<p> The purpose of this inquiry was to develop a depth psychological understanding of immigration as a liminal experience. The Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) method derived meaning from the lived experiences of five recent immigrants from both Western and Eastern cultures. Emergent themes referenced the expanded understanding of immigration as a process of homecoming, perceived psychoanalytically as a transitional phenomenon; in Jungian terms, a transcendent one. Homecoming represented both a process of transformation and an area of experiencing as the individual came to terms with the liminal experience of immigration by integrating self-experience and bridging differences and similarities. Results offered a new view of a depth psychological approach to the phenomenon of immigration, suggesting an association between trauma and the loss of a sense of home, and the function of symbolization in the process of bridging differences and similarities, enabling psychic growth. Clinical implications included understanding the nature of the sense of loss of home, developing coping strategies for immigrants who see themselves as being in between worlds or homeless, and integrating immigrant clients into the new culture. Future research emphasized methodological considerations.</p><p>

<p> This study investigates the subjective well-being of Chinese rural-urban migrants by examining the effects of nostalgia and perceived authenticity in the context of rural tourism. The rural-urban migration and rural tourism are unique phenomena in contemporary China. Since 1978 when the country&rsquo;s dramatic economic reform began, China has witnessed a rapid and unprecedented process of urbanization. Due to economic disparity between rural and urban regions, people from rural regions have been flocking to urban regions, which has resulted in a large-scale flow of rural-urban migration. However, having settled in big cities with changes of life experience, the migrants now join in the recent boom of rural tourism as part of their pursuit of happiness. </p><p> Founded on the theories of tourist motivation and nostalgia and drawn on selected Chinese philosophical values, this study develops a conceptual model of rural tourism motivation for rural-urban migrants. The model identifies the unique Chinese philosophical values of both &ldquo;searching for ancestral roots&rdquo; and &ldquo;old home/hometown&rdquo; as key factors of motivation for rural-urban migrants returning to rural destinations. The empirical evidence shows that rural-urban migrants have strong desires to return to rural regions in search of their past memories, personal heritages, and ancestral roots. Rural destinations contain unique cultures, customs, environments, and lifestyles with which migrants were once very familiar. For those rural-urban migrants, nostalgia is found to be the key push factor that motivates them to return to rural destinations because of the Chinese philosophical value of &ldquo;old home/hometown&rdquo;. To them, this philosophical value means more than any particular rural destination or their actual home villages. It represents their personal life stories, family histories, and true self-identities. Therefore, a visit to rural destinations is not merely a tourism activity to them&mdash;it is a particular way to find their inner peace, past memories, and values, fulfilling their need for self-actualization and improving their subjective well-being. The analysis of the textual interview data in the study benefited from the introduction of such Chinese philosophical values as exemplified by the sayings of &ldquo;fallen leaves return to the roots&rdquo; and &ldquo;searching for ancestral roots&rdquo;.</p><p> The study also found that there is a discrepancy between the expectation of rural-urban migrants returning to rural regions and the reality of what they perceive. Rapid social development and reconstruction have not only occurred in urban China, but substantial developments have also taken place in rural regions. Therefore, rural-urban migrants perceive that many original aspects of rurality, rural community, and rural culture have been lost. The findings from the study reveal that rural-urban migrants pursue an authentic rural destination, which would have an emotional and memorable appeal, because it arouses their nostalgic feelings. The way they perceive authenticity largely depends on their past life stories and the comparisons with and reflection on their current lives and visiting experiences, which is very emotionally complex. The study invokes an age-old Chinese philosophical value to understand their perception process of authenticity: &ldquo;one can&rsquo;t have fish and bear at the same time&rdquo;. The perception process is tantamount to balance between preserving authenticity and modern development rather than giving up one aspect to the other. The migrants value the importance of preserving rural originality; yet, they believe in the necessity of changing and transforming some aspects of rural regions. They are pursuing neither the pure format of objective authenticity nor constructive authenticity. They look for the combined efforts of integrating modern elements into rural tradition, culture, and authenticity.</p><p> The results from the study are pragmatically valuable for rural destinations and tourism businesses to apply the understanding of nostalgia and other motivational factors for effective product development and marketing. Furthermore, preserving rural culture and authenticity through proper rural tourism development can improve the overall social and cultural welfare of hosting communities and the subjective well-being of tourists. The review of the research process illustrates the impact and importance of integrating Chinese philosophical values into academic inquiries on the consumers of the Chinese tourism market instead of explaining Chinese phenomena based only on Western theories.</p><p>

<p> This mixed-method study identified undergraduate students enrolled in a teacher education program that embedded an urban field placement into their teacher education program as a way to educate teacher candidates about children of color&rsquo;s cultural identity and improve application of culturally responsive pedagogy. The focus of the study was to determine how the urban field experience made teacher candidates more aware of their intentions to teach in urban areas and if the experience made teacher candidates become more conscious of their multicultural attitudes towards teaching children of color. In addition, it was important for the study to consider if teacher candidates were more aware of their perceptions of teaching in low socioeconomic and diverse urban settings.</p><p> The participants in this study (n=19) were students enrolled in an Education course, taught by faculty members of the institution. The teacher candidates&rsquo; course work, which included journal response, field notes, evolving conceptual framework and CRP lesson plans along with a Multicultural Teacher Candidate survey were examined to determine if there was an increase in the teacher candidates&rsquo; awareness of their intentions, attitudes or perceptions about teaching children of color. Teacher candidates&rsquo; comments highlighted that they were aware of their increasing levels of commitment and cultural understanding necessary in educating children of color from urban communities. Examining the data points illuminated that teacher candidates increased their awareness about the academic and social needs of children of color. In addition, teacher candidates reflected on their craft and infused a higher level of cultural diversity.</p><p>

<p> This interdisciplinary thesis begins with a 1981 birthday gift of art, music, photography, and words presented to the citizenry of Los Angeles for their bicentennial titled <i>The City of Our Lady Queen of the Angels</i>. The installation was created by Anthony Duquette and Angelino artisans and depicted a court of giant Archangels presided over by their queen, the patron angel of the city. The installation was accompanied by a poem written for Los Angeles by Ray Bradbury, set to music by Garth Hudson, and preserved through photography by James Chen. I reconstruct the fragments of Bradbury's poem and prepare them as spell for transportation as a Los Angeles specific ritual performance. I document and then use the installation and poem as the inspiration for my own reinterpretation of the 1981 work through music, words and choreography titled <i>A Dance in the Green Garden of the Queen of the Angels</i>. My oral interpretation of the poem defines its structure, and composer David Johnson creates a score for the work, which I perform and record with instrumental quartet. I choreograph, cast, and costume the resulting <i>Queen of the Angels Sonata</i> as a ritual dance, and the piece is performed at CSULA&rsquo;s International Day of Dance Concert, 2016. I then create a film production team to digitally record and edit the entire dance concert as a feature length film, and its seven individual dances as short film excerpts, that are distributed globally on YouTube.</p>

This study explores, through participant observation and interviewing, the meaning of the experience of Cape Verdean women who participate in a base group of the national women's organization of Cape Verde, Organizacao das Mulheres de Cabo Verde (OMCV). The study addresses the significance of this type of organizational activity for Third World women, seeking to illuminate the perspective of women who participate in it. It also has three underlying purposes: (1) to fulfill a goal of feminist research to see the world from women's viewpoint; (2) to aid outside 'helpers' of such organizations to understand them more fully; (3) to contribute to theory-building about women organizing by examining multiple theoretical perspectives in light of a Cape Verdean group's reality. Based on 20 months of field research carried out during 1989-1991 with the OMCV base group in a low-income peri-urban neighborhood of the capital city, the study asks: What are the relationships between important themes in the women's lives and the activities and issues of their group? To answer this question, I studied the women's words about their lives and their group, revealed in individual interviews, group discussions, and informal conversation, and blended these with my participant observation experiences with the women, their group, and their community, situated within the national context. The study chronicles and reflects on this process of doing research across cultures using an interactive, interpretive approach within an openly feminist research program. From the study of the women's life stories, four major themes emerged: (1) the economic imperative and women's responsibility for survival, (2) the dynamics of help ties, (3) self-respect, pride, and status, and (4) issues of change and resistance. In the analysis of how these themes relate to women's organization activity, the help relationship symbolized by the madrinha, or godmother, appears key in defining group purposes, functioning, and relations. I suggest that the women's organization expresses tensions evident in Cape Verdean society at large involving gender, economics, and social relations and status, while it also serves as a subtle challenge to the status quo in the consciousnesses of women.

The last 2000 years of Indian occupation of the central Labrador coast and adjacent interior regions is the focus of archaeological and ethnohistorical research. Recognition of the primacy of social mechanisms, including the perceptions and strategies that are used to construct and maintain a sense of group identity, are perceived as the means by which the small dispersed Indian populations throughout the region were linked together by social, economic and information networks. Research and excavations at more than twenty-five sites along the central and northern Labrador coast supports the recognition of a cultural continuity between the contemporary Innu cultures of Quebec-Labrador with the Naskapi-Montagnais of the exploration and ethnohistorical record, and the preceding protohistoric and late prehistoric period Indian occupations. Excavations at two sites, at Daniel Rattle-1 and at Kamarsuk greatly extend the duration of the late prehistoric period and provide the recognition of the Daniel Rattle complex (circa A.D. 200 to A.D. 1000) which is antecedent to the Pt. Revenge complex (circa A.D. 1000 to European Contact in the sixteenth century). Survey in the adjacent interior and excavation at coastal sites demonstrate a mixed economy for late prehistoric period Indian cultures in Labrador based on both terrestrial and marine mammal resources; an economy quite different from the specialized interior caribou hunting adaptation pursued by the nineteenth-century Naskapi. The cultural preference for production of a chipped stone tool assemblage relying nearly exclusively on Ramah chert is an especially visible aspect of social reaffirmation. The mechanisms that facilitated the movement of the distinctive raw material from the quarry sites in northern Labrador, down the Labrador coast and throughout the Far Northeast are a reflection of pervasive social networks that provided access to raw materials, information and relationships that united dispersed, low-density, populations of northern hunter-gatherers. The results of the research demonstrates the fallacy in relying too heavily on ethnographic accounts for modeling prehistoric social dynamics and reveals that the Innu are heirs of a cultural tradition which shows a remarkable propensity for taking advantage of the wide array of social strategies and resource options available to them.

This dissertation examines political processes within Native American societies of seventeenth-century southern New England, focusing on the strategies used by individuals and groups to legitimize or challenge political authority within Native society. Documentary, archaeological, and oral history data are integrated in order to investigate the significance of and variation in different political strategies involving ideology, alliance, marriage, coercion, settlement, exchange, and the manipulation of material culture. I compare the political strategies employed by the leadership of three historically known polities (the Mohegans, Pequots, and Narragansetts). Two of these experienced a violently contested change in leadership personnel, while in the third leadership was more stable. These differences in internal political struggles, particularly in the legitimizing of authority, provide a context for understanding variation in political strategies.

This dissertation examines how space contributes to the creation and maintenance of social stratification. Space is understood to both constitute the context in which human behavior takes place and forms a part of its content. My examination of the transition from feudalism to capitalism illuminates how the material dimensions of landscapes serve to embody and reflect social meaning. Changing spatial relations define social distinctions based on class and gender and reinforce people's ideological understanding of where they belong in the social and physical world. Socially constructed landscapes play an active role in shaping and reproducing economic, political and ideological relations, in effect, the basic constituents of social life. The conceptual framework developed in this dissertation stresses the dialectical relationship between social action and social structure. Social structure is understood as being produced and reproduced through social action by individuals and groups; social structure, however, also serves to constitute and constrain social action. The focus in this dissertation is on the construction, use and maintenance of the built environment. The relationship between human behavior and the built environment is traced by examining the production and flow of social surplus as evident in its spatial manifestations and articulations. Specifically, I examine how space is used to mediate social stratification in the medieval town of Montblanc during the 18th and early 19th centuries. This study proceeds along three scales of analysis: (1) a regional approach to changing spatial boundaries at the level of Catalonia; (2) the overall transformation of the agricultural landscape and townscape; (3) and the transformation of specific structures as recorded in building biographies. Social stratification, class domination, and even resistance are evident in landscapes of the past. The built environment changed in ways that embodied and expressed societal and individual conceptions of space in accordance with socioeconomic variables during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. From this analysis of the socioeconomic and spatial circumstances in which one form of social organization was replaced by another, I offer an interpretation of how and why it occurred. The insights gained from this research offer additional understanding of how space is used and manipulated in different historical contexts.

This dissertation seeks to understand how the women of Cambodia recreated self and culture after experiencing civil war, displacement, refugee camps, and resettlement. The women, as well the men, lost all that was meaningful including children, spouses, immediate and extended family, known villages, the Buddhist religion, predictable life rites, and economic self-sufficiency. Since most women lost the protection of husbands, brothers, and fathers, their plight was all the more urgent as they attempted to keep their remaining children alive and safe. In order to comprehend this enormous problem, I conducted interviews with the women (and some men) in Amherst, Massachusetts, a rural New England town. In addition, I questioned several nuns and a Buddhist wiseman and gathered life histories from some of the women. I used a loosely structured interview method as well as participant observation. I attended Buddhist festivals and family events. I had access to videos, library resources and archival material at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts. I found the women have not recreated but added to their pre-war sense of self and culture. Most families maintain their Khmer/Buddhist identity through language, food, clothing, celebrations, and personal surroundings. It is important to the women that the children remain knowledgeable in Buddhist practices and learn the valuable Khmer lesson of respect. The women readily accept aspects of American culture. They understand the importance of education for their children and the need for their children to learn English. English is beyond the grasp of many older women. There are areas of difficulty for the Khmer women, especially when strongly held Khmer values violently clash with American values. There are also endeavors that will strengthen the Khmer community in Amherst, such as the construction of a traditional Buddhist Wat (Temple) in neighboring Leverett, Massachusetts. It is my conclusion that the Khmer community will remain viable as the women actively blend new traditions with older rituals.

Following cultural anthropological inquiry, this dissertation examines the adoption of shamanic healing techniques into Western medicine and the resultant hybrid modality of health care fostered by two disparate healing traditions. As the U.S. populace increasingly turns to alternative forms of healing in conjunction with, or in lieu of, conventional Western medicine, shamanic healing has been added to the list of recognized non-conventional therapies. Shamanism, once prevalent throughout most of the world in various cultural forms, is purported to be the oldest healing modality, dating back to the Upper Paleolithic in Siberia. Historical excoriation and extermination from religious and political dogma have plagued shamanic cultures for centuries while their healing practices have been rebuked by Western concepts emergent from the Scientific Revolution—whereupon the Cartesian Split and a corporeal view of the body transformed the field of medicine. In the United States, over the last decade, a new and growing subculture of health care practitioners, including “Western” educated medical practitioners, is seeking out shamanic training for personal and professional development. This study examines how the adoption of a healing paradigm borne out of indigenous cultures oriented toward communal living and local economies is adapted to a Western culture steeped in individualism, commercialization, and commodification. Through surveys, interviews, and ethnographic research, the investigator provides numerous examples and analysis of the practice of shamanic healing techniques in medical clinics, health care centers, and hospitals. In particular, this study will focus on the shamanic training of health care practitioners, their motivations, the manner in which they incorporate shamanic healing techniques into their treatment protocols, as well as patient/colleague/administrative responses and institutional barriers. A comparative analysis provides discussion on both the metamorphosis of shamanic healing traditions appropriated within a biomedical framework as well as the influence of spiritually-based healing practices upon the established medical culture in the United States today. Through the lens of highlighted individual experiences, the investigator offers insight into an emerging hybrid healing modality embedded in cultural contrasts that also serves as a catalyst for the renegotiation of the meaning of healing.