A function of organized religion thought crucial to the maintenance of society is the passing of societal values to the young. Yet membership and participation in mainline religious organizations has been in decline since the 1960's, a fact attributed to teenage youth rejecting the institutional expression of religion. The assumption that religious dropout behavior is a normal process of adolescent development has limited the focus of social science research. Missing in this account is the actor's subjective perspective. What is needed in order to understand the forces that govern membership behavior is an exploration of the concept structure that constitutes the psychological life space of the adolescent participant. The purpose of this study was to examine the subjective meaning of church membership from the viewpoint of eight religiously active adolescents. As the first step in an action research process in organizational development, the study utilized the long ethnographic interview as a qualitative approach to problem solving by focusing on the organizational actor's inside perspective as the primary source of data. The interpretation of this data then served as the diagnostic stage of action research laying the ground work for future participatory planned change. The data in this study supported survey research that showed religious interest is strong among adolescents. The findings suggest that among church youth, both a high level of religious belief and a high level of social relationship serve as positive reinforcers in maintaining church involvement. Parents modeling religious behavior who set their children on a religious path, yet allow them to choose their own level of religious involvement in adolescence, seem to promote a process of values clarification among church youth that results in a positive religious attitude and active participation. Moreover, church youth who see a lack of tangible results in religious behavior, feel invulnerable, or have little familial support in the face of socio-economic demands for their time, are more likely to be persuaded by peer pressure than familial influence, and are more likely to disengage from religious practice.

This research concerns the nature of the process of land fragmentation in rural Poland which resulted in the appearance and persistence of a specific type of peasant land tenure which can be described as the "dwarf farm pattern." The investigation is focused primarily on South Poland, a region which was the former Austrian partition section of Poland known as Galicia (Galicja). The general approach of this study is characterized by two main features. First, this is a macro-study. Second, its frame of reference is primarily historical. Traditional explanations of dwarf farm development have centered on the role of rising population growth in combination with a Polish peasant inheritance ideology calling for the division of the farm among all its heirs. This explanation is both overly simplistic as well as misleading, as it tends to overlook other critical historical and ecological factors. Rather, it is my assertion that the dwarf farm pattern emerged as an unexpected and unwanted adaptation to a previously existing socio-economic structure which was faced with a severe demographic and economic crisis. The fact is that the Galician peasant was fully aware of the impending disaster in dividing the farm. But the alternatives were even more bleak. The lack of non-agricultural employment in the face of an economy which failed to industrialize exerted pressure upon the peasants to divide the land. Labor intensification on a smaller piece of land was the best possible alternative to their economic dilemma. In sum, it was not the "mindless application of inheritance rules" which caused the dwarf farm pattern, but rather the economic imperatives of poverty. In addressing this last question, it is necessary to understand the peasant inheritance ideology much more thoroughly than has often been the case. For example, the very assertion of the existence of a partible land inheritance ideology is questionable at best. In fact, the Galician peasant showed a very strong aversion to dividing the land. In many areas of Galicia, the principle of non-division of the farm was dominant. The ideal inheritance ideology was rather to give the farm to one son, who then had the obligation of "paying off" his other siblings as their share in the farm. The decision to subdivide the land was taken only when this solution proved no longer feasible.

This dissertation is a project in interpretive ethnography for which fieldwork was done in "Greenway County," Kentucky, between 1986 and 1989. The question guiding the research was: How are decisions about the future of work in Greenway County, Kentucky, mediated by local constructions of (1) livelihood; (2) identity; (3) relatedness; (4) power; and (5) change? This problem challenges notions of "modernization" as progression from "underdeveloped" to "developed," instead asking what the multiple scenarios of development are in a region, and tracing them through an overdetermined context. East central Kentucky was chosen as the site for this research because (1) factory and farm work have long been combined in the region, contesting classification of the work force as either "peasants" or classical proletariat, (2) there is a rapid influx of multinational capital into the region, sparking talk of change, and (3) the ethnographer is indigenous to the region, affording multiple "placement" of the analytical voice along with those interviewed. Methods used in this ethnographic project included participant observation in numerous settings, semistructured interviews, mapping of social networks, ethnohistory, analyses of aggregate data, and discourse analysis of local and regional news reports. Livelihood images and forms of life in Greenway County were clustered analytically as "tobacco," "toyota," and "subaltern" development discourses. Tobacco and Toyota, as key symbols in dominant discourses of development in the region, represent the participation of Greenway Countians in two multinational industries; the former discourse, surrounding the cash-cropping of burley tobacco, may be characterized by images of continuity, and the latter by images of change. A subaltern development discourse in Greenway County is locally initiated and controlled, mostly by women, and its participants do not rely as much on "official" settings of decision-making to enact their images of the future of work in Greenway County. The central conclusions of this dissertation are that more subtle forms of analysis than regionalized dichotomies of the powerful and the powerless must be invoked to study "development," and that if agriculture and manufacturing are viewed as both being multinational industries, we can better see the ways in which workers manipulate and are manipulated by those industries.

Anthropologists studying sociocultural evolution are interested in the processes that contributed to social ranking in egalitarian societies. Individual agents must overcome the inertia of communalism to extend their authority into various domains of social life by controlling resources, people, and places essential for social reproduction. Native North Americans maintained relatively equal access to resources through reciprocity. Under some conditions, however, agents undermined reciprocity to establish privileged positions of status. I develop a political-economic model to explore how social inequality is created and perpetuated through labor mobilization and resource monopoly from archaeological remains in central Arkansas. The model explicitly articulates social negotiation and hierarchy formation with strategies and tactics of surplus extraction and its resistance to explicate how the material world is implicated in experimental social forms. I analyze the changing form, function, and distribution of settlements and artifacts associated with the establishment and abandonment of the Toltec Mounds site--the paramount center of Plum Bayou culture in the Arkansas River Lowland. Longitudinal trends in settlement patterns, mound construction, exchange relations, and the organization of technology are compared with expectations derived from the model to interpret the archaeological record. There is meaningful spatial-temporal variation in the distribution of people and objects which reflects fluctuations in social organization within and between regions. This interpretation contrasts with that of a gradual, linear trajectory of growth and development. Furthermore, changing population integration relates to political and economic processes that operate over large spatial arenas that transcend ecological, stylistic, and social boundaries. Mounting empirical evidence suggests that social ranking harbored contradictions between generosity and accumulation which allowed individuals the opportunity to resist surplus extraction. The result is a cyclical pattern of social integration and disintegration associated with diachronic shifts in central places suggesting that the processes that contributed to incipient social ranking were tenuous and politically unstable in central Arkansas. Ranking does not represent a reorganization of egalitarianism within all realms of life, nor do elite strategies to mobilize labor and monopolize surplus operate as a totality. Institutions of egalitarianism seem to lie immediately beneath the veneer of power and authority in rank societies.

No description available.

This dissertation is a longitudinal ethnography of a bicultural organization in transition I began in October 1987 directly after the takeover by Japanese management of a Western Massachusetts paper plant. This project documents the experience of both the American workforce and the Japanese management team at the plant, a microcosm of the cultural change process recurrent in modern industrial America. In particular, I examine cultural differences in the understanding of leadership and "concept of work," actual and experienced shifts in how inequality is structured, how conflict is managed, and how "otherness" is defined. The results are organized around four themes which emerged over time from the ethnographic data: (1) a conceptual model of "negotiated culture"; (2) national cultural differences in the transfer of technology; (3) effects of culture on labor relations and the collective bargaining process; and (4) "bicultural alienation" of the American middle manager. This study employs a between-methods triangulated research design involving both a qualitative ethnographic component as well as a quantitative study. The ethnography relies on a dialectical mode of inquiry wherein current anthropological theory and ethnographic data gathered at the field site are constantly compared. The results of the ethnography are then used to inform the generation of strong constructs which are the basis for a quantitatively tested organization-wide census. My ethnographic methods include participant observation and intensive interviewing of the American managers, union committee, blue collar workers, and Japanese management team in the U.S. and in Japan. The quantitative component of my methodology is a retrospective questionnaire administered to the entire workforce (N = 203) which measures their attitudes towards the Japanese management and their assessment of the evolving organizational culture at three distinct time periods: (A) before the takeover; (B) after a $40 million dollar expansion of the facility---a zenith of the company's success; and (C)~the present---after the company has endured its first layoffs in the wake of a severe industry downturn. Results of the questionnaire analysis are woven into the body of the ethnographic reports, sometimes supporting, sometimes adding to, and sometimes challenging the ethnography.

This project focuses on the cultural fault lines that converged in the years between 1890 and 1920 to create a dynamic sense of folk regional identity among the people of western Massachusetts' Sawmill Valley. The key to the study is its thematic attention to the often conflicting uses of place and landscape within the oral traditions that I have collected from local residents over the last two years. In comparison to the urban and suburban sprawl which lie within less than a half hour's drive of it, the Sawmill Valley now appears to be a last vestige of the old, pastoral New England out of which many American myths of consensus have been made; this dissertation is concerned with dismantling such appearances. Far from being secure vestiges of old Yankee stability or self-sufficiency, the Valley's folk traditions functioned during the turn-of-the-century period as highly self-conscious reactions to events which were occuring both within and just beyond the region's immediate borders. The gradual influx of an immigrant (primarily French Canadian) population into this already dynamic rural/industrial corridor during the period 1890-1920, as well as the Valley's growing dependence on the Connecticut Valley's market-economy, provides a suitably volatile focal point for the study, an appropriate moment of cultural re-definition and upheaval.

The Micronesian island group of Belau, long-identified by the United States as an important strategic area, became part of a United Nations trusteeship administered by the U.S. immediately after World War II. Although the United States promised to promote self-government within the trusteeship, U.S. officials have consistently designed and implemented policies with the intention of maintaining permanent access to Belau's land, reefs, and waters far military purposes. Women have emerged as major actors in debates surrounding Belau's political status and as opponents of U.S. military proposals in national and international arenas. Drawing from nearly two years of field research, 1987-1989, that concentrated largely on the experiences of two women and their family history, extensive recorded conversations provide key texts for examining gender and politics at the intersection of historical patterns of ranked matrilineal clan relations, newly-instituted electoral politics, and consideration of U.S. military proposals. By focusing on the structure and negotiations of clan relations, on extensive exchange events among relatives, and on national political activities, I investigate how men and women have worked together in various political arenas and examine how categories of "women" and "politics" in Belau have been constructed in specific socio-cultural and historical contexts. Feminist and poststructural conceptions of power have been central in choices to emphasize specific dialogues and particular interactions in this interpretive, discourse-centered ethnography. I explore how power circulates in local arenas, emphasize the multiplicity of discourses and subjectivities operating at any given time, and contextualize the confrontations through which this ethnography has been produced. This ethnographic experiment, therefore, addresses relations of power not only in content but also in the process of the research and writing itself.

No description available.

<p>An examination of diet in Central Africa, showing that malnutrition is not only a function of nutritional needs and food supplies, but also depends on culturally learned behaviour and values.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)