located in the Northwest Territories' Sahtu region) represents geopower. It suggests a semiotic reading of these representations in order to take the agency of other-than/more-than-human beings into account. In doing so, it identifies the ontological bases through which geopolitics can be indigenised. Drawing from Dene animist ontologies, it indeed introduces the notion of a place-contingent speculative geopolitics. Two overarching argumentative lines are pursued. First, this thesis contends that geopower operates through metamorphic refashionings of the material forms of, and signs associated with, space and place. Second, it infers from this that through this transformational process, geopower is able to create the conditions for alienating but also transcending experiences and meanings of place to emerge. It argues that this movement between conflictual and progressive understandings is dialectical in nature. In addition to its conceptual suggestions, this thesis makes three empirical contributions. First, it confirms that settler geopolitical narratives of sovereignty assertion in the North cannot be disentangled from capitalist and industrial political-economic processes. Second, it shows that these processes, and the geopolitical visions that subtend them, are materialised in space via the extension of the urban fabric into Indigenous lands. Third, it demonstrates that by assembling space ontologically in particular ways, geopower establishes (and entrenches) a geopolitical distinction between living/sovereign (or governmentalised) spaces and nonliving/bare spaces (or spaces of nothingness).