Madagascar is one of the richest sites of biodiversity in the world. During the last two decades, it has been the recipient of large amounts of foreign aid in an effort to halt biodiversity depletion. Despite these efforts, deforestation continues unabated and the conservation activities undertaken to date have been largely ineffective. To better understand the reasons for continued environmental degradation in Madagascar, a political ecology research framework is used to identify different social actor groups vying for access to natural resources and the extent to which their actions influence biodiversity conditions on the island. The application of this framework in a region on the central highlands of Madagascar reveals that local actors (most of whom are subsistence agriculturalists) resent conservation programs that fail to consider them as part of the “biodiversity” that international environmental nongovernmental organizations (IENGOs) are laboring to conserve. Local actors are frustrated by state-sponsored conservation programs that simultaneously victimize and penalize them by taking away traditional lands and then giving them “protected area” status. At the same time, elite and extralocal interests (e.g., politicians, businessmen), in collaboration with government civil servants, exert their power and influence to mine state resources for their personal benefit. It is this inequality in power and influence that permits extralocal actors to continue the pillaging of state resources without any accountability, as IENGOs and their donors willfully turn a blind eye to these activities. This research posits that contrary to the conventional wisdom of IENGOs working in the country, it is extralocal actors, and not local ones, who are primarily responsible for biodiversity depletion in this region of Madagascar. The behaviors of all of the actors in this situation assure the continuation of the status quo, which includes current patterns of biodiversity elimination. If this situation continues, the Malagasy rainforest and associated biodiversity will surely be eliminated within this century. To be more effective, IENGOs in Madagascar and elsewhere must take a more vigorous stance in undertaking activities that genuinely address local needs as well as the fundamental causes of biodiversity depletion.

This dissertation is an exploration of the novel Gone with the Wind and its journey into Vietnamese readers' minds, specifically how the novel's concept of womanhood is perceived by Vietnamese women readers. It looks at the original text and a variety of Vietnamese translations to discover the perceptions of Vietnamese readers that may have formed from this Southern saga of the American Civil War. Chapter I traces the creation of Gone with the Wind from a Southern belle's experience of the Confederate's defeat, contextualized by women's viewpoints during the roaring 20s of the last century. Chapter II examines the characteristics of the translations into Vietnamese from English and Drench. It identifies the problems inherent in the translation process and highlight issues relating specifically to the Vietnamese language. This chapter explores various translation theories and practices and analyses the derivations that are due to the translators' viewpoints and their relation to the text. Chapter III discusses the reading and feedback process of a group of female lecturers in the English Department of Hochiminh City Open University in Vietnam. Their feedback is considered the precritical responses to the basic elements of a literary work such as the narrative's plot, characters, story, and ending. Chapter IV interprets the readers' treatment of the novel's concept of womanhood, especially the central female protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara, who dealt with the collapse of the plantation's system of values and the emergence of a new role for women. This dissertation concludes by showing that there is a strong link between Gone with the Wind and Vietnamese women readers, illustrating the reflection of Vietnamese society's interaction on a personal level. The novel's influence manifested itself in different ways in each of the respondents. This dissertation explores, through qualitative research, the meaning of Gone with the Wind for women readers in Vietnam and gives a fresh perspective of the novel's success.

Iroquoian philosophy and political thought survived solely in the minds of old men and women at the end of the nineteenth century. These ideas endure today because of ethnographers who patiently transcribed the elder’s oratory. One such ethnographer was a Tuscarora tribal member named John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt (1857-1937). Hewitt was a linguist who worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology for fifty-one years and dedicated himself to preserving Iroquois thought. He was self-educated and became expert while assisting other staff ethnologists. Hewitt’s “Iroquoian Cosmology Parts I & II” (1903, 1928,) sealed his reputation as the leading Iroquois scholar of his day. In spite of this accomplishment, Hewitt’s reputation faded quickly after his death. This dissertation seeks to understand why Hewitt decided to withhold some material from publication, and looks towards Hewitt’s complicated relationship with the Iroquois – for whom he was both a fellow tribal member and a professional ethnographer – for the probable answer. Finally, I re-evaluate Hewitt’s place in the field of Iroquois Studies as the last of a group of notable self-trained ethnographers and examine the lasting impact of his work on contemporary Tuscaroras and other Haudenosaunee people.

Gray-brown mouse lemurs (Microcebus griseorufus) are able to survive in the most stressful environments of Madagascar. Between 2003 and 2007, I collected data on threats to the survival of M. griseorufus at Beza Mahafaly and how various factors impact their behavior. Individuals can survive ∼5 years, but few do. Females give birth to multiple young in single litters; furthermore, polyestry exists at Beza. Population turnover rates are higher than they are for other mouse lemurs, which also live longer. The morphology and behavior of M. griseorufus in three populations (protected gallery and spiny forests; unprotected forest at Ihazoara) at Beza are influenced by differences in vegetation. Gallery-forest mouse lemurs have hook-like hands and feet while those in the spiny forest have more “clamp-like” cheiridia. Differences in feeding and nesting behavior may explain these differences, as mouse lemurs in the different habitats use small branches in high canopy vs. larger supports close to the ground to different degrees. Morphology and behavior also vary by sex. Reverse sexual canine dimorphism is strong in M. griseorufus at all three forests. The greater canine height of females likely relates to female dominance. Females have greater access to exudate-producing trees and to tree-holes for nesting. They undergo seasonal torpor more frequently than males, and this may give them a survival advantage. Mouse lemurs are not hunted for food but their habitats are disturbed. In the most highly-disturbed (unprotected) forest, I recorded the highest population turnover rate and shortest maximum lifespan. Ihazoara mouse lemurs here cannot fatten or hibernate. But even in “protected” forests where they do hibernate, mouse lemurs suffer from the felling of trees and herding of cattle. The Mahafaly people are cattle herders and faithful to their culture. The externally-imposed prohibition against resource extraction in protected forests engenders local hostility toward conservation. Education has minimally affected these attitudes. Building a more healthy relationship between conservationists and local people is of paramount importance; the views of local people must be considered and more of an effort made to involve local communities in constructing effective conservation strategies.

At the current moment, with voter turnout low and mass popular uprisings refashioning the political map, questions of political participation and dissent are extremely pressing. In established democracies and newly democratized states alike, an active and potentially dissenting citizenry is often seen as the necessary balance to overreaching state power and unregulated market forces, but scholars struggle to keep abreast of a proliferation of new foci and forms of engagement. This dissertation focuses on the form of collective political engagement enacted at centri sociali occupati autogestiti (occupied, self-managed social centers) or CSOA in Bologna, Italy. As they enact political alternatives through everyday practices of self-management and cultural production, social center participants complicate conventional analytical distinctions between revolution and reform or between individual transformation and larger social change. Through participant observation at three specific centers, interviews with participants and visitors and discourse analysis of recent legislation and policy, the investigator explores the character of social center participants’ cultural and political practice, internal organization and decision-making processes, and the heated conflict surrounding social centers in order to discern the opportunities afforded and tensions generated by this form of political engagement. The author argues that CSOA participants experience a form of belonging constructed on the basis of participation rather than ascribed statuses or adherence to shared ideological positions. Furthermore, participants seek to establish an autonomous space wherein key obstacles to participation have been deliberately dismantled or drained of authority in order to render this form of belonging more inclusive. In the shadow of post-9/11 securitization processes at the supra-national, national and local levels aimed at governing migrant mobility and public expressions of dissent, CSOA participants seek to displace the ethnic, religious, linguistic, generational and class-specific norms that define the cultural dimensions of contemporary Italian citizenship. Drawing on the concept of cultural citizenship, the author therefore argues that the political imaginary proposed by CSOA participants represents a deliberate contestation of both the authority and function of state-based citizenship models and can be understood as new model of citizenship characterized by an alternative, less exclusive relationship between belonging and participation.

In my dissertation I analyze the relationships between historical and everyday state-formation and the making and remaking of the people and landscapes of Dersim, produced as the outsiders of state. I focus on three periods: the massacre and the following displacements in Dersim known as 1938; the growth of capitalism in Turkey and the leftist movements in Dersim between World War II and the coup d’etat of 1980; and, finally, the rise of the PKK (Kurdish Worker’s Party) and the “state of exception” in Dersim in the 1990s. I conclude with a discussion of the last decade where the history, identity, and nature of Dersim have been central to various social and political organizations through the first public recognitions of 1938 after seventy-two years, and a developing anti-dam politics. I mobilize archival methods, field research, in-depth and multiple-session interviews with three consequent generations, and focus groups. Through analyzing state and newspaper archives of the 1930s, and the “extraordinary laws” of the 1980s and 1990s, I discuss multiple narratives and discourses about Dersim, how outsiders came to be defined as “exceptions to the law,” and how they are managed in different periods. Through field research in different settlements and political organizations, interviews, and focus groups, I analyze the mechanisms through which experiences and memories of state violence are transferred and mobilized by different generations to construct identities and oppositional movements. I argue that relations of power and struggle can be analyzed only historically and in relation to each other. More specifically, the state, movements and identity are related and founded upon the making of “outsiderness.” On one hand, the making of the outsiders contributes to the productions of the nation and consolidation of state power. On the other, outsiders identify with and mobilize “outsiderness” as a generalized category of a counter-hegemonic identity. I argue that outsiderness is transferred through subjective constructions of history in the form of memory and consciousness, mediated through personal interactions with the state, and transformed by the movements. As an identity produced simultaneously by the state and the people, outsiderness is both enabling and paralyzing for movements.

This eleven-month ethnographic study puts critical discourse analysis in dialogue with postmodern conceptualizations of space and place to explore how eight educators talk about space and in the process, produce racialized spaces in Roche Bois, Mauritius. The macro-historical context of racialization of this urban marginalized community informs the discursive analysis of educators' talk at school. Drawing on theories of race that call for the non-deterministic exploration of race relations as they occur in different contexts and times (Hall, 2000; Pandian & Kosek, 2003; Essed & Goldberg, 2000), I explore the spatial racialization of children in Roche Bois as a process specific to this township and its history. Engaging with Lefebvre's three-dimensional theorization of space (Lefebre, 1991) as well as the Discourse Historical Approach developed by Wodak and colleagues (Wodak & Reisgl, 1999), I draw on the micro-macro concept of identity construction "strategy" to study 1) how meanings of race play out as an amalgam of various thematic dimensions of schooling, culture, bodies, and work that are spatialized; 2) how meanings of place perpetuate or transform long-standing historical constructions of Creole identity in Roche Bois. The findings show that repeated patterns of educators' spatial racialization produce and reproduce conceived spaces (Lefebvre, 1991) and yet my research also highlights that banal moments of lived space (Lefebvre, 1991) also exist, as ordinary disruptions of the spatial order produced by patterns of conceived space. While educator discourse for the most part negatively emplaces and racializes the children, one educator's representations of place and race both assimilates and differentiates marginal identities, encourages unity and essentialism at the same time as promotes hybridity. The analysis therefore shows that discourses of place are not totalizing and that moments of interruption can be the basis for thinking of teacher education and practice as a politics of "decolonization" and "reinhabitation" (Gruenewald, 2003). Specifically, the findings indicate the importance of reinvesting critical historical meanings into pedagogies of the local.

The Transition movement is a grassroots movement working to build community resilience in response to the challenges of climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and economic insecurity. Rather than focusing on the state as a site for contestation or change, the movement adopts a "do it ourselves" approach, prioritizing autonomy and prefigurative action. It also places importance on relationships and community in the context of local places. It is open-ended and characterized by an ethos of experimentation and learning. Transition shares these place-based and prefigurative features in common with many other contemporary movements, from the Zapatistas to alternative globalization movements, to popular movements in Latin America, to most recently the Occupy movement. Though often not seen as "political" by conventional definitions that understand social movements in relation to the state, I argue that Transition's choice of practical, place-based forms and commitments is an ethical-political one, based on the state's failure to meet crises of our times, and it has political effects. In exploring the movement in its own terms, this ethnographic study of the Transition movement in the northeast US demonstrates the ways in which activists are locating power and possibility in the local and the everyday. Operating in the terrain of culture and knowledge production, the Transition movement is engaged in an effort to shift subjectivities and social relations, and to resignify power, security, economy, and democracy. Paying attention to the Transition movement's specifically place-based, prefigurative features provides a better understanding of the potential of this approach and its political significance. It also sheds light on tensions, which in the US context include challenges in addressing racism, inequality, and the neoliberal state.

Due to a worldwide increase in migration, refugees, and migrant laborers, interpersonal conflicts today are more frequent and complex. The young field of interpersonal conflict resolution is therefore being looked to for answers. Practitioners all over the globe are limited by the conflict resolution literature which is mostly written from a western perspective. There is a need to explore interpersonal conflict resolution practices of different cultural groups and societies with different histories of oppression. In a 15-month qualitative research study, I explored interpersonal conflict resolution practices of a Tamil labor community on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka called Sooryan. The first part of the study traces the establishment of plantations in Sri Lanka by the British. It differentiates between plantation and non-plantation societies. The works of Jayaraman (1975), Beckford (1983), Wesumperuma (1986), Daniel (1993), and Hollup (1994) help trace the cultural, economic, and political factors which cause conflicts on plantations. This part also explores interpersonal conflict resolution practices in different societies, and presents four third-party conflict resolution models practiced in non-plantation societies. The second part describes the labor community at Sooryan plantation. It explains the living and working conditions of the laborers, and the role of Talaivars (leaders) and trade union representatives. It examines discrimination faced by the laborers from the outside non-plantation community. It highlights the machine bureaucracy and the management style at Sooryan. The third part explores four categories of interpersonal conflicts, which manifest within-family, between laborers, between laborers and their supervisors, and between the labor plantation community and the outside non-plantation community. It describes processes which the labor community uses in resolving their conflicts. Challenges are posed to practitioners and educators by contrasting the conflict resolution practices of the Sooryan labor community with the mainstream mediation model of the United States. Finally, the study examines the unique problems of the labor community and how its social, economic, and political isolation makes its conflicts permanent. With this understanding, further research and effective educational programs can be developed for plantation societies, migrant laborers, and refugees. To this end, the daily water problems of the Sooryan labor community in Sri Lanka serve as a timely reminder.

This dissertation presents a study of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, popularly known as the Shakers. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis that integrates anthropology, social and religious history, and biography in an exploration of the dynamics of material culture in the maintenance of, and challenges to, relations of gender and social power in a sectarian communal society. This dissertation explores how the United Society manipulated spaces, symbols and rituals during three crisis periods in order to reproduce their communities and specific social relations through time, as well as the various roles members played in supporting or resisting such efforts. This dissertation also explores how the Shakers represented their distinctive landscapes to each other through their art work, prayers, and poetry. These "imagined landscapes" reflect the circumscribed worlds determined by gender, celibacy and spiritual hierarchy. Such alternative media identify domains within the Shaker material and spiritual worlds that were contested at different times by men and women, and leaders and common members.