This dissertation seeks to understand how the women of Cambodia recreated self and culture after experiencing civil war, displacement, refugee camps, and resettlement. The women, as well the men, lost all that was meaningful including children, spouses, immediate and extended family, known villages, the Buddhist religion, predictable life rites, and economic self-sufficiency. Since most women lost the protection of husbands, brothers, and fathers, their plight was all the more urgent as they attempted to keep their remaining children alive and safe. In order to comprehend this enormous problem, I conducted interviews with the women (and some men) in Amherst, Massachusetts, a rural New England town. In addition, I questioned several nuns and a Buddhist wiseman and gathered life histories from some of the women. I used a loosely structured interview method as well as participant observation. I attended Buddhist festivals and family events. I had access to videos, library resources and archival material at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts. I found the women have not recreated but added to their pre-war sense of self and culture. Most families maintain their Khmer/Buddhist identity through language, food, clothing, celebrations, and personal surroundings. It is important to the women that the children remain knowledgeable in Buddhist practices and learn the valuable Khmer lesson of respect. The women readily accept aspects of American culture. They understand the importance of education for their children and the need for their children to learn English. English is beyond the grasp of many older women. There are areas of difficulty for the Khmer women, especially when strongly held Khmer values violently clash with American values. There are also endeavors that will strengthen the Khmer community in Amherst, such as the construction of a traditional Buddhist Wat (Temple) in neighboring Leverett, Massachusetts. It is my conclusion that the Khmer community will remain viable as the women actively blend new traditions with older rituals.

Over the past 20 years, small-scale citizen action movements have become an integral part of the social and political landscapes of countries throughout the post-industrial west. In poor communities in particular, the protagonists of such endeavors are often women. Based on two years of fieldwork in a municipality in northern England, I examine the emergence of local-level campaigns, initiated and sustained by women who are tenants of public sector housing developments (council estates). By combining ethnographic material based on participant-observation with historical research, I suggest that the current fluorescence of grassroots activism is one outcome of a shift in the way in which poverty is being "governed" in post-industrial societies, away from the government of the poor once characteristic of welfare states and toward a new notion of government by the poor as manifested in policies intended to foster such values as "freedom," "choice" and "empowerment." In Chapter 2, I propose an historical explanation for women's on-going participation in local-level campaigns by considering the extent to which poor mothers were made the primary targets for the application of such interventions as social work, health visiting and urban planning. I argue that it was this emphasis placed on the role of the mother in the governing of families that explains her engagement in grassroots movements which are intended to better the lot of poor households and neighborhoods, whose well-being has traditionally been designated her responsibility. Chapter 3 offers a view of life in these communities at the present moment. I document the ways in which women's activism is coming to fill in the void created by the prolonged flight of the state from poor communities. And, in Chapter 4, I consider how post-welfare technologies of government now locate "expertise" within the domain of experience, rather than as a result of professional training, obliging the poor not only to govern themselves, but also to police their own communities. Finally, I discuss how popular representations of poverty as a "spectacle" demonstrate the extent to which mobilizing images of "normality" and "deviance" remains integral to the project of governing society as a whole.

In the last decade, labor migration of women from the former Soviet Union has grown exponentially. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Moldova, where 1/3 of the population works abroad, most illegally, and where about 1/2 of these migrants are women transnationally "commuting" to work for 6 to 12 months at a time. This dissertation examines the effects of the neoliberal global economy in this region on women's migration and questions how notions of gender inform this new economy. Bridging ethnographies of postsocialism with those on migration and gender, and drawing upon poststructural feminist works, I show how shifting ideas about gender play a key role in the moral economies of supply and demand for these labor migrants, in the experience of this migration on the ground, and in state and organizational responses to it. I offer a comprehensive view of one particular migration pattern—(Gagauz) Moldovan women who work as domestics in Turkey—drawing on multi-sited and transnational ethnographic dissertation research and interviews conducted in 2004–5 with these migrant women at home and abroad, their village compatriots at home, their employers and employment agents in Istanbul, and employees of the foremost institution dealing with migrants in the region, the International Organization for Migration. I deploy Bourdieu's concept of social fields of values—here conceptualized as gendered moral economies—to show how notions about women, wealth, migration, and work play out in discursive practices at these sites, conditioning the experiences of this migration from these various perspectives and helping this illegal labor market to function. This dissertation also problemmatizes claims about 'postsocialist women' by specifying their experiences in terms of overlapping and various subjectivities. In so doing, it shifts the anthropological gaze from a narrow focus on 'postsocialism' in this region and 'postsocialist women' as a special case of migrant women to identify problems and processes of neoliberal globalization that hold wider significance. In this, I am concerned with relating the common dilemmas of migrant women, the ambiguities of all female labors, and the complexity of women's agency.

This dissertation examines the beliefs, values, and behaviors that constitute the "culture of gender" in Belize, Central America. The author begins with an overview of feminist theory and other changes in anthropological theory that have influenced her own understanding of social inequality and culture change. She moves from this to a detailed discussion of the historical and demographic features of gender relations in Belize along with a critique of the historiography of the country. One chapter provides a structural analysis of the position and status of women, which is balanced by a micro analysis of how these structural features affect individual women's lives, focusing mostly on the experiences of Creole, Garifuna, and East Indian women. Three chapters contain oral individual narratives that give specific examples of the constraints women live under. The chapters also emphasize how these women have managed change in the contexts of their personal lives and through their participation in women's groups. The process of gender enculturation is analyzed as an impediment to individual and culture change while women's groups are viewed as facilitators of both individual and structural change.

<p>This study helps address gaps in knowledge concerning the lives of Indo-Fijian immigrant women in California and offers a space for their voices to be heard. The subsequent chapters investigate the lives of five Indo-Fijian immigrant women and their experiences upon migrating to Modesto, California. Using a qualitative research approach, data were collected through participant-observations, semi-structured in-depth interviews and informal conversations. The data are presented as anthropological silhouettes, a form of life-writing (the recording of events and experiences of a life), which explores each individual woman&rsquo;s experience with life in Fiji to her eventual migration and transition to life in California. The study reveals heterogeneity amongst the women&rsquo;s experiences and perspectives as well as commonalities that arise in their collective experiences as Indo-Fijian immigrant women residing in the city of Modesto. Overall, the anthropological silhouettes reveal that migration has led to shifts in the women&rsquo;s identities and their prescribed gender roles. Furthermore, despite some of the challenges that came with immigrating, the women have experienced social, political and economic mobility since arriving to California. All five women have accepted the United States as their adopted homeland, and as a result, have no plans of re-migrating to Fiji. </p>

Deploying a surplus-labor theoretical framework, I incorporate results from interviews with South Asian families in Chicago to investigate how immigrants juggle and assume a variety of revenue positions: in nuclear and extended families, as full-time wage earners, as home-based independent producers, in retail stores, in 'family councils,' etc. Family councils will be defines as an important institution inside immigrant households in which potentially all family members partake, making a series of financial and non-financial decisions that affect all the class and nonclass processes in which household members participate. In addition, the chapter on the household also explores a class analysis of extended families, a particularly important institution for US-bound immigrants since the majority of contemporary entrants arrive on family reunification visas. By examining how immigrants actively seek out multiple revenue positions, not only does this thesis map their survival strategies but also emphasizes changes in the acceptable living standard and more specifically the private value of labor power as reasons why immigrants take on new economic positions. This thesis examines the evolution of the immigrant's private value of labor power, and the many effects generated for immigrant-employing capitalists, non-immigrant-employing capitalists, immigrant households, and non-immigrant consumers of commodities produced by immigrants, and, of course, for immigrants themselves.

Over the last two decades, international development organizations and agencies have adopted "people's participation" as an imperative of the development process. Viewed as a prescription for redressing the imbalance of power between different cultures and systems of knowledge, its purpose has been a compensation for the "developed" world's mind/colonialization of "developing" countries. I have discovered, through my own work as a Western academic engaged in participatory educational projects in the refugee camp setting, how it is possible to use "participation" as a "smoke screen": masking how we manage and control the lives of the disenfranchised in carrying out our quest for democracy, modernization, market economies and even women's rights as human rights. This dissertation examines a research process in context. Using aspects of participatory action research, I spent two months with two groups of Cambodian women who had returned to their country after spending a decade or more in refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border. The main intention of this collaborative research relationship was to examine issues of reintegration. The feedback from the refugee women in my previous work in the camps and in this study with women returnees, coupled with the examination of case studies and other qualitative studies from the literature, has led to questions concerning the epistemological, philosophical and political motivations underlying "participatory" policy, education, and research. The dissertation examines the what, where, why and how of these considerations. Positioning myself among post-structural and post-modern as well as third world feminists, but with a sense of openness, I combine these world views in deconstructing the methods of negotiation in knowledge production and the dialogic process required in crossing cultural horizons with this particular group of women returnees to Cambodia. The purpose of the study is to explore ways of carrying out "the cause for social justice", without destroying it in the process.

In this dissertation, an ethnography of transnational commercial surrogacy in India, I argue that existing Eurocentric and ethics-oriented frames for studying surrogacy make invisible the labor and resistances of women within this process. By framing commercial surrogacy as ‘labor’ instead, I ask: How do commercial surrogate mothers in India, as participants in a new kind of labor, challenge and/or re-affirm ideologies, discourses and practices surrounding not just surrogacy, but women’s role as producers and reproducers? Through participant observation and open ended interviews, I reveal the “labor” of women that often remains invisible and underpaid: whether in the form of “dirty” labor, “embodied labor” (labor that requires intensive use of their physical selves) or “kinship labor” (the labor of forming and maintaining kinship ties). Instead of romanticizing the everyday resistances of the surrogates, I highlight the inherent paradox of their resistances to domination by the family, the community, the clinic and the state. The multiple sites of domination imply that resistance to one set of forces often involves reification of other forms of domination. At one level, the significance of my research is that it is the only existing work on this stunning example of international division of (reproductive) labor where poor women of the global south have babies for richer women, often from the global north. This study aims to move beyond the Euro-American setting and get a broader view of the cultural response to new reproductive technologies. By calling for the recognition of commercial surrogacy as “labor”, I challenge the gendered dichotomies of natural and biology versus social and labor. Simultaneously, I deconstruct the image of the “victim” inevitably evoked whenever bodies of “Third World” women are in focus. It’s likely that the everyday resistances by the surrogates in India pose very little threat to the fundamentally exploitative structure of transnational surrogacy. What they do represent, however, is a constant process of negotiation and strategizing at the local level. They provoke a reappraisal of existing assumptions surrounding not just surrogacy but our understanding of new forms of women’s labor and local resistances, new bases for forming kinship ties and novel responses to new reproductive technologies and biomedicalization.

Own to a long tradition in Spanish America, the Venezuelan feminine chronicle production takes a greater consideration and interest in the last decades. In this sense we present Elisa Lerner who constitutes an indispensable presence when we need to talk about Venezuelan chronicle. This research is directed to the chronicle corpus of that writer in order to establish a tentative pattern, necessary for its study an analysis. That pattern is conformed by five groups, literary chronicle, mass media chronicle, sexual gender chronicle, cinema chronicle, and autobiographies chronicle. Each one of them can be analysed independently and represent a particular study object. However, we have verified that lernereanas chronicles have an axis which unified them such as the concern for women in the modernization process, which has Hollywood cinema influence. In particular we take cinema chronicles, because in them we have observed that the life in the United States, as it is presented on the screen, is a systematic reference for Lerner when she speaks about women, modernity, and their compulsive conflicts. The cinema then is a metaphor in order to do cultural critic when we refer to more problematical aspects of Venezuelan culture and society. At the same time, she comments, socially and ironically, about the North American society and the strategies related to feminine aspects in that area. We analysed some of this chronicles in a cinema temporal curve in Hollywood from 1920's to 1960's. When Lerner filters her critic through Hollywood, she readapted herself inside the masculine hegemonic speech without using the political speech of their like kind. This cinema mediation allows offering her point of view in the face of modernity, the feminine liberation, the Venezuelan society, and the international politics without being put apart from the circle she belonged at that time. While many of the intellectual people enjoyed a privileged situation own to their hegemonic situation, Lerner's writing continued constantly and secretly emergent in the Venezuelan society.