Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, San Francisco with the University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-04, Section: A, page: 1333. Adviser: Sharon Kaufman.

The objective of this research was to develop a holistic understanding of how risk, especially the risk of HIV transmission, is constructed and negotiated in the daily lives of a group of heterosexual, HIV-serodiscordant couples in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Couples serodiscordant for HIV are those in which one partner is infected and the other is not. Data were gathered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with serodiscordant couples, as well as key informants in HIV/AIDS-related civil society, government, and biomedical practitioners in Porto Alegre. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and relevant study materials were coded and subjected to thematic and ethnographic discourse analysis. Many studies of HIV/AIDS assume that risk is a natural fact, objectively verifiable and meaningfully quantitative, but this dissertation problematized such constructions, seeing risk for HIV and the condition of serodiscordance as contingent and polysemic. This research also examined participating couples' experiences with HIV for evidence of commodification or practices of biomedically-mediated citizenship. The main finding of this study indicates that the sociocultural management of seropositivity is much more challenging than its relatively unproblematic biomedical management might lead one to expect, primarily due to the pervasiveness of AIDS-related stigma. Participating serodiscordant couples evidenced attempts to manage this stigma through recourse to a suite of linguistic strategies I call the "semantic quarantine," which discursively isolates the relationship and its constituent members from lexical elements associated with stigmatized identities. The ultimate goal of the quarantine is to create a reality where these couples' intimate relationships are stripped of their threatening connotations, and constitute a "livable love."

<p>Throughout American history, parental involvement has been a ?hot topic? in American education. Parents have great influence on their children?s schooling. Chinese immigrants are one of the largest populations in the United States, which introduces new challenges for American teachers. Along with the increasing numbers of Chinese in the United States, many American teachers have limited knowledge and resources to help them. Using Joyce Epstein?s six types of parental involvement and Grolnick and Slowiaczek?s three dimensions of parental involvement as a theoretical framework, this study investigated 10 Chinese immigrant parents in northwest America. The purpose of this study was to explore how Chinese immigrant parents? heritage, culture, and beliefs affect their understanding of American education. In addition, this study explored the factors that affect Chinese immigrant parents? participation in their children?s cognitive development.

This dissertation addresses gaps in anthropological knowledge about how reciprocity--and a specifically Andean form of reciprocity--works in disaster and resettlement settings. This study looks at the practices of reciprocity in a disaster-affected community (Manzano) and a disaster-induced resettlement (Pusuca) in the Andean highlands of Ecuador. Specifically, it examines two aspects of reciprocal exchange practices in these sites. It first looks at some of the factors that affect the continuity of reciprocal exchange practices, which other studies have found to play a vital role in recovery from disasters and resettlement. It then looks to the roles of unequal power relations in the practices of reciprocity and a particularly Andean form of reciprocity and cooperative labor, the minga. The study identifies power-laden dynamics in the practice of reciprocity that tend to be overlooked in studies of social support and mutual aid in disasters and resettlements. I argue that these dynamics are critical to an examination of reciprocity in these contexts because they have important implications for the distribution of relief and development resources. This study employed an iterative, mixed-method, 3-phase research strategy in the recursive discovery and corroboration of analytical domains and the evaluation of study hypotheses. In the first phase, exploratory observation, key informant interviews, and archival searches identified specific terms, practices, and events in order to design effective structured interview questions. In the second phase, I administered structured interviews to obtain quantitative indicators of reciprocal exchanges between group members, distribution of development benefits and collective resources, and occupational and socioeconomic data. In the third phase, I conducted focused observation and documentation of participation in decision-making, plus patterns of influence in public negotiations of development strategies and aid allocation. The expectation of hypothesis 1 was that wage employment and residential distance would be negatively associated with minga participation. The results were mixed between the two sites. In Manzano, wage employment was not significantly associated with records of minga participation, but there was a significant negative correlation with residential distance and minga participation. In Pusuca, there were significant negative correlations with wage employment and residential distance with records of minga participation. The expectation of hypothesis 2 was that household exchange participation would be positively associated with minga participation. Multiple tests of the association between household minga attendance and total household exchange participation found positive associations between these two variables in Manzano, but not in Pusuca. For hypothesis 3a, the expectation was that total household exchange participation would be positively associated with brokerage and decision-making power and statistical tests found a significant positive correlation between these variables in both sites. The implication is that one way that politically powerful individuals exercise and maintain their power is through forming reciprocal exchange ties. Those with more ties are more likely to act as brokers between their neighbors and scarce aid and development resources and more likely to have their views and agendas supported in local decision-making processes. Hypothesis 3b tests the assumption that households connected through reciprocal exchange relations to highly connected households access a greater share of relief and development resources than others. Statistical tests indicated a significant positive association between being connected to highly connected households and project benefit inclusion in both sites. This suggests that it is not only the powerful that access scarce extra-local resources, but also their less connected allies, which can be taken as evidence of privileged inclusion as a form of power in both sites. This study contributes to anthropological knowledge about the political economy of reciprocity in disaster-induced resettlements in two ways. First, it looks more broadly at the range of factors that could influence the continuity or disruption of practices of cooperation and reciprocal exchange in resettlement than other studies, which focuses on the narrow influence of policy practice. In this study, I draw on the economic anthropology of reciprocity and posit a possible role of wider political economic processes--growing integration into the capitalist wage labor economy--as an added explanatory factor for the dissolution of reciprocal exchange relations in post-disaster and resettlement contexts. The second way in which I seek to build upon these studies is by foregrounding the ways in which power relations are bound up in reciprocal exchange relations.

<p> Since WWII, the United States has experienced unprecedented economic growth and global expansion through the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Today, STEM technological innovations permeate many aspects of the social experience, from education to career to home-life, contributing to a pervasive technocratic ideology emphasizing global U.S. economic and political superiority. Many sectors of American society now tout STEM initiatives as a premium for U.S. education, contributing to the neoliberal model of producing effective, efficient, and skilled laborers. But, does STEM necessarily contribute to those social forces that routinely devalue the principles of a liberal, democratic educational ideal?</p><p> In 2014, I investigated new forms of collaboration between the commercial sector and education system in Flagstaff, AZ. The STEM City Center is a non-profit organization that seeks to bridge the gap between community and schools by identifying local assets and sponsoring integrated STEM experiences for students. Using STEM as a conceptual tool to support interdisciplinary approaches to education, participants of this project revealed the core values that motivate social transformation in a town that borders multiple ethnic and cultural realities recognized as under assault by increasingly globalized markets. STEM City's model emphasizes increased critical thinking, collaborative learning, creativity, and effective communication and supports an implicit goal of encouraging a critically engaged, politically aware, and socially conscious society.</p>

<p> "Find Yourself Here" argues that since transmigrants often form profound connections to place, we can develop a nuanced account of transmigrant subjectivity through innovative fiction by migrants who describe their own neighborhoods. The authors studied use their own hometowns as both setting and stylistic inspiration, deploying various formal techniques to mirror the fictional location to the real one, thus literarily enacting the neighborhood. I construct a neighborhood geography from each work, by traveling on foot, interviewing the neighbors and local historians, mapping the text&rsquo;s fictional setting upon the actual spaces it references, and teasing out connections between place, narrative form, and migrancy, to demonstrate how excavating the locale illuminates the text. My methodology is interdisciplinary: it incorporates recent sociological studies of transnationalism by Linda Basch, Patricia Pessar, and Jorge Duany, tenets of Human Geography, and the work of Latino literary theorists including Ra&uacute;l Homero Villa and Mary Pat Bray on space in narrative. My literary neighborhood geographies&mdash;of Salvador Plascencia&rsquo;s El Monte barrio, Junot D&iacute;az&rsquo;s New Jersey housing development, Sandra Cisneros&rsquo; Westside Chicago, and Helena Mar&iacute;a Viramontes&rsquo; East Los Angeles&mdash;sharpen Latino literary criticism&rsquo;s long-standing focus on urban and regional spaces in narrative by zooming in on neighborhood streets, while building on contemporary theories of transnationalism to analyze the broader cultural implications of local migrancy. By grounding the effects of transmigrancy in concrete locations, &ldquo;Find Yourself Here&rdquo; presents a comprehensive vision of the US Latino immigrant experience without generalizing from its myriad versions and numerous sites.</p>

<p> The Town Creek mound site, located in Montgomery County, North Carolina, is classified as Mississippian based on the archaeological evidence for intensive maize agriculture, the presence of complicated stamped ceramics, and the presence of an earthen platform mound. In my research, I studied hinterland sites within a 40-km radius of the mound site to determine how Mississippian settlement patterns in the surrounding region changed through time. I used ceramic analysis and the presence and absence of diagnostic artifacts to create an occupational history of hinterland sites. I also used spatial analysis to delineate polity boundaries and compare spatial patterns to others established in the region. When ceramic and spatial data were combined, patterns emerged suggesting that fewer hinterland sites were occupied during the height of Town Creek&rsquo;s occupation, and more hinterland sites were occupied when Town Creek&rsquo;s population was dwindling. These patterns suggest that as people moved away from Town Creek, they were relocating within the mound site&rsquo;s immediate vicinity. Spatial analysis also showed a break in hinterland sites at 18 km during all of Town Creek&rsquo;s occupation, indicating that the administrative center at Town Creek had an influence of at least 18 km.</p>

The furry subculture (also known as the anthropomorphic fandom) creates identity through anthropomorphism and therianthropy. Anthropomorphism is the giving of human traits to the non-human. Therianthropy is the giving of animal traits to the human. Through play and creating art, these individuals of the furry subculture take on an anthropomorphic identity (what furries call a fursona) while bridging local and global groups through communication technologies. For this folklore project I conducted ethnographic field works interviews with the Bowling Green, Kentucky fur group. I also build off of the interviews project with an online furry role-play group as well as a Manhattan, Kansas fur group. This thesis explores furry folklore: how members of the furry fandom create, relate to, and express their fursonas. This was done by looking at people’s narrative of joining the fandom and stories of their fursona creation, furry art, fursuits, and fursuit performance. At the same time it covers the complexities of furries as a network and how they mitigate stigma and identity.

Developments in video games over the last few decades have opened up many new kinds of musical experiences that pose substantial challenges to traditional understandings of music and musical agency. Virtual spaces grant us opportunities and freedoms to interact with music in manners that might not be prudent, practical, or even possible in the physical world. Players and creators of games have considerable license to play with music – to push the boundaries of music’s signifying and sensational potential within far-reaching narrative, ludic, and social contexts. This dissertation investigates how modern technologies of digital gaming enable and motivate such transgressive modes of musical engagement. Video game players, composers, and designers frequently employ (or otherwise interact with) music, noise, and speech in ways that deliberately or inadvertently violate technical rules, social expectations, cultural conventions, aesthetic norms, and ethical codes. Just as creators of games are constantly surprising gamers with innovative concepts and progressive designs, so gamers often come up with forms of emergent play that creators themselves might not have anticipated or intended. Though gameplay isn’t always explicitly transgressive, I argue here that it can be productively conceptualized as an activity that is largely bound up in potentialities for transgression. Play isn’t simply about make-believe, but additionally about re-making belief – about redrawing the limits of the imagination through accomplishments of acts previously unimaginable (or believed to have been outright impossible). The particular liberties that can be taken with (and in) games may ultimately teach us some profound things about what (we think) music is (and isn’t), how it works, what it’s good for, and why and to whom these questions should matter in broader social, cultural, and intellectual contexts. / Music

An important dimension of contemporary capitalism is the global spread of intellectual property rights law, drawing new attention by governments and media to the unauthorized copying of fashion brands. In this dissertation, I draw on sixteen months of ethnographic research with small-scale, indigenous Maya garment manufacturers to examine the cultural and moral context of brand piracy in Guatemala. I analyze what practices of copying and imitation, some of which qualify as piracy under national and international law, among Maya manufacturers reveal about two aspects of the social field: first, changing economic and cultural conditions following waves of neoliberal economic and legal reform, and, second, the nonlinear reproduction of forms of moral and legal reckoning at the margins of the global economy and amidst mounting insecurities that include rising violent crime rates and legal impunity for violent crime. I examine how practices of copying and imitation among manufacturers and competitive behavior more generally are evaluated locally in light of kin relations that promote the sharing of knowledge and resources within a somewhat loose property regime and given ideologies of race and nation that encourage class-based solidarity among Maya people. I find that the normative models and business practices evident among these manufacturers parochialize official portraits of progress, business ethics, and development promoted in neoliberal policy agendas and international law. In addition, I analyze significant gaps between what fashion and branding mean in Guatemalan Maya communities and how they are understood in international projects of legal harmonization that are also about re-branding and re-imagining the Guatemalan nation. Neoliberal statecraft following a long internal armed conflict in Guatemala involves policy approaches that amplify the presence of global brands while compounding conditions of social and economic inequality that limit Maya men and women’s access to authorized goods. Meanwhile, Maya people are invited to participate in a modernist vision of citizenship and social progress that encourages a privatized model of indigenous identity mediated by branded commodities and formal market transactions. The brand emerges as a powerful medium through which claims to legitimacy and authority and senses of belonging are negotiated at national and local levels. / Anthropology