Drawing from medical anthropology's approach to global health, this dissertation examines well-being among HIV- and TB-infected labor migrants in South Africa. Based on forty-four months of fieldwork from 2005 to 2013, it narrates households' struggles to make ends meet materially and morally in a context of unemployment, scarcity, and epidemic. / Anthropology

This dissertation offers an ethnography of motorcycle taxi drivers: Bangkok's most important and informal network of everyday mobility. Drawing on over eight years of experience in the region, six months of archival research, and 24 months of fieldwork, I analyze how the drivers, mostly male rural migrants, negotiate their presence in the city through spatial expertise, bodily practices, and social relations. Their physical mobility through traffic, I argue, shapes their ability to find unexplored routes in the social, economic, and political landscapes of the city and to create paths for action where other urban dwellers see a traffic jam or a political gridlock. My narrative builds up to the role of these drivers in the Red Shirt protests that culminated in May 2010 and analyzes how their practices as transportation and delivery providers shape their role in political uprisings and urban guerilla confrontations. My main finding is that when the everyday life of the city breaks down the drivers take advantage of their position in urban circuits of exchange to emerge as central political actors in contemporary Bangkok by blocking, slowing down, or filtering the circulation of people, goods, and information which they normally facilitate. Owners of the Map proposes an alternative view of contemporary urbanism in which the city is constructed day after day through the work of connection and mediation, its frictions and failures, the tactics adopted to resist them, as well as the political tensions that emerge from these struggles. / Anthropology

In 1992, several thousand residents from northern Bosnia's Prijedor region were detained in the Omarska concentration camp, which was created and run on the site of an iron mine by the mine's own engineers, labourers and management. Often overlooked in discussions about the ethnoreligious nature of the Balkan conflict is the fact that Omarska's workers relied heavily on their technical knowledge (of organic compounds, geology and terrain, machinery) to generate new ways of concentrating and executing prisoners. / Anthropology

This dissertation builds a socio-cultural biography of Paris's Gare du Nord, Europe's largest railway station, from its transnational aims to connect Europe in the nineteenth century, to early twentieth century strikes, to twenty-first century immigration and riots. It shows how the formation of subjects, boundaries, and the "dangerous classes" in France were linked to infrastructural development. Through this examination, I argue that official French rhetoric and policies around the so-called "dangerous classes" created ideologies of contact that played out in concrete public space and came to be challenged by subjects and groups represented as dangerously different. Through encounter, overlapping boundaries--beyond the foreigner/citizen divide--became significant in the Gare du Nord, as marginalized subjects created new ways of relating spaces and bodies in this heterogeneous arena. My dissertation examines the connection between four processes that govern the station’s socio-political trajectory: 1) the government’s elaboration of the "dangerous classes" paradigm that led to expanding technologies of policing and surveillance; 2) the development of transportation infrastructure that brought migrants and goods to the capital; 3) the emergence of a railroad labor economy that created a new class of workers; and 4) the arrival and settling of immigrant groups from former colonies. I show how "dangerous" social archetypes, from the nineteenth century provincial migrant, to the early twentieth century railway worker on strike, to the African-Muslim immigrant, were summoned and reconfigured in events at the Gare du Nord and shaped the future configuration of political subjects and their struggles. I focus ethnographically on the trajectories of African immigrants at the station, the contemporary "dangerous classes." I argue that through their trans-regional networks and practices, the Gare du Nord has become a unique site of political contestation as it transforms into a node that connects the station to immigration pathways through sub-Saharan and North Africa. By offering an ethnographic approach to multidisciplinary conversations on transnational cities and postcolonial history, my dissertation builds a framework and methodology to analyze proliferating "theaters of encounter:" sites suffused with conflicting idioms, grounded in structures of human and capital circulation, and traversed by histories of struggle.

<p> This research is the first exploratory survey of rule of law officials in Iraq. Prior to this research, little has been done to examine whether U.S. rule of law efforts in Iraq were informed by a proper knowledge of the culture and criminal justice systems of Iraq and whether the U.S. learned lessons over time. </p><p> This research demonstrates that understanding of the indigenous legal and social culture is critical to the success of rule of law programs, that there are distinctive characteristics of the legal culture in Iraq, and that the rule of law programs of the U.S. in Iraq were not informed by an adequate understanding of the culture of Iraq. The author concludes that a new paradigm &ndash; Enablement Plus &ndash; is necessary if the U.S. is to improve the chances of success for rule of law programs during and immediately after conflict.</p>

<p> Throughout the history of the National Park Service, the question of whether Native American&rsquo;s still have rights to traditionally used natural resources found within park lands has been debated. This debate is largely held in political, legal, and philosophical arenas, but there are ethnographic and ecological questions that need to be addressed in order for policy makers to make informed decisions. Addressing these questions also provides insight into how cultures develop sustainable harvesting practices. One of the parks that has been addressing traditional plant harvesting is Mount Rainier National Park, which has been working with the Nisqually Indian Tribe to develop a collecting agreement that would allow members of the Tribe to harvest twelve species of plants. In this dissertation, I ask two questions: first, how do members of the Nisqually Tribe traditionally harvest these plants? My other question is: what are the biological effects of harvesting beargrass (<i>Xerophyllum tenax</i> (Pursh) Nutt.) and pipsissewa (<i> Chimaphila umbellata</i> (R. BR.) Spreng,), and peeling bark of western redcedar (<i>Thuja plicata</i> Donn. Ex D. Don)? I used a combination of ethnographic and ecological methods to answer these questions. Based on the metrics I used, the Nisqually practices do not decrease the abundance of beargrass and pipsissewa. The traditional harvest of cedar bark does not change the tree&rsquo;s secondary growth rate. The lack of measureable change in these three species is a product of limiting the amount of biomass harvested to within the plants&rsquo; range of tolerance to damage. Results suggest that the Nisqually&rsquo;s methods of harvesting are based upon traditional ecological knowledge. The results of this research will help Mount Rainier managers and the Nisqually Tribe to develop policy that allows the Tribe to utilize these plants while not interfering with the park&rsquo;s mission. </p>

<p> The musical traditions of New Orleans are largely patriarchal. As the predominant sonic signifier of New Orleans, the brass band amplifies this gender bias more than any other musical tradition in the city. Brass band song lyrics can at times revolve around the subjugation and objectification of women, which renders the brass band canon tricky to access for female musicians. These symbolic issues become socially reified in the male control of instruments and the barriers to professionalization experienced by female musicians. Indeed, female brass band musicians are in the minority, constituting few more than ten musicians in a city with somewhere in the vicinity of fifty bands, all of which feature about ten musicians. The available literature on brass bands has thus far focused almost exclusively on black men and, mostly due to the relative absence of women in brass bands, neglects to view gender as a category of analysis, reflecting the gender bias of the scene at large. Using black feminist theory, this thesis seeks to introduce gender as a key element to brass band research by studying the only current exception to male dominance in New Orleans&rsquo; brass band community, an all-female brass band named the Original Pinettes Brass Band. Their example forces us to reconsider the domain of brass band music not only as one where brass band instruments articulate power, but where gender is a primary element in the construction and consolidation of this power.</p>

This paper is about the transformation of a society in a rural area among the Nyamwezi of West-Central Tanzania. It deals with the change of people’s attitudes toward themselves, their lives and the surrounding world, brought on by the introduction of ‘modern education’. The discussion evolves around the theories of education and the socializing role of schooling. The paper treats the issue whether the education provided is relevant in relation to local life, or only directed toward the realization of a radically new way of living.Further this paper debates the impact of modernization through institutions other than the schools, and the future of small communities in an increasingly globalized world.The issues in this paper are discussed from the perspective of young students in secondary schools and their parents. The background to the discussions throughout the paper is the secondary school itself,the educational system, the rural community and developing countries.

Denna text handlar om qawwalimusiken. Qawwali är en musikform med rötterna i Indien och Pakistan. Den är också en del av en specifik religiös tradition nämligen sufismen. Qawwali är en musikalisk genre som är nära förknippad med en sufisk ritual, under vilken den spelar en betydande roll. I texten undersöks det huruvida qawwali har förändrats, exempelvis till form,innehåll och mål, när den blivit en del av den västerländska musikscenen och kategoriseras under World Music.Nyckelfrågan är om de religiösa idéerna och den sakrala, religiösa meningen urvattnas eller försvinner i och med att qawwali har blivit del av den moderna och globala musik-industrin och har därmed lyfts upp ur dess ursprungliga socioekonomiska och religiösa miljö. Med andra ord: Finns det en essentiell kärna, den religiös-mystiska musiken som trotsar kulturgränser? Eller går den förlorade i främmande kulturella sammanhang? Tonvikten läggs på den religiösa aspekten men uppsatsen tar också upp förändringar av de sociala, ekonomiska aspekterna av qawwali, liksom genusaspekten. Analysen inleds först med en beskrivning av den kulturella och regionala bakgrunden,där frågor om musik och islam, sufismen, qawwalis regionala och kulturella förankring och sufimusikens syfte behandlas. Därefter följer en diskussion om globalisering och musikindustrin samt en presentation av de den teoretiska ramen, bland annat Giddens urbäddningsteori och Tomlinsons avterritorialiseringsteori. Texten avslutas med en sammanfattande diskussion om qawwalis förändring på olika plan och den traditionella qawwalin kontrasteras mot den kommersiella.De sufistiska och islamska traditionerna som avspeglas i qawwalimusiken och under sufiritualen,samt sufismens syfte beskrivs som förändrade och urvattnade i den musikindustristyrda qawwali.

Some six million people in modern Central America are considered to be “Maya” and thereby descendants of an ethnic group that created one of the great early civilizations of mankind. The present study, in a first section, looks in some detail at how the Maya became a group of its own, slowly separating itself from Mesoamerican neighbors, taking on an ethnic identity, markers and boundaries Attention is paid to what can be considered uniquely Maya and what remained features shared with other groups. This historic section follows the Maya until early colonization. The next section gives an overview of modern Mayaness, activism and Maya claims to preserve and revitalize a supposed heritage, taking it into the 21st century. With the historic section as a mirror and background, the study aims at identifying how Mayaness is maintained through time, how silent testimonies tell us about the use in the past of ethnic and cultural markers. Proofs are given of such elements still alive. The text goes on to discuss the future of Maya ethnic identity and culture, its continuity while changing.