In the present milieu of global change and redefinition, traditional approaches to Third World development are being submerged in a rising tide of skepticism given the dubious record of development efforts to date. The root problem in traditional approaches to development has been epistemological: They have failed to deal appropriately with the complex questions of how people change their beliefs and practices, how development insiders and outsiders reach new, mutually constructed development meanings and understandings that provide the basis for development praxis and address in a productive manner the 'tradition-modernity' dialectic in development. In recent years, increasing attention is being paid to articulating alternative discourses of development that better address the phenomenon of change at the implementation level, the level of discourse. This dissertation proposes that a fusion of philosophical hermeneutics and critical theory in the form of a 'critical hermeneutic discourse of development' (CHDD) effectively addresses the epistemological dimensions of the development problematic and can, therefore, ground the discourse-practices of an alternative development. The major theorists drawn upon in constructing this discourse are Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jurgen Habermas. Chapter 1 examines the development problematic, focusing especially on the epistemological dimension; it establishes the rationale for proposing CHDD as a viable counter-discourse, and describes the methodology of the study. Chapter 2 reviews prominent theories, models, and strategies of change and development, and deconstructs them in order to free development discourse from its traditionally positivist moorings. Chapters 3-5 describe the major dimensions of hermeneutics and critical theory and delineate their implications for development discourse. Chapter 6 examines the socio-cultural background of Cambodia and introduces the case study, the Cambodian Village Development Project, a rural development project on which the researcher was Field Director during 1992-1994. In Chapters 7 and 8 the major dimensions of a CHDD are applied to the case study, the aim being to demonstrate how they were exemplified in the design, implementation, and overall discourse-practices of the project. The study concludes in Chapter 9 with a critical assessment of a CHDD and a discussion of the myriad development issues and questions it helps to illuminate with new light.

Utilizing the paradigm of social constructionism, this research project inquires how the North American Free Trade Agreement is co-created, managed and transformed in communication. Articles and editorials about NAFTA in Mexican and U.S. newspapers provide the topoi where narratives of cultural identity are sought. Rather than treating communication as a variable whose amount determines the quality of NAFTA, this dissertation takes the communication perspective, arguing that persons in conversation co-create, manage and transform such social realities as that of an international economic trade agreement. The practical and critical theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning is selected as the method to approach three sets of research questions: (1) What stories do Mexican and U.S. newspapers tell about the official position in order to justify their actions to the population? What sorts of stories are told about nationalism, patriotism, economic development, capitalism? (2) How is the "self" and the "other" presented by the storytellers of different countries and the different newspapers in each country? Did the presentation in the U.S. have any repercussions on the stories told in Mexican newspapers and vice versa? and (3) What is the role of communication theory in issues of economic development and international cooperation? Can viewpoints such as Social Constructionism and the critical and practical communication theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning provide a heuristic to examine this type of issues? As with any piece of interpretive and critical research, the findings are not so exclusively significant as is the process by wh ich researchers arrive at them. In addition to this concern for process over product, the conclusion discusses the un/intended consequences of interpolating theories of development with the Coordinated Management of Meaning to address the inter(in)dependence between Mexico and the U.S.

Social, economic, and cultural components of trapping furbearers was studied in six Northeast states. In 1994, a 12 page mail-back questionnaire was sent to a sample of licensed trappers in Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and West Virginia. A total of 2,279 questionnaires was returned for an overall response rate of 65 percent for the six states combined. Factor analysis identified five underlying dimensions associated with the importance of reasons for trapping. The strongest reasons related to dimensions associated with "Lifestyle Orientation," and "Nature Appreciation," followed by "Wildlife Management." Other reasons related to "Affiliation with Other People," and "Self Sufficiency," though they did not rank as high in importance for the overall sample as did the previous three dimensions. To identify the existence, structure, and function of trapping-related networks of trappers, 92 fur trappers from the six states participated in face-to-face, in-depth interviews designed to gather data on their trapping-related social relationships and interactions. Participation in trapping-associated activities included cooperatively setting and checking traps; processing pelts; verbally sharing trapping experiences with others; giving, bartering, or selling pelts, products, meat, and trapping services; and participating in events such as a fur auction or rendezvous. These forms of interaction linked trappers to broader social network structures that included nuclear family, extended family, friends, workmates, neighbors, landowners, wildlife agency personnel, trapping association members, and fur buyers. Overall, respondents who trapped alone, primary alone, or with others, exhibited similar patterns of trapping-related ties and interactions with other people. These patterns included a high level of trapping-related interactions with nuclear family members, friends, participants at trapping association events, and fur buyers; and a moderate level of interaction with extended family, landowners, and wildlife agency personnel. Far fewer trappers reported trapping-related interactions with workmates and neighbors. Findings indicate women trappers exhibited much less of a tendency than men to have trapping-related ties with friends or with fur buyers. Results suggest network relationships act as 'social resources' that not only facilitate affective ties of sociability and companionship but also serve instrumental purposes such as sharing of information, social support, and exchanges of furbearer-related goods and services.

Owning Culture demonstrates how the fabric of social life in most Western countries—and increasingly, the world—is deeply bound up with the logic(s) of intellectual property law. The primary new question that is asked, which provides the focus for this dissertation, is the following. What happens to an area of cultural production that had been previously (relatively) untouched by the sphere of intellectual property law when that area is immersed in these new social relations? To better understand why people resist, adapt, or cease to engage in cultural practices at particular historical moments and in situated social contexts, I use articulation theory to help me identify and map the particular elements at play in the privatization of culture. By primarily focusing on ownership patterns, battles over ownership, and the effects of the corporate ownership of culture, political economists have ignored many interesting questions that are raised when cultural texts become commodified and subject to laws of private ownership. If one looks beyond the political economy of cultural production and shifts the unit of analysis to the location where culture is produced, a whole new set of questions emerge—questions that focus on the way in which intellectual property law affect the day to day lived experiences of cultural producers and consumers.

This research is an exploration of the local, place-based knowledge surrounding a degraded urban river, the Lower Neponset River and Estuary in southern Boston Harbor, Massachusetts, and its environmental restoration. Through a mixed-methods approach to sociological inquiry that included 18-months of ethnographic interviews and participant observations, Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping, archival document research, and critical environmental history, it explores the different ways local citizens interpret the river as a place of historical importance, personal nostalgia, social and family networks, neighborhood legacies, aesthetics, economic security, danger, psychological refuge, ecology, and political power. Using an interpretive analysis of the narrative, visual, and spatial data related to those meanings, it then explores how such different local, place-based interpretations can be used to inform the theory, practice and politics of urban river restoration. The research shows that recognition of the socio-cultural diversity in local citizen interpretations of the Lower Neponset River’s restoration is important for environmental managers, planners, and local decision-makers to recognize alongside ecological and economic development “best-practices” (e.g., holistic watershed management, anadromous fish re-introduction, flow and function, ecosystem services, affordable housing quotas, “Smart” growth, etc.). The research recommends that environmental managers, planners, and local politicians and decision-makers give equal consideration to the socio-cultural, political, economic, and ecological factors surrounding urban rivers, and the diversity of meanings that their “restoration” conjures, in order to make strides towards ethical environmental restoration and management practices that are socially, as well as environmentally, sustainable.

When a biomedical curriculum is exported from the First World to the Third, what embedded cultural values come along? Do locally specific historical, political, religious, or socioeconomic associations of the “physician” as signifier shape the professional values students take on? Or is professional identity, like most of the rest of the curricular content, imported from the North? To date, empirical research on professional socialization has been restricted almost completely to North America. In the twenty-first century, when biomedicine is learned and practiced worldwide, the universality of socializing processes cannot be assumed. The project described here was collaboratively designed to assess the socializing function of medical education in Malawi. This cross-sectional qualitative research explores the acquisition of professional identity in students at a new medical school in Malawi, documenting changes during medical training in the values and norms that make up professional identity. I used a sequential research method involving focus group discussions, interviews and a questionnaire, moving from open-ended and general to more specific questions. This method was supplemented by archival research and “observant participation” at the university's teaching hospital. The homogenizing process of basic science education during the first two years of medical school in Malawi appears similar to that found by researchers in North America. When students reach their hospital training, however, their nascent scientist doctor identities crash into a clinical reality in which the tools of science are largely unavailable. Responding to the resulting crisis, they may preserve the Northern doctor-scientist identity by seeking a geographic or occupational location in which its execution is possible. They may also reject the identity of detached technocrat to claim instead the dual roles of political activist and loving witness to suffering. I address historical and economic conditions that shape these responses, and discuss their implications for health in Malawi, for medical pedagogy, and for anthropological research on identity in an era of globalization. I use Gramsci's notion of contradictory consciousness to show how discrepancies between hegemonic cognitive frameworks of identity and real conditions of work have the potential to create a revolutionary new consciousness among doctors working in poverty.

The Mexican maquiladora industry was thirty-four years old in 1999, the second summer of my field work. Many maquiladora workers are second and in a few cases third generation in their families in the industry. This dissertation is about the spaces they have negotiated. Maquiladora workers live a variety of lifestyles. Some get up in the morning, go to work and return to their families at the end of their shifts. Others have started or are saving to start their own enterprises. Some (especially women) have used the economic stability wage work provides to leave the confines of their families or marriages. Some maquiladora workers have renegotiated family relations, in part as a result of their financial independence and their experience of gender equality in the workplace. A few have moved in and out of the industry to bridge slow periods in their independent entrepreneurial activities. Collectively, and in some cases individually, maquiladora workers have affected the conditions and relations of production where they work. I will interpret their stories discourse of difference, one in which relations of power are produced, not assumed. My goal is to contribute to changing the direction of the academic debate that has surrounded the industry by constructing a new way of seeing what is happening and how participants are affected. Opening a new discursive space can allow that which is there but not seen to emerge and perhaps offer new political and economic possibilities for maquiladora workers.

This dissertation investigates and analyzes the process of subject formation among Turkish immigrants of the second and third generation in the southwestern German region of Swabia (Schwaben). The study shows how Turkish immigrants find salient ways to formulate their subjectivities in deliberate contradistinction to a straightforward Cartesian model. In the ethnographic section of the dissertation four Turkish immigrant narratives are presented. In discussing these cases, it is shown that Turkish immigrant existence in the region of Swabia is characterized by a fascinating diversity and differentiation. This existence is thus a far cry from the homogenizing imaginaries that persist about Turkish immigrants and Turkish-German culture in German mainstream society. Of particular interest here are the skillful and often ingenious ways in which immigrants reconcile their seemingly antagonistic desires for remaining in touch with their Turkish heritage and traditions and a claim to belong to a present or future (German) modernity. There exist manifold ways in which Turkish immigrants in Swabia can, for instance, utilize forms of regional, national, and transnational identification to achieve a reconciliation of modern with traditional ways of life. Analysis of the immigrants' situation in Swabia suggests that forms of regional identification have recently gained significantly in importance. Identification at the regional level apparently offers immigrants the most accessible inroad into mainstream societies of their new homelands. The emphasis lies here on demonstrating the diversity of possible ways available to immigrants to achieve these goals. The analysis of the ethnographic material at hand focuses on the salience of recent models of subjectivity and the substantial critiques these models have furnished of the traditional way Cartesian subjectivity has been conceived. It is argued that many of these critiques offer valuable and indispensable qualifications or modifications to the homogenizing force of the cogito approach that has come to be the hallmark of modernity. This study also shows, however, that the ideal image of the Cartesian subject cannot be simply eliminated from our registers since it serves as a negative counter-point against the backdrop of which more heterogeneous versions of subjectivity can be formulated. For Turkish immigrants in Swabia, this means that their subjectivities are formulated beyond, but in constant (negative) reference to, the demands placed on them by German mainstream society to adopt a homogeneous, cogito -driven form of subjectivity in order to prove their claim for belonging to ‘the right kind of’ modernity. Instead of giving in to these demands, the immigrants complement their modern subject formations with key elements that are located beyond the grasp of modernity—thus subverting German claims that they prove their belonging to the modern world in a particular way. In the final analysis, the study thus suggests that we need to retain the conceptual image of Cartesian subjectivity because it continues to serve as a salient model for many in today's allegedly postmodern world. However, many contemporary subjects—such as the Turkish immigrants of Swabia—refine the model of Cartesian subjectivity in their desire to account for important pre- or postmodern elements in their lives. Descartes' cogito as a main pillar of modern subjectivity is thus in need, today, of important amplifications that pay tribute to the rapid changes in a globalizing world that, not just in the case of Europe, has simultaneously rediscovered the importance of regional identities. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This case study encompasses the issues of cultural difference, moral orders, and the public and private accounts of the conflicted patterns of interaction that occur when differing, often incommensurable, ways of being human and living a life of dignity and honor are not rendered comparable. Instead, these ways of being in the world promote and privilege a type of "us and them" $\...$ "we're right and you're wrong" diatribe that (re)creates and increases the socio-cultural tensions on the island of St. Croix. The focus of this research was on the narratives about the patterns of interactions between "Locals" (Black/Crucian men and women) and "Expatriates" (White men and women); "Relief workers" (White/"Off-Islander" men) and "Islanders" (both "Locals" and "Expatriates"); and, most importantly, between "Local" (Black/Crucian) men and women and how these practices are associated with tourism and the racial/social/political tensions on the island. Narrative data obtained through field interviews with people who live on or are presently working on St. Croix were analyzed by interpreting the data in light of Pearce and Cronen's (1980) CMM conversational model of analysis. CMM helped me to look at the narratives about communication practices in which people (re)create, manage, and transform social reality and to interpret how these discursive practices (re)create problematic ways of living. CMM also provided a way of describing how some people where "stuck" in their conflict or were able to reframe their situation to break free from the conflict. This way of interpreting narrative data illuminated the dual and sometimes triple cultural patterns and associated lifestyles, social class, and relationships that the Black Crucian men and women have to make sense of in the living of their lives. Without CMM analysis of the data, the distinctions between the "us and them" relationships would not have been identified nor would the gender related issues of black Crucian men and women have been associated with tourism practices. Key findings are categorized into the following topic areas: (1) use of physical space, (2) "us and them" situations and the acculturation process of Black Male and Female Crucians, (3) tourism as a catalyst for change, and (4) the changes brought about by the devastation of Hurricane Hugo.

This dissertation is concerned with the modern Western phenomenon of "display zones." The concept of "display zones" is defined as those spaces of representation which are marked off from the space of daily life with clearly defined borders, and constructed with the intention of causing a sense of spatial and/or temporal displacement. It argues that the dominant mode of representation within the "display zones" is based on the mimetic doctrine of truth. As the major elements of modern representational economy, "display zones" establish and regulate the process called the constitution of cultural difference from a Western perspective. In this process, the representation of non-Western cultures via their display amounts to their discursive constitution as "Other cultures." In the first part of this dissertation, the constitution of cultural difference in "display zones" is investigated in terms of its metaphysical constituents. In the second part, the concrete cases of the nineteenth-century world's fairs, the phenomenon of displaying bodies, and finally the discourse of the modern ethnography museum are analyzed.