This thesis examines the use of Tarot cards as a means of healing among individuals in Western divination culture. This research examines how biopolitical discourses affect individual agency when engaging in healing as a form of self-care, it also addresses the ways in which subjects negotiate their own subjectivities in contexts of self-care. I analyze social media discourses about Tarot cards and healing to examine the motivations for using Tarot cards as an alternative route for healing. This research finds that practitioners use Tarot as a means of therapeutic healing similar to talk-therapy. Another finding suggests that, practitioners make use of Tarot in spiritual and secular worldviews. Research findings also provide that practitioners create and reinforce identity through the use of Tarot. Finally, research findings suggest that most participants were able to create a community through the use of Tarot that establishes their own definition of self-care. These findings illuminate the ways in which a divination practice supports self-care and must be reconsidered in contexts of emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing. I argue for a reconsidering of what it means to be a Tarot practitioner in a Western biomedical context in which methods of care are not always accessible. A better understanding of how Tarot practitioners use Tarot cards as a method of self-care can contribute to a better understanding of alternative methods to healing in a Western biomedical context.

The dissertation investigates the articulation of race, class, and religion among Africans in colonial New York and the methods used by these individuals to resist the oppressive conditions of Northern bondage. Men's, women's, and children's burials from the African Burial Ground Project in New York city will be compared to burial sites in The Netherlands, Suriname, and England in order to understand the range of mortuary practices available to captive Africans, and their influence on various social relationships constructed throughout the old and new world. Archaeological evidence will be used to explore social roles from burial positions and grave goods associated with individuals, emphasizing the cultural symbolic ritual of mortuary behavior.

In the last decade, labor migration of women from the former Soviet Union has grown exponentially. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Moldova, where 1/3 of the population works abroad, most illegally, and where about 1/2 of these migrants are women transnationally "commuting" to work for 6 to 12 months at a time. This dissertation examines the effects of the neoliberal global economy in this region on women's migration and questions how notions of gender inform this new economy. Bridging ethnographies of postsocialism with those on migration and gender, and drawing upon poststructural feminist works, I show how shifting ideas about gender play a key role in the moral economies of supply and demand for these labor migrants, in the experience of this migration on the ground, and in state and organizational responses to it. I offer a comprehensive view of one particular migration pattern—(Gagauz) Moldovan women who work as domestics in Turkey—drawing on multi-sited and transnational ethnographic dissertation research and interviews conducted in 2004–5 with these migrant women at home and abroad, their village compatriots at home, their employers and employment agents in Istanbul, and employees of the foremost institution dealing with migrants in the region, the International Organization for Migration. I deploy Bourdieu's concept of social fields of values—here conceptualized as gendered moral economies—to show how notions about women, wealth, migration, and work play out in discursive practices at these sites, conditioning the experiences of this migration from these various perspectives and helping this illegal labor market to function. This dissertation also problemmatizes claims about 'postsocialist women' by specifying their experiences in terms of overlapping and various subjectivities. In so doing, it shifts the anthropological gaze from a narrow focus on 'postsocialism' in this region and 'postsocialist women' as a special case of migrant women to identify problems and processes of neoliberal globalization that hold wider significance. In this, I am concerned with relating the common dilemmas of migrant women, the ambiguities of all female labors, and the complexity of women's agency.

This is a critical analysis of the music of the Puerto Rican new song movement placed within the cultural and political dynamics of Puerto Rican society. Its focus is the relationship between popular music and cultural politics using the music of the new song movement as a case study. The study is a discourse analysis of a sample of song texts that elucidates the elements and characteristics that define the new song's discourse as an oppositional one. In addition, this study explores possible reasons why that oppositional discourse did not interpellate larger segments of the popular classes, or why it did not become a hegemonic discourse. This inquiry places the song texts in the context of the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States in order to study the sample using a combination of theoretical perspectives. The study draws from Latin American approaches to the analysis of popular culture, from Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony and from various interpretations of Puerto Rican cultural identity. It also studies the texts' articulation of a pro-independence ideology as a key aspect of its oppositional discourse. This analysis sheds light on the relationship between popular culture, cultural identity and nationalism in Puerto Rico. The discourse analysis showed that the Puerto Rican new song movement created a discourse in opposition to the dominant political, economic, military and cultural discourses articulating Puerto Rican society during the 1970's and early 1980's. The discourse of the new song movement was anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-militarist and advocated Puerto Rico's independence. In its song texts the movement reflected its subscription to several oppositional discourses articulated by pro-independence groups in Puerto Rico. The music of the new song movement served as a form of resistance to the conditions of colonialism in Puerto Rico.

Music remains an important aspect of culture and society, proven by copious academic studies exploring how humans create, experience, and utilize it. The emergence of punk rock as a music genre and scene of interconnected individuals in the mid-to-late 1970s provides significant insight into social and political attitudes of the time. Punk rock's continued existence in the present day reflects similar themes to its first incarnation besides forging new directions for the genre and the scene. In this study I examine social factors within the current Central Florida punk rock scene that contribute to its evolution and longevity. I used participant observation and semi-structured interviews to obtain ethnographic data from punk rock scene members and understand their experiences in the scene. I found two prevailing themes in the Central Florida punk scene, community and networking, which serve to unite scene members and ensure punk rock as a DIY, underground scene remains relevant at present time. Based on this, I conclude that the current punk rock scene exists as a critique to contemporary societal norms around the world as well as an example of mixed-mode complex social networking and information sharing.

In pre-Hispanic Central Mexico, communities frequently practiced various forms of embodying social identity through the use of facial adornments. Ornaments were placed in the ears, nose, and lips to materialize aspects of both self and collective identity. Important characteristics, such as age, gender, status, kinship, and ethnicity can be better understood through analysis of facial ornaments recovered from archaeological sites. Recent research at the Late Postclassic (AD 1420-1521) city of Tlaxcallan has provided insight into how facial ornamentation varied within the central highlands of Mexico. Typological analysis of ornaments and figurines recovered at Tlaxcallan and comparative examinations between Tlaxcalteca and Aztec historical documents has provided evidence to support varying embodiment practices between these groups. Despite their shared Nahua identity and close proximity, the Tlaxcalteca and the Aztecs chose to emphasize significantly different aspects of identity within their own social hierarchies. The persistent conflict and varying political organization between these communities is reflected in their embodiment practices. Thus, these objects have the potential to reveal how larger sociopolitical interactions can affect local collective identities. Through this comparative analysis, I demonstrate how the Tlaxcalteca and the Aztecs identified aspects of social identity through analysis of facial ornamentation.

The preservation of osseous material at the Turner Farm site, Maine provides us with an opportunity to examine more closely some of the variability in Northeastern Late Archaic mortuary practices, especially that associated with the Moorehead/Maritime Archaic and Susquehanna traditions. A minimum of '70 individuals was recovered from Turner Farm from unburned primary inhumations (n = 7), unburned secondary inhumation features (MNI = 7), and secondarily deposited cremations (MNI = 56). All burials have been attributed to the Susquehanna occupation of the site by Bourque (1993). Neither age nor sex appears to have directly determined burial treatment at death since males, females, and subadults were afforded primary as well as burned and unburned secondary inhumation. All the unburned secondary interments appear to have undergone significant decomposition and were largely disarticulated at the time of deposition. Similarly, analysis of the burning patterns of the human bone suggests that individuals deposited in the secondary cremation features were disarticulated and in various stages of decomposition at the time of the burning. Complete individuals were deposited in burned (Feature 38/1974) and unburned (Feature 30/1975) secondary interments while incomplete individuals were contained in other cremated (Features 7/1975, 9/1975, 12/1975, 19/1975, 24/1975, 30/1975, 41/1974, 42/1974) and unburned (Feature 39/1974) contexts. All cremation features contained at least some cremated faunal material with Feature 24/1974 representing the largest quantity of burned animal bone (981 g; 86.7% of feature weight). My analysis of the Turner Farm burials suggests that a shift from the interment of complete to incomplete individuals may have occurred. Further, the relative number of individuals secondarily interred signifies the importance of Turner Farm as a regional cemetery. I suggest that participation in a closed mating network (Wobst 1974, 1976) explains well the florescence of northeastern Late Archaic mortuary traditions. The discontinuity associated with the Susquehanna tradition in Maine may reflect an augmentation of ritual specificity functioning to increase mating network allegiance. Curation of individuals may serve to increase the number of ceremonial events associated with the mortuary ritual. Territoriality may be symbolized through participation in highly visible mortuary customs including cremation. In addition, the choice of coastal sites as the location for communal burial areas may functionally improve the position of marginally located groups within the mating network.

This thesis explores the complex relationship between making African Diaspora history and culture visible at Historic Jamestowne, a setting that has historically been seen as "white". The four hundredth anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans in Virginia has created a fraught space to examine African American collective memories of shared history, community and commemoration. This thesis operationalizes Page and Thomas's (1994) "white public space" which describes the utilization of "locations, sites, patterns, configurations or devices that routinely discursively, and sometimes coercively privilege Euro-Americans over nonwhites" (1994: 111). When this concept is applied to the construction of heritage and production of history, it may this be reconceptualized as "white public heritage space". At Jamestown, Jim Crow-era Anglo-Protestant elites created white public heritage space through their interpretation of archaeological sites, objects, historical events, and spaces to reaffirm white supremacist hierarchical views on the past in an effort to naturalize white privilege and structural violence toward non-whites. These formulas of silences construct an uneven past which add to what Tillet describes as "civic estrangement," the feeling of alienation from the "rights and privileges of the contemporary public sphere" (2009:125). For African Americans, civic estrangement further complicates the always complex process of identity formation and negatively affects transnational diasporic relations. To confront early-20th-century misrepresentations, archaeologists and heritage professionals at Jamestown have begun engaging the local descendant African American community in collective knowledge production centered around Angela, one of the first African women that lived at Jamestown in the 1620s. This method draws upon critical praxis as it aims to reconstruct traditional power relationships in archaeological production of histories and identities. Here, the Angela Site is foregrounding the life and influences of one of the first "invisible" African women to have lived and labored in the colony. Connecting postcolonial theory and community-collaborative methods, this thesis explores the production of dominant histories, plausible alternative interpretations of the colonial past, and relationships between heritage sites and local descendant communities.

The Knights of Labor was 19th century America's largest and most successful labor organization, yet historians have given it scant attention. Much of the work that has been done concentrates on the Knights' decline and seeks to justify its demise. Aside from several superb community studies, few works have analyzed the Order's achievements or given it credit for the legacy it bequeathed to future working class movements. The last national survey of the Knights of Labor was completed in 1929. My study seeks to address the imbalance. The Knights organized more than a million workers in the 1880s and 1890s. What made it so successful? What were the experiences of those who joined? What did future organizers learn from the Knights? To answer these questions, I have turned to manuscript sources, the labor press, memoirs, 19th century commentary, and a variety of 20th century scholars and theorists. In the pages that follow I sketch a portrait of Knights' culture from both a local and a national perspective. I find that the Knights' rich culture--embracing ritual, ideology, music, poetry, fiction, material objects, leisure activities, and religion--defined the essence of Knighthood, and was an element of the Order's success. I identify five overlapping phases of Knights' cultural development, each of which was an amalgam of working class and popular cultures. Ultimately, though Knights of Labor culture was creative and strong, it could not overcome two larger problems facing the Order, internal factionalism and external oppression. Though the Knights of Labor faded quickly after 1890, it left a brilliant legacy upon which future working class movements were able to build.

There is an inherent tension between self and society in human life. Such a tension is also embodied in the way people talk. The dissertation is a demonstration of how Chinese deal with that tension via Chinese collectivist and self-interest talk in solving social problems. A case study is presented from the perspective of the CMM theory. Several important theoretical issues are also discussed, as to how can we achieve the validity of a text analysis, and what should be the basic unit of analysis in communication studies, and in what ways are Grice's (1975) conversational maxims inadequate in accounting for human communication. The dissertation answers those questions on the basis of a study of a Chinese mediation case.