This thesis draws on over eighteen months of multi-sited fieldwork carried out in London and Dhaka, among geologists, lawyers, fund managers, engineers, and private sector development consultants intent on securing profitable extractive opportunities in new ‘frontier' markets, and among public intellectuals and politicians in Dhaka who oppose the development of Bangladesh's energy resources by foreign corporations. The thesis contributes to a recently revitalized anthropological political economy and engages critically with the actor–network theory-inspired ‘social studies of finance'. By tracing ethnographically the production of extractive industry capitalism, I show that capital is not merely free–flowing or reproduced by its own inevitable logic. Rather, the movement and accumulation of capital is facilitated by distinct forms of knowledge production, such as political risk analysis and the emergent field of Corporate Diplomacy, and by historically constituted legal norms, most notably those of investor–state arbitration. Equally, I show that the calculative capacities exercised by financial analysts and fund managers have material consequences far beyond those normally considered by scholars in the social studies of finance, who tend to confine their analyses to the ‘bounded fieldsites' provided by bank dealing rooms or stock exchange trading floors. Methodologically, this thesis defends the notion that ethnographically tracing the generation of extractive industry capitalism demands a rejection of the recent ‘post–critical' turn in the ethnography of experts and elite groups. Ultimately, I argue that what allows extractive industry capitalism to be generated is the subordination of the sovereignty of ‘frontier' states to the sovereignty of transnational extractive corporations. This subordination is supported by the norms of international arbitration, and is the source of the perceived ‘investment climate' stability that ultimately allows extractive industry capitalists to attract speculative investment for resource exploration in new ‘frontiers'.

This thesis investigates the link between the precarious lives of underemployed young Korean women in the post IMF crisis and their use of digital media. It draws on precarity and immaterial labour, key concepts in studies on new forms of labour and life in neoliberal, post industrial society. The thesis contributes to this field of research in two main aspects. Firstly, moving away from an ahistorical, Eurocentric, and androcentric tendency, through ethnographic fieldwork, it reveals the particular gendered nature of precarity historically formed in a particular geographical site, South Korea. Secondly, it links the two concepts, which are closely related theoretically but located in different fields. It demonstrates how precarity is a condition leading to individuals taking up forms of immaterial labour in an attempt to manage their precariousness. The research underpinning this argument consisted of a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul, investigating young women's life stories, work trajectories and, following media anthropologists, use of digital media as part of their communicative ecology. The thesis shows how fifteen underemployed young women with different education levels and social backgrounds negotiated precarity, producing various ways of living: lives encircled to an extreme level of social withdrawal; lives juggling with various part-time jobs; lives stuck in permanent training; lives protesting on the street. Their respective modes of underemployment meant that they experienced personal isolation, frustration, and fear of people, forming a strong desire to be ‘normal' in society. Their digital media use was deeply integral to attempts to become normal in everyday life. In this respect, I argue that precarity is a condition to form a vast amount of ‘free labour' workforce for the digital economy.

<p> This dissertation details a doctoral research project studying three food-plants&mdash;and their potential for introduction into diet and agriculture in Northern California. Applying post-qualitative methods to multispecies ethnography, I followed three food-plants (millets, edible bulbs, and milkweeds) through their life cycles and production chains, considering their many interactions with other species and the biosphere, as well as with humans. Each food's story emerged while investigating the food-plant and its potential as an appropriate crop for Northern California's changing climate. I followed each food's lifecycle, both textually and in the field, uncovering intra-actions along a "soil to sustenance" framework. The study is presented as a narrative that examines each food within cultural and biological contexts. Expanding current crop introduction efforts within a biocultural diversity framework, I call for a diversification of our choices for crops based not only on historical and cultural relevance, but also on current and future relevance for an evolving place and time. In this way, we can look to adaptive crops and traditions from around the globe, representing both a decolonization and a diversification of agriculture and diet.</p><p>

This dissertation is a comparative study of cultural relationships between European and Indian settler communities along the Six Nations' borders with New York and Pennsylvania from 1720 to 1780. It particularly examines "everyday encounters" between ordinary peoples---a dimension of colonial social and economic life that has usually escaped historians' attention. Palatine, Scots, Irish, Dutch, and English colonists not only lived close to Indian villages but also frequently interacted with Iroquois, Delawares, and other natives. Frontier farms, forts, churches, and taverns were scenes of frequent face-to-face meetings between colonists and Indians. My dissertation explores the dynamics of settler-Indian encounters and how they changed over time in the Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Ohio valleys. Ordinary people powerfully shaped the larger patterns of cultural contact through their routine negotiations.;The dissertation establishes a new vantage point by exploring northeastern North America as the "Iroquoian borderlands" rather than the Middle Colonies' frontiers. It also employs comparative history to highlight the structural similarities and differences of the Six Nations' borders with nearby colonies. Both Pennsylvania and New York enjoyed alliances with the Six Nations that sustained a period of peaceful relations in the eighteenth century. But Pennsylvania's settlement expansion sparked a triangular contest over land between natives, European squatters, and proprietors that resulted in open warfare and native dispossession by the 1750s.;New York enjoyed the longest span of peace with the native nations on its borders. In the Mohawk Valley, strong religious, economic, social, and military ties enabled Indian and colonial communities to coexist for most of the eighteenth century. It was not until the American Revolution that New York experienced the same racially charged warfare that Pennsylvania and other British colonies had experienced much earlier. The Revolution overturned the patterns of accommodation that prevailed between the Iroquois and the New York colonists. It uprooted the British-Iroquois alliance and led to dispossession for many Iroquois in punitive postwar treaties with the U.S. The comparative context more precisely reveals the means whereby the permeable Iroquoian borderlands of the early eighteenth century were transformed into juridically and racially defined state and national borders by the 1780s.

As Europeans expanded across North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they parceled their territorial acquisitions into a variety of administrative subdivisions. Naming and dividing the land became an integral part of the project of colonization; the conquest of territory involved the transformation of unknown places into clearly defined jurisdictions. This dissertation examines the invention of one jurisdiction, the state of Maine, viewing the evolution of its borders as a reflection of the growth of state power in the region. Seeing an inextricable link between social and territorial boundaries, it ties the development of the territory of Maine to the formation of an alliance between property owners and English governments. The alliance promoted a vision of territoriality in which the land was divided into clearly marked jurisdictions exclusively governed by particular towns, counties, and provinces. These jurisdictions, in turn, granted and protected clearly marked estates that were the exclusive property of individuals; property rights and state sovereignty reinforced one another. This English system of territoriality competed with other visions of the land attached to different social arrangements. to Native Wabanakis, the right to use the land flowed from membership in fictive kin groups that included both human beings and the spirits of surrounding animals and natural features. French colonial officials treated their possessions adjacent to the Gulf of Maine as a network of military, economic, and missionary outposts that upheld the authority of church and state in a peripheral region. English notions of territoriality gained precedence over others because the alliance between property owners and the state facilitated the large-scale mobilization of human and material resources in trade and warfare. Far from being unproblematic facts of the environment, Maine's boundaries are the physical traces of a historical process in which English colonists acquired vast quantities of natural resources at the expense of their French and Indian rivals. to give legitimacy to these conquests, the colonists promoted a form of state sovereignty characteristic of English-speaking North America: the land, under this system of territoriality, was construed as a measurable object to be possessed and exchanged by individuals.

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