Museo Na Bolom uses anthropology and archaeology to educate the public, organize for political change, and preserve cultural knowledge in Chiapas, Mexico. The museum was founded by Gertrude Duby and Frans Blom. This dissertation examines the substantial written legacy of Gertrude Duby Blom and her practice of what has since been termed "engaged anthropology." During fieldwork in the archives, the focus of the project shifted from research to "rescue archaeology" when a flood severely compromised the archives. All available typescript manuscripts were scanned to preserve their information in digital format from further environmental damage; 322 different typescript manuscripts were scanned (a total of 5442 pages). A CD of scanned documents has been deposited at Na Bolom. The script documents remain for future work. Gertrude Duby Blom's background and Mexican work is discussed, including her close personal relationship with the Lacandon Maya of southern Mexico. The Lacandon, two groups of formerly horticulturalists, inhabit a region that is highly contested and under close scrutiny since the 1994 Zapatista uprising. Gertrude Blom's papers, which include interviews with elderly female participants in the Mexican Revolution, notes from numerous excursions into difficult-to-access regions of Chiapas, and a record (over time) of environmental damage in Chiapas were assessed, as was Na Bolom's role in the preservation of cultural knowledge for a number of highland Maya groups and for the Lacandon. Essentially, this study is designed to be both an autoethnography of an important Mexicanist and a contribution to the preservation of indigenous cultural patrimony.

Questions of the relation between race and nationality are at the center of Israel's defense narrative, its violence, its deployment of blood and its domination of land and bodies. Usually, the discourse of violence and the concept of victim in a nation's logic involve images of penetration to borders and land. However, this dissertation is about internal violence, about the reproduction of the state not through land, but through babies and identities, narratives and memory, knowledge and censorship. I revisit Said's Orientalism (1978) and the way it was applied to the analysis of Israeli cinema by Ella Shohat (1989). I also use the framework of ‘The West and the Rest’ developed by Stuart Hall (1992), thereby relocating the different ways in which Orientalism and Eurocentrism internally work within the Israeli nation state. In this dissertation I argue that Israeli national identity is constructed on a notion of imagined unity as articulated in the Zionist ideology, while in practice denying and oppressing cultures and identities of Oriental Jews. This notion of unity, I claim, was achieved under a false sense of emergency by the Arab threat, and thereby advocated the need for a strong Jewish state. This logic is used continuously in public discourses to justify the state's overlooking of internal conflicts. To demonstrate my argument I analyze in depth the case of the Kidnapped Yemenite Babies Affair. This case study, I argue, reveals how the media, who play a central role in Israeli society (Caspi and Limor, 1986), articulate and shape inner conflict and how they define and reproduce identities while maintaining national unity and hegemony. Through this analysis I wish to re-define the relationship between the state of Israel, minority groups and the Arab ‘enemy’. I also discuss the essence of national identity, citizenship and unity and how, from the states' standpoint, such inner conflict interrupts and threatens the wholeness of the Israeli state. In my work I engage with such theoretical concepts as articulation, representation, nationhood and national identity, Orientalism, race and ethnicity, colonial and post-colonial discourse, identity politics and community.

Altruistic cooperation, like a typical example of altruistic behavior, is frequently observed in human societies. Since altruistic cooperation; just as any other form of altruism is socially beneficial but individually costly, the evolution of cooperation has long been regarded as a challenging puzzle and one of the most intriguing issues in socio-biological debate. The following three essays analyze these problems. First, I examine the role of institutions in sustaining social norms and the evolution of these institutions. Second, I also analyze the effect of social interactions on the evolution of cooperative traits among individuals where kin selection and reciprocal altruism do not apply. The first essay examines the problems of an n person public goods game structure. In this essay. I show that retaliation based on the repetition of game is not enough to sustain cooperation. By suggesting the difficulties involved in multi-agent interaction and the inapplicability of the repeated game approach to n person public goods situation, the essay reconfirms the importance of institutions that provide favorable conditions for the evolution of cooperation. The second essay analyzes the effect of different structures of social interaction on the evolution of cooperation in an n-person public goods game situation. I set up an agent-based model in which agents interact with others under different social structures, to see which social environment provides favorable conditions for cooperative behavior. In the third essay, I present a model to show how institutions govern relationships and interactions among individuals, and how these institutions evolve. To answer the first question, specifically, I discuss the evolution of equal-sharing norms which had been sustained for most of human history before private property rights were established.

The question that guided my research was: Are alternative, non-idolatrous, discourses and uses of the computer discernible in Puerto Rican society? In Puerto Rican culture, the idealization of modernity and technology has strong historical and cultural roots (Álvarez Curbelo, 2001). In order to gain a better understanding of the multiple connections between modernity and technology, I explored the philosophy of technology, particularly the works of Heidegger. This exploration proved fruitful in deepening my understanding of technology as a cultural and historical phenomenon. Using this understanding as a point of departure, I engaged in a “conversation” with other authors and the insights I gleaned included: the recognition of technology as a space for ideological struggle; the contemporary subordination of political freedom to the promise of technology; consumption and consumerism can usefully be considered manifestations of the promise of technology; consequently consumption has gained importance as a form of communication and of citizenship. This comprehension of consumption as an increasingly significant social phenomenon, led me to explore the specificities of the ways in which goods are socially endowed with meaning. I attempted to apply the general interpretations of the social significance of objects to the personal computer, an object that became a mass consumer good in the United States and Puerto Rico during the decade of the 90s. Early studies of the computer in the 60s and 70s had already pointed to this object's polysemic richness. I selected Thompson's (1990) depth hermeneutics as my methodology because of its usefulness in exploring the meanings given by social subjects to their world and because hermeneutics attempts to liberate rationality from permanent reduction to means-end thinking. Since meaning was a central concern, I appropriated Schrag's (1986) hermeneutical concept of communicative praxis. This concept assigns equal weight to speech and action in the creation of meaning. The search for contestatory communicative praxis led me to analyze written—political party programs and newspaper articles—and oral discourses—generated through interviews and focus groups—on the personal computer in Puerto Rico. Notwithstanding the dominance of discourses of technological idolatry in Puerto Rico, my research found glimmers of contestatory views.

This dissertation examines the new emphasis on childhood in France that came from the destructiveness and trauma of the First World War. After the Great War, the French sought to rebuild their nation by redefining both young people's social responsibilities and adults' duties towards children. Politicians, educators, scientists, a social activists sought greater control over what seemed to be an increasingly valuable and potentially volatile social group. From 1918 to 1949, I argue, in public debates about the fashioning of a new, post-war youth culture, traditionalist, idealist, and scientific conceptions of childhood were competing alternatives. Each of these ways of thinking and talking about the social and cultural role of the next generation expressed different visions of the French nation in response to national crisis. Through the schools, family legislation, and leisure culture such as youth groups and the children's press, the younger generation assumed a new social and cultural position. French youth began to be seen as a national community, set apart by their age status from the rest of society, yet reflecting patriotic ideals and deeply-rooted French values. The new and distinct youth culture developed as part of post-war recovery served to mediate young people's relationship the nation, circumventing the earlier primacy of family relationships as the basis for social identity. During this time, French children were pulled out of the more private space of the family. This increased the sense of the power of youth as a collective entity, which also contributed to new fears of youth rebellion. These underlying tensions, between tradition and science and between heroism and rebellion, also led to the implementation of official regulation of French youth culture, notably through the passage in 1949 of a law censoring children's periodicals. Throughout this period, with state support, scientific theories gained the greatest authority over constructing the French child's world, but this new public space retained a deep-seated connection to adult-envisioned national ideals. In reforming the role of the younger generation after the war, the French found grounds for hope and national rejuvenation.

Most colleges and universities in the United States today claim that "diversity" is an important institutional value, but it is not always clear what this term means or how "diversity" is actually experienced and understood by students at predominantly white institutions. This ethnographic study examines a predominantly white liberal arts woman's college in New England, applying data from participant observation, semi-structured interviews, autoethnography, and textual data. My research addresses three intersecting areas of inquiry: the experience of students attending a predominantly white institution in relation to issues of race and racial identity, institutional practices related to race, "diversity," and "culture," and examples of "white cultural practices" within the institution. The study found that institutional discourse promotes an ideology that marks "students of color" as "other" and the embodiment of "diversity" and creates a dynamic where white students are placed in the role of cultural tourists. Throughout the college community the invisibility and silences surrounding whiteness reinforced an ideology of white privilege. The analysis focuses on four central themes or narratives that circulate through a predominantly white campus. The first theme is the articulation of "diversity" and the "diverse community" specifically through the lens of the college admissions process. The next theme is "culture" as understood through an examination of institutional sites where "culture" is named and deployed on campus such as student cultural organizations. The third looks at the invisibility of whiteness and "white culture." The final theme considers what happens on a predominantly white campus when there is a high profile racial conflict, or "racial incident." The conclusion provides specific recommendations and interventions for the broader higher education community related to "re-framing" the "diverse community" and shifting towards the creation of "diverse, inclusive, and engaged learning environments." Possible interventions include integrating the academic mission of the college more closely with the goals of diversity and inclusion; providing more opportunities for white students to think critically about race and their own racial identity; and an increasing emphasis on the intersections and complexity of identity rather than a reliance on monolithic categories such as "students of color."

This dissertation addresses the questions: What is the impact of neoliberal education on the development of civic identity in college students? What are the limitations and the potential of service-learning to support students to become agents of change within the context of neoliberal education and corporate education reform? How do the students navigate the complexity of the development of their civic identities within this context and to what extent do they either challenge or reproduce (or both) existing social and political structures and develop the skills they need to enact their vision of change? In a climate of increasing corporatization and standardization of education that continues to more narrowly define what it means to teach and learn across the K-16 spectrum, the future of democracy demands an exploration of what kinds of civic actors such a system is producing. Employing an ethnographic sensibility, I examine the trajectories of students in the Citizen Scholars Program at UMass-Amherst (a five course, service based academic leadership program) as they navigate their learning and development as civic actors over the course of two years. I explore themes that emerge in the areas of community, pedagogy, and civic & social selves, and within these examine where the program appears to succeed in helping students to vision change, where it falls short - and how it might better support students to act and to discover a praxis of possibility. In addition, I offer more general recommendations on best practices for effective civic education in the era of neoliberal education reform.

Over the past 20 years, small-scale citizen action movements have become an integral part of the social and political landscapes of countries throughout the post-industrial west. In poor communities in particular, the protagonists of such endeavors are often women. Based on two years of fieldwork in a municipality in northern England, I examine the emergence of local-level campaigns, initiated and sustained by women who are tenants of public sector housing developments (council estates). By combining ethnographic material based on participant-observation with historical research, I suggest that the current fluorescence of grassroots activism is one outcome of a shift in the way in which poverty is being "governed" in post-industrial societies, away from the government of the poor once characteristic of welfare states and toward a new notion of government by the poor as manifested in policies intended to foster such values as "freedom," "choice" and "empowerment." In Chapter 2, I propose an historical explanation for women's on-going participation in local-level campaigns by considering the extent to which poor mothers were made the primary targets for the application of such interventions as social work, health visiting and urban planning. I argue that it was this emphasis placed on the role of the mother in the governing of families that explains her engagement in grassroots movements which are intended to better the lot of poor households and neighborhoods, whose well-being has traditionally been designated her responsibility. Chapter 3 offers a view of life in these communities at the present moment. I document the ways in which women's activism is coming to fill in the void created by the prolonged flight of the state from poor communities. And, in Chapter 4, I consider how post-welfare technologies of government now locate "expertise" within the domain of experience, rather than as a result of professional training, obliging the poor not only to govern themselves, but also to police their own communities. Finally, I discuss how popular representations of poverty as a "spectacle" demonstrate the extent to which mobilizing images of "normality" and "deviance" remains integral to the project of governing society as a whole.

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.

The connection between identity and place has been made many times by scholars from myriad disciplines. In Tyrol this connection has recently been complicated by the intersection of modernity and globalism at this identity: place connection. Rural communities in Tyrol have been faced with an increasing burden of caring and providing for thousands of visitors on a daily basis; this has been hampered by dwindling space, unacceptable quarters, and an inability of local inhabitants to cope with the stress of constant intrusion into their daily lives. This dissertation examines the problems encountered by a rural population in the Stubai Valley of the Austrian Tyrol. I discuss the difficulties of seasonal adjustment, as well as the constant problems of spatial negotiation as the crush of tourist populations ebb and flow throughout the year. Most importantly, I suggest that there has been a conscious construction and reconstruction of Tyrolean identity with the advent of the burgeoning tourist economy. I call this the "brokered image"; one that has been reluctantly accepted by local inhabitants, enhanced by tourist buros and museums, and made real by the tourist populations. This is not to say that Tyroleans in general regret their dependence on the tourist market; on the contrary, they have developed an economy which thrives on tourism and many Stubai inhabitants have grown wealthy due to their involvement in the industry. What the "brokered image" has accomplished is a caricature of the Tyrolese which is neither true nor false--it is somewhere in between the poles of authenticity.