<p>Abstract</p><p>It is estimated that up to 2 percent of the population in Third World countries survives on waste in one way or another. In Mexico City alone there exist 15,000 garbage scavengers called Pepenadores. The poverty and marginalization they experience is utterly linked to their work, and while they do much of the hard work their socio-economic situation seems stagnant. This paper explores the complexity of the waste management system in Mexico City which keeps them in this position, and how the current system is a manifestation of the existing symbiosis between the formal and informal sectors of the city.The main characters in the maintenance of this system are the leaders of waste management associations.Their struggle to maintain their powerful positions influences both the system’s relationship to the public sector and determines the socioeconomic situation of the Pepenadores.The paper also analyzes the effects of past efforts to change the system, and how policy changes always seem to work against the Pepenadores. Efforts to help the Pepenadores escape their vulnerable positions can be successful in the short-term, but the existing social structure in Mexico City make any permanent changes difficult to achieve.</p>

I den här uppsatsen har vi studerat hur en film aktiverar människors sociala och kulturella positioner. Vi visade filmen Crash för åtta komvuxelever, vilket följdes av en kvalitativ intervju med dem. Eleverna fick svara på frågor om sin egen bakgrund, filmens budskap och rollfigurer, hur de uppfattade filmen och den föreslagna verkligheten i filmen, samt frågor kring sin egen framtid. Informanternas svar har hjälpt oss att synliggöra hur det görs över- och underordningar i filmen. Med hjälp av vår bakgrund och analytiska verktyg har vi interagerat med våra informanter och de har bidragit med perspektiv som vi aldrig hade kunnat se med tillämpning av enbart teorier. Något som blev framträdande var att de applicerade problematiken som den amerikansktillverkade filmen tar upp, på ett svenskt samhälle. Vi kom fram till att filmen som populärkulturellt medel hjälper till att reproducera gamla maktordningar och fördomar. Trots att detta inte var filmskaparens intention, blir det här till fördomar och stereotypa föreställningar om att det finns rasskillnader. Med den här studien har vi synliggjort att filmen medverkar till att reproducera maktordningar. Film och dess folkliga inflytande, skulle kunna bli ett redskap för nytänkande runt klass, kön och etnicitet med mera.

Abstract This paper applies an impressionistic and reflexive genre of ethnography to understand the ethnographer’s meeting with the humanitarian aid workers in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. It offers an analysis of the political atmosphere in the country prior to the tsunami as a central framework for understanding current tensions and debates over the distribution of tsunami aid resources, and traces the emergence of what has been termed Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork from April to July 2005 among aid workers at the central level in Colombo and a careful attention to the rhetorics and arguments that characterized the writings in the Sri Lankan press during this period, the paper argues that while public debates over tsunami aid distribution has been entwined with political rivalries between the Sri Lankan government, and Sinhala and Tamil nationalist groups, the everyday reality of international humanitarians evolved around the forming of a common development language to categorise the demands of the aid intervention and on the performances of individual organisations, personified by a limited number of individuals in the professional fora of the humanitarians in Colombo.

Abstract It is estimated that up to 2 percent of the population in Third World countries survives on waste in one way or another. In Mexico City alone there exist 15,000 garbage scavengers called Pepenadores. The poverty and marginalization they experience is utterly linked to their work, and while they do much of the hard work their socio-economic situation seems stagnant. This paper explores the complexity of the waste management system in Mexico City which keeps them in this position, and how the current system is a manifestation of the existing symbiosis between the formal and informal sectors of the city.The main characters in the maintenance of this system are the leaders of waste management associations.Their struggle to maintain their powerful positions influences both the system’s relationship to the public sector and determines the socioeconomic situation of the Pepenadores.The paper also analyzes the effects of past efforts to change the system, and how policy changes always seem to work against the Pepenadores. Efforts to help the Pepenadores escape their vulnerable positions can be successful in the short-term, but the existing social structure in Mexico City make any permanent changes difficult to achieve.

In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered a geographic concentration of Type 2 Diabetes patients in 11 Southeastern states in the United States. Since its acknowledgement by the public health community, little has been done to address the rising rates of diabetes onset and resulting mortality. This thesis provides a medical anthropology analysis to the 'Belt' by critiquing secondary sources in order to construct a productive discussion on socio-medical contributors to Type 2 Diabetes. My thesis documents the numerous social, economic, political, historical, and medical barriers to health equality in the Southern United States and their influence in determining individual, community and population health. Additionally my thesis provides policy recommendations that if enacted, would dramatically equalize the United States health care system. By addressing a current public health crisis in the United States, my thesis provides necessary scholarship on health inequality in the 21st century.

This thesis is about the Ohio State University and the fans of the OSU Buckeyes Football Team. In a study of the students that attend this university, I highlight the behavioral norms that dictate their identities and daily practices. I mean this report to serve as an example of the way in which college football, the marketing and rhetoric of the university, and larger cultural assumptions about college form individual identity. The perspective employed in this report is that of the anthropological process of participant observation, and therefore includes personal reflections throughout my research. This thesis focuses on the theoretical framework of Erving Goffman and discusses the intersection between college football and undergraduate education.

We carry objects from place to place in bags, all the while maintaining that they are trivial objects. If we categorize objects as mundane, then why do we carry them everywhere we go? I interviewed female students at the Claremont Colleges about what they carry in their bags. College women articulate many distinct reasons for carrying a bag and for carrying the items within that bag. My participants perceive the items they carry as mundane, and do not question the presence of those items in their lives. Yet they also claim to need the items they categorize as trivial. They perceive the need to carry items as natural, and so do not question that need. My project demonstrates the ways college women make objects seem trivial and make needs seem natural. Through ethnographic interviews, I highlight how things perceived as mundane have significance. Additionally, I show that carrying a bag and carrying objects enables college women to be prepared to care for the well-being of themselves and the people around them. Between perceptions of objects as inessential and perceptions of the functions of objects as superficial, college women find value in carrying items.

This thesis contributes to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of food studies. Taking a qualitative, discourse-analytic perspective, I analyze the discursive strategies employed by a group of home canners in the construction of their community of practice. The community of practice framework (Wenger 1998) posits three defining characteristics: mutual engagement of participants, a jointly negotiated enterprise, and shared repertoires. Drawing on narrative analysis and adopting an anti-essentialist view of identity, I examine the way members use the discursive construction of time and place as symbolic resources in the formulation of their identities and in the maintenance of their community. Directions for further research into the complex relationships among language, identity, and food are recommended.

<p>This dissertation explores the place of Irish-Gaelic language (Gaeilge) television and film media in the lives of youths living in the urban greater Dublin metropolitan area in the Republic of Ireland. By many accounts, there has been a Gaeilge renaissance underway in recent times. The number of Gaeilge-medium primary and secondary schools (Gaelscoileanna) has grown throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, the year 2003 saw the passage of the Official Languages Act (laying the groundwork to assure all public services would be made available in Gaeilge as well as English), and as of January 2007 Gaeilge has become a working language of the European Union. Importantly, a Gaeilge television station (TG4) was established in 1996. This development has increased the amount of Gaeilge media significantly, and that television and film media is increasingly being utilized in Gaeilge classrooms.</p><p>The research for this dissertation was based on a year of fieldwork conducted in Dublin, Ireland. The primary methodology was semi-structured interviews with teenage second-level-school students who were enrolled in compulsory Gaeilge classes at two schools in the greater Dublin area. Simultaneous examination of social discourses, in the form of prevalent television and film media, and the talk of the teenage students I interviewed led me to discern a "locality production" process that can be discerned in both these forms of discourse. While it is noted that this process of locality production may be present anywhere, it is suggested that it may be particularly pronounced in Ireland as a result of a traditional emphasis on "place" on the island.</p><p>This dissertation thus makes a contribution to Irish and Media Studies through an analysis of Gaeilge cultural productions in the context of increased effects of globalization on the lives of the youth with whom I did my research. Additionally, this dissertation contributes to an on-going critique of identity-based theorizations through contribution of an alternative framework.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation offers a comprehensive model of contemporary nation-state sovereignty. To do so, it examines the mutually constitutive relationship between sovereignty and present-day globalization as well as the role of law and capital in creating, maintaining, and driving that relationship.</p><p>The scholarly treatment of nation-state sovereignty has been inadequate for several reasons. Older theories of sovereignty could not have foreseen the unprecedented technological advances that underlie our current system and therefore do not sufficiently explain it. More recent theories of sovereignty, in turn, tend to be too narrowly focused, such that a given model of sovereignty often only applies to that particular condition. Furthermore, the academic literatures on sovereignty and nationalism, while occasionally referencing each other, have failed to recognize that the two phenomena are parts of the same whole and therefore must be more fully integrated. </p><p>This dissertation argues that a comprehensive model of contemporary nation-state sovereignty must include two symbiotic elements. The first, referred to here as <italic>emotional sovereignty</italic>, involves subjective relationships with the state. As such, the substance of this element is unique for each group. The second element is a <italic>functional/instrumental</italic> element. It addresses ways that the sovereignty serves as an interface-mechanism with other sovereignties, like compatible nozzles attaching and linking variously-sized hoses. It likewise explains how sovereignty functions as a value-maximization mechanism. In short, a sovereignty must control its relationships with others in order to accumulate as much capital as possible in order to protect and perpetuate aspects of the domestic culture that are deemed most valuable. This <italic>functional/instrumental</italic> element, while used in distinct ways by different groups, is largely identical in form among all states.</p><p>From these multiple angles it becomes evident that nation-state sovereignty is not one single power but instead a set of powers, such that each power entails a strategic option that can be negotiated, delegated, mortgaged or surrendered. Nation-state sovereignty is therefore rendered meaningful only in connection with other nation-state sovereignties; in the contemporary situation, this means globalization. Sovereignty is, after all, an <italic>ad hoc</italic> solution to a particular set of historically and contextually emerging dilemmas; as the dilemmas have continued to change, so have the solutions. And so although people, goods, and ideas have always flowed across borders, whether geographic or cultural, the speed, nature, and extent of all such movement in the contemporary age is unprecedented. Today, all sovereignties - across the globe - are connected in diverse and manifold ways. This dissertation therefore provides a model of globalization that goes beyond the simple movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas to explain the conceptual transformations that have made today's globalization possible; the processes that drive it; and the role of the nation-state, and in particular nation-state sovereignty, as a necessary component of globalization itself. </p><p>The dissertation integrates these theories of sovereignty and globalization to show how the connections created by systems of nation-state law serve as the framework for many of the core processes of globalization, while flows of capital within and enabled by that framework fuel those processes. It shows that there are at least three important aspects of this relationship between sovereignty, globalization, law and capital: First, because of the connections of law, capital, and labor, <underline>every</underline> state is implicated in the production of <underline>every good</underline>, a phenomenon here referred to as <italic>co-production</italic>. Together with the <italic>co-consumption</italic> of those goods, <italic>co-production</italic> is the driving force behind globalization; as such, one can likewise say that nation-states <italic>co-produce</italic> globalization itself through the legal regulation of the movement of capital and individuals. Second, nation-states remain the central structural machinery of globalization. Third, globalization is not uniform. To be sure, the effects of globalization have transformed every culture on the planet and capitalism has been the vehicle for doing so. But just as not all cultures are the same, all capitalisms are not the same either. No model of sovereignty and globalization is therefore complete without a mechanism for accounting for differences in culture and capitalism.</p><p>The research that is the foundation for this dissertation was undertaken primarily in the South Pacific region, focusing on Cook Islanders in the Cook Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. Methods included participant observation, legal and documentary research, as well as informal and semi-structured interviews.</p> / Dissertation