This dissertation examines women's lives in a rapidly urbanizing rural community in Southern Pakistan to understand their responses to modernity in developing societies. Applying a mixed-methods approach, socio-demographic data is collected and contrasted with oral history and personal narratives to analyze social change through women's access to education and reproductive health care in the village. The results are framed within a post-modern and post-colonial feminist anthropological discourse to reveal that Sheherpind represents a model of 'multiple modernities' where women's agency and progress could only be contextualized in non-western, local cultural perspectives. Emerging trends in the village are evaluated for their 'Applied' significance to underscore areas of local, national and transnational policy significance. / Graduation date: 2013

This dissertation explores the transformation of a small town in South East Transylvania, Sighisoara, historically defined through a strong German presence. Despite the small number of Germans remaining in the region after the massive migrations of the last decades, historical German privilege (made visible through and materialized in the long-lasting architecture) is reformulated and re-configured in the present precisely through processes connected to valuing and producing this built landscape as historical heritage. Claims for stakes in the development of the area become entangled with an interest in heritage preservation publicly performed by a diverse set of (mostly foreign) actors. By analyzing a failed development project, the gentrification of the historical citadel, transformations in public spaces, and NGO and historical preservation funding, I argue that Germanness offers a discursive space in which local desires for a developed West are able to articulate, productively, with Western nostalgias for a developmental do-over, as well as with fears for an endangered European heritage at the 'margins' of Western civilization. This dissertation contributes to the anthropology of post-socialist transformations in Eastern Europe by drawing attention to the relationship between ethnicity and participation in a global capitalism. It shows how a continuous, living engagement with the "outside," the "West," with consumer capitalism has been part of local quotidian subjectivities and understandings of the world, all mediated by desire and access to mobility and possibility. Understandings of people's current relationship with development, consumption, the idea and reality of capitalism cannot be disentangled from these continuities, and I argue for locating analysis precisely in these relationships. This dissertation also brings a critical native voice to the body of English language Eastern European anthropology. At the same time, it attempts to both build on and disrupt historical approaches to the region by forging analytical and substantive continuities with discipline-wide approaches to ethnicity, development, and heritage tourism. / text

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / This thesis compares the Western response to two radical challenges in eras considerably removed in time: the 1900-1901 Boxer rebellion in China and today's Islamic terror. It brings a much-needed historical perspective to bear in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary Western conceptualization of the al-Qaeda and Taliban threat as a "clash of civilizations." It demonstrates that the current struggle against Islamic fundamentalism is not an altogether new challenge to Western interest and values. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are in the end an expression of the same forces of resistance that also led to the origination of the Boxers in 19th century China. The cultural pressure that the West unavoidably developed by its imperialistic policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries was replaced by the penetration of the world with values, standards and symbols of the Western way of life and civilization in the course of globalization. The West ought to understand that the current terrorist threat is not "the next stage of history," as some scholars erroneously puts it, but a known historical phenomenon in a new form, for which neither the West nor other cultures bear the blame. / Major (GS), German Army

This is an in-depth analysis of competing cultural ideas at a pivotal time in Japanese history through study of masculinity and identity. Through diaries, newspaper articles, and illustrations found in popular periodicals of the Meiji period, it is evident that there were two major groups who espoused very different sets of ideals competing for the favor of the masses and the control of Japanese progress in the modern world. Manner of dress, comportment, hygiene, and various other parts of outward appearance signified the mentality and ideology of the person in question. One group espoused traditional Japanese ideas of masculinity and dress while another advocated embracing Western dress and culture. This, in turn, explained their opinions on the direction they believed Japan should take. Throughout the Meiji period (1868-1912), the two ideas grew and competed for supremacy until the late Meiji period when they merged to form a traditional-minded modernity. / Department of History

劉鳳霞. / "2012年8月". / "2012 nian 8 yue". / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-201). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Liu Fengxia.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished