Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Anthropology, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 23, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4382. Adviser: Christopher S. Peebles.

<p> Organizational culture is in need of new paradigms. As an ontological category it is flawed because the lack of academic consensus on what culture is tends to render it inadequate as an explanatory framework. As a field of praxis managers and practitioners tend to oversimplify culture, reducing it to one or two variables such as idealized norms or values, or as personality-writ-large. This leads to failed organizational culture change efforts, usually at great cost and effort as organizations fail to adapt beyond surface effects. Against these notions a new paradigm for organizational culture is proposed. Cognitive science, specifically embodied and situated cognition, analogically based reasoning, and cultural schemas provide a robust way to conceptualize and investigate culture. It is proposed culture is loosely but distinctively ecologically determined, underwritten by human cognition grounded in the functional, technological, and social forces inherent in work, and the production of meaning related to work. This paper advances a theory of culture as shared cognitive models by which groups derive meaning and organize sensemaking. Under the right conditions such models may make up the organization&rsquo;s dominant culture. This dissertation provides theory and research describing a so-called functionally embodied organizational culture framework. It investigates the shared schemas and cultural models of the executive team of a global, diversified Fortune 1000 manufacturer. Preliminary support for functional grounding is seen: Schemas rooted in the strategic task environment of manufacturing make up the cultural models for people leadership and business management, lending preliminary support to functionally grounded culture. Implications for current theory and practice are discussed, along with avenues for future research. One implication is that popular approaches to culture and change utilizing top-down, espoused, and idealized norms and values may not be sufficient to dislodge prevailing shared cognitions rooted in dominant professional orientations or strategic context.</p>

<p> The Occupy movement galvanized people from across the United States and around the world to stand up against corporate profiteering and political corruption. The revolutionary energy spread from community to community and Occupiers began to create a reality moving beyond racism, hierarchy, and patriarchy. Feminist activists, both women and men, had a major voice in Occupy. They called into question sexist behavior, unrecognized privilege and gender inequality in conjunction with other forms of oppression. Unfortunately the breakdown of the encampments and the backlash in the mainstream media led to a critical view of the movement. In reality, Occupiers formed networks of mutual aid which continue to expand and transform today. </p><p> Based on ethnographic research conducted at Occupy Los Angeles and Occupy Long Beach, this thesis project explores a feminist perspective of the Occupy movement. Inspired by applied visual anthropology and new media, Occupy Feminism is an interactive zine interspersed with writing, photographs and videos. This project is an educational resource for those who want to understand feminist theory, the Occupy movement and how they intersect.</p>

abstract: On May 12, 2009, hundreds of Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) raided Agriprocessors, a meat packing plant in the sleepy town of Postville, Iowa, and arrested 389 workers. These workers, primarily Spanish speaking immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico, were charged with felony aggravated identity theft. This criminalization of immigration is a critical point in immigration policy in the United States, representing a ritual performance of the exclusion of immigrants from American society. In stark juxtaposition to the raid itself, the community of Postville was working to welcome the very immigrants that were targeted by ICE. In attempts at inclusion, Postville had created an adult soccer league that provided a sense of community and identity for immigrants. Using the classic anthropological method of ethnography, this research draws on extensive time immersed in the community of Postville to conduct a qualitative case study of the day-to-day meanings of immigration in the United States. This dissertation examines the adult soccer league and the ICE raid as examples of cultural performances of inclusion and exclusion by using anthropological concepts of nation, sport, and performance. Performance is used to mark national identity in both instances--a shifting, hybrid `transnational' identity in the case of the immigrants playing in the soccer league--and a clearly delineated `American' identity in the case of the ICE raid. Moreover, national identity is tied to other aspects of identity, such as gender. As the performances create national `imagined communities,' they also gender their participants and nations themselves. Ultimately this reveals the way that immigration itself is gendered, and the way in which American immigration policy is designed to promote an American national identity. These efforts are not only to the detriment of immigrants in the United States as laborers but also to the communities with jobs that draw these workers. The case study of Postville provides a lens to examine the meanings of immigration policy from the ground up and in the lives of those it impacts most--immigrants and the communities in which they reside. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Anthropology 2010

<p> This thesis describes how politics shape vulnerability to climate change at the local level, based on an ethnography in Cortez, Florida. Focusing on a &ldquo;traditional&rdquo; commercial fishing village on the Florida Gulf Coast, my research indicates that such vulnerabilities are created at multiple scales of the nexus between governance and commerce. Moreover, a key finding is that, as a community closely linked to the health of local environments, the village in Cortez is largely organized to protect their commercial industry from regional economic overdevelopment; not in recognition of its role in contributing to global climate change, but because such overdevelopment is perceived as unjust and destructive to local environments. Further, through qualitatively examining the environmental values of a &ldquo;traditional&rdquo; fishing community located in a large metropolitan coastal area, my thesis confronts the responsibility that broader society may have to reevaluate economic growth in effort to truly foster sustainability and justice. Finally, the thesis describes how communities like Cortez may be repositories for locally developed, ecologically grounded resilience strategies, rendering their voice all the more crucial, beyond conventional stakeholder approaches, in public discussions about regional economic development and marine resource management. </p><p>

This thesis explores questions of identity and the body in performance in collegiate competitive bhangra, a South Asian diasporic popular dance form, through the analytical frameworks of hype and the musicking body. I explore the relatively recent shift of bhangra from a club scene to a college-level, competitive context in order to understand the ways in which this contemporary bhangra still offers participants a meaningful expression of South Asian identity, when the context in which the music is produced and consumed seems to have changed dramatically from the original context in which the genre emerged as a popular cultural form in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. I analyze the way in which hype, an intangible element of contemporary bhangra that is essential for successful performance, is built up and maintained through the embodied practices of the co-producers of bhangra.

<p> First created in 1974, the largest table-top role-playing game (RPG) <i> Dungeons &amp; Dragons</i> (D&amp;D) started out as a war game where multiple players could join in and fight monsters. Grounded in fantasy conventions and as a way to explore fantasy genres, <i>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</i> popularity continued through new editions and add-ons. In addition, <i> Dungeons &amp; Dragons</i> legacy has lived on in the gaming world as the father of most RPGs and fantasy games with a large fan following across various editions and over multiple decades. The fan following is still evident today due to D&amp;D's foundations in high fantasy. An exploration of the ways in which fantasy narrative plays a role in the fan culture of D&amp;D is necessary to understand how the aspects of fantasy affect gameplay and how players view D&amp;D. By conducting a study of <i>Dungeons &amp; Dragons </i> players which focused on close game play, players' relationships to other fantasy genres, and how players interacted with game conventions, I explored the ways in which <i>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</i> introduced players to fantasy and how they participated in a fandom. This paper will present the findings of the study as well as situate <i>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</i> in relationship to other fantasy and gaming subcultures. </p><p>

<p> With its roots in 1920&rsquo;s and 30&rsquo;s Japan, the term eroguro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) refers to an artistic movement with an aesthetic that focuses on grotesque visuals and bizarre humor. My project is to examine the contemporary form of eroguro nansensu as an avenue for considering how mass culture changes and develops over time. Focusing on how mass culture changes is important because it could potentially illuminate breaks/openings where something can escape the hegemony of the culture industry. The method of change, and potential mode of escape from the culture industry that I identify here is <i>escalation</i>. Escalation both contains and explains mass culture&rsquo;s propensity towards repetition but also allows for a certain amount of change. Eroguro nansensu may also have a unique place to reflect on and potentially critique the manga (comic) industry and what this says about Japanese culture more generally. While eroguro nansensu may be rejected by many due to the intensity of the erotic and grotesque imagery, or ignored as simply meaningless nonsense, there are enough artists and fans interested in this aesthetic that there is hidden potential here that I aim to bring into the light. Nonetheless, no extended scholarly work has yet been done on the contemporary revival of eroguro nansensu as a genre of manga in the last few decades of the 20^th century. I am attempting to fill in some of that gap with my own analysis as well as by presenting information on contemporary eroguro nansensu as a mass culture movement, about which little has been written in English or Japanese to date. In my dissertation I begin with the historical background of eroguro nansensu, and proceed through analysis of its use of humor and aesthetics, all as a means of considering mass culture and its critique.</p><p>

<p> Within a framework of intersectionality, this thesis explores the multidimensional experiences women of color have in abusive same-sex relationships. It also explores the tremendous influence those experiences have on their lives. Although intimate partner violence (IPV) in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community has become increasingly visible within the past two decades, media and scholarship continue to focus on heterosexual incidents of domestic violence. Relying on the powerful narratives of four women of color who are IPV survivors, I examine social constructs such as familial violence, homophobia, racism, and poverty, that contribute to lesbian intimate partner violence. I also present reasons for and consequences of staying in an abusive relationship. The findings of this study indicate that intimate partner violence is a symptom of oppression for socially marginalized lesbians of color and not a source.</p><p>

<p> At a time when human environmental disturbance is challenging livability on the planet&mdash;for humans and nonhumans alike&mdash;it is important to find better methods for engaging with the liveliness of landscapes, the relations with which they hang together, and the various ways they are interrupted. This dissertation explores the practices of tracking and gathering as methods for studying such issues facing Kalahari Desert landscapes in Botswana. These ecologically important landscapes are increasingly encroached upon and fragmented by the growing cattle economy and the proliferation of extractive industries into the desert. These trends have led to dramatic declines in wildlife populations and growing desertification of the already arid region. The Kalahari is home to small communities of people, many of whom are former hunter-gatherers whose rights to land and access to wildlife are increasingly inhibited. The government has banned hunting, largely in response to conservationists&rsquo; concerns about wildlife. In addition, gathering is increasingly regulated, and cattle colonize areas that are significant for wildlife and San communities. In this context, rather than treating tracking and gathering as objects of study, I take these practices seriously as methods for noticing and theorizing more-than-human landscapes, their transformations, and contingent histories to address challenges facing people and their environments in the Kalahari and beyond. </p><p> By focusing on the relational forms of noticing landscapes with San trackers and gatherers, I describe landscapes as always in motion, emergent more-than-human places where assemblages gather, histories are made, and politics enacted. This is in direct contrast to theoretical moves that treat landscapes as background on which histories and politics occur. My dissertation enacts tracking and gathering as a methodology. Beginning with an extension of the concept of tracks and following their movements out to their relations with other landscape actors in each chapter, I emphasize that landscapes are not merely contexts for politics and histories. Rather, landscapes do histories and politics, in spite of efforts to hold these landscapes still as underutilized expanses of resources. </p><p> The dissertation itself unfolds, moving out through the landscape by tracking these emergent relations. I argue that tracking is a relational practice of becoming-familiar-with these multiple entanglements of emergent landscapes. The practice of gathering involves much of the same kinds of attention to landscape movements and their coordinations as with tracking. Here, I employ gathering in its double meaning: the practice of collecting and of coming together. The tracks of gathered truffles then lead to the worlds of grass and termites that, in turn, allow for a reflection on Kalahari rangeland ecology and the political economy of the cattle industry. Finally, the dissertation zooms out to the desert&rsquo;s geomorphology, tracking the movements of geological processes as they gather with the movements of humans and nonhumans to form lively landscape features over the <i>longue duree</i>. Tracking and gathering are methods that allow for an elaboration of these more-than-human landscapes-in-motion, together with their social, political, and economic histories and speculative futures.</p><p>