In 2014 the Iñupiaq Native American tribe of Alaska published Never Alone, a video game that adapts a traditional folktale into a cooperative puzzle platformer. The game is an assertion of sovereignty for the Iñupiaq people in its role as self-representation in media after centuries of others speaking for them, as an assertion of economic agency beyond their own borders, and as a decolonization of their youth’s education. It has also served to create important hubs for the community, both inside and online. The game is an important piece of media within both the culture and indigenous media studies. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 10, 2018. / Indigenous, Iñupiaq, Kunuuksaayuka, Media, Native American, videogame / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristin Dowell, Professor Directing Thesis; Vincent Joos, Committee Member; Sabra Thorner, Committee Member.

This is a study of power at the limits of the nation-state: an examination of the institution of the national border that focuses on the practices of the border people, from the perspective of cultural and performance theory. The site of this study is the trilateral border region of Prespa, where Albania, Greece and Macedonia/FYROM meet over the waters of two lakes. This ethnography offers an analysis of the discursive ways in which the border, a materialization of state power, affects the lives of the people who live around it, forming among them particular subjectivities. These border subjects are both formations of the territorial nation-state power, and sites of its articulation. With their negotiations and representations of identity, their haunting by past violence, their excesses and their secrecy, they carve out the border as a material sphere essential to the legitimacy of nation-state authority. The border provides the nation-state with a state of exception . The Prespa borders, as all national borders, are subtended by violence that is instrumental to the institution of the nation-state and the legitimation of its power. The border is theorized in this study as the space of distance between the Nation and the Subject, the no-man's land where both the nation and its subject, stripped bare, institute and reiterate each other anew, locked in confrontation: the border is primarily a space of threat . My investigations used participant-observation and oral history techniques to document a broad range of practices of daily life in Prespa. I accommodate modes of representation such as storytelling, historical narrative, and theoretical analysis to take up challenges that the category of "performance" poses upon writing.

This study explores the experiences of female youth in a residential treatment center serving adolescents in the New York juvenile justice, foster care, and special education systems. Findings are based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with eight female juvenile justice residents and ten staff members on the campus. Drawing on a robust literature in psychological anthropology and critically applied medical anthropology, as well as work on pathology and criminality in psychology, sociology, and philosophy, the study uncovers the processes through which a group of adolescent girls are made and remade within the space of residential treatment. I argue that such processes are contingent upon specific arrangements of institutional life that work toward the reform and reconstitution of individual selves. The chapters in this study demonstrate how institutional arrangements shape the lives of female youth in complex ways that are not entirely consistent. Some of these arrangements are wrought from above through the formal categorization of youth by their referral source, the psychiatric diagnoses attached to their case records, the staffing structure, and the design of therapeutic interventions. Others, however, are tinkered with from below, with residents and staff alike redefining the space of residential treatment and the type of work that gets done on the campus. What emerges is a complex interplay between the fairly strict principles structuring the institution and the creative work by residents and staff encountered in the minutiae of daily life. This interplay works to underscore the idea that categories (of referral sources, of diagnoses, of therapeutic interventions) are in flux, shaping youth and also shaped by youth in turn. Although this work is primarily ethnographic in nature, it also pays attention to the historical material that is linked to current perceptions about residential treatment, delinquent youth, and psychiatric disorder. I argue that deep understanding of the institutional arrangements at the center of this work depends on knowledge about the past and about transformations in the treatment of youth over time. This historical context is especially important for understanding the enduring ambivalence about residential treatment and for thinking about what place residential treatment centers might occupy on the continuum of treatment options for youth with behavioral and emotional health problems. By situating my findings within the broader context of residential treatment and juvenile justice in the United States, I call attention to some of the policy implications that arise from this study and suggest opportunities for re-envisioning residential treatment in the current child welfare environment.

Two recent cybernetics-derived academic disciplines, biomechanics and operations research, have worked to reshape cricket. Liberalization and the consequent large flows of money into the game have resulted in a transformation in how the game is regulated, coached, and played. In this dissertation, I have focused on how cricket is now being produced through an account of the use of biomechanics in the regulating and coaching of cricket and an appraisal of the role that operations research plays in regulating interruptions to individual games of cricket. I argue that these twin developments correspond to Foucault's notion of a contemporary governmentality organized around the body as machine and the species of body, respectively. A consideration of the manner in which cybernetics underpins these practices and theories broadens and deepens accounts of both how the contemporary world is continually being shaped and being studied.

The objective of this ethnographic study was to elucidate the individual and collective meanings and functions of drug taking for research subjects including methamphetamine users and dealers in drug subcultural groups recruited in two major cities. Participant observation was conducted in the two cities among methamphetamine users and dealers. In depth interviews were conducted with N=35 respondents in New York City and N=38 respondents in Los Angeles including injecting (IDUS) and non injecting drug users (NIUS). In this dissertation, I describe how the social identities and economic lives of participants in various sites have influenced the buying, selling, and consumption of drugs. Comparative analyses of the meanings and practices of research subjects, including mixed income gay, straight and bisexual users in New York City and inner city ethnic and class minorities in Los Angeles, illustrate how the function of drug taking and drug effects can vary depending on the social and economic context and physical setting, the social location of users and the subcultural group that one belongs to. Variations were found in the structure and organization of methamphetamine distribution. Among New York City respondents, freelance distributors catered to "binge" users that used the drug on weekends while clubbing and during commercial sex encounters and the co-evolution of the local methamphetamine market with the expanding online men who have sex with men (MSM) commercial sex industry and the New York City gay sex and club drug scene provided a collective identity that largely determined subjective drug effects. Sex workers operated as cultural brokers between buyers and sellers in the gay sex scene by facilitating sex parties and the closing and policing of public venues including clubs, bathhouses, and afterhours venues, largely shifted the buying and selling of drugs and sex indoors and in transitory public locations such as hotels. Whereas buying, selling, trading and consuming methamphetamine were a cultural response to stigmatization as a sexual minority for many New York City respondents, among ethnic and class minorities in the Los Angeles sample, low income and transient dealers and users formed helping networks as a response to social economic marginalization and consumption and distribution were important aspects sustaining them. For these respondents, buying, selling, and consuming drugs were an adaptive response to instability in housing, unemployment, racism, and structural inequality including historical exclusion and discrimination on the basis of immigrant status and class oppression. This study suggests the importance of a contextual understanding of local drug markets and risk taking which are essential to the formation and development of risk reduction and prevention methods and policy.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the seven-year-long mass hunger strike undertaken by prisoners affiliated with outlawed Marxist-Leninist organizations in Turkey to protest their transfer from traditional ward-type facilities to new cellular institutions modeled after maximum security prisons, and it scrutinizes as well as radicalizes the ontological and political structure of hunger striking to construe otherwise the contestatory relationship between the individual right to death and political sovereignty by insisting on the irreducible excess of death over the totalizing closure of the performative acts of political institution. Anchored in participant observation and in-depth interviews with surviving hunger strikers, ex-political prisoners, their families, medical and forensic doctors, and enriched by the textual and visual analysis prison memoirs, diaries, correspondence, testaments, last speeches, and photographs, the dissertation focuses on the ambiguity of the very right to die--an ambiguity that has been ignored by performance theories of sovereignty--by figuring death at one and the same time as both radical possibility and impossibility. Accounting for the extraordinarily long duration of the prison movement (7 years) and self-starvation period before death (up to 558 days) by examining its temporal and organizational logics, the dissertation argues that hunger striking draws an enormous political power from keeping the possibility of death in suspense unlike the power of negation which dissipates itself irreversibly in a paroxysmal moment of actual death. In distinguishing the anticipatory relation to death on the hunger strike from its counterparts in suicide attacks and self-immolations, the dissertation seeks to reveal an inescapable anachrony between two deaths--the passage of time that separates and draws together death as possibility from death as an anonymous event which comes either too early or late. It claims that it is precisely in this interim state between two deaths that death withdraws from the realm of possibility only to fold in on life, creating a reserve in both senses of the term, one where state power and political organizations vie with each other for hegemony over the ideological representations of life and death. The dissertation narrates how the hyper-rationalized political instrumentation of the suspended state between life and death produces its own everyday socialities by organizing the affective relations of hunger strikers to the futurity of death, to their individual bodies, and others on the hunger strike in a destructive rivalry with the contradictory discourses and practices of state officials, families, doctors and mass media. It argues that "death" thereby yields itself to a movement of self-differentiation and proliferation, oscillating uncontrollably between sacrificial sublation and waste, and the result is a growing division within the prison movement which propels it towards its eventual dissolution, leaving in its ruins a crippled political subject without futurity. The dissertation figures the surviving fasters afflicted with the Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, a severe type of amnesia characterized by the inability to retain memories after an indefinite lapse of time, as an allegory for the ruination of the power to die in the performance of death itself. As such, it seeks to bring about a transformation in the very language of sacrificial politics by interrupting the economy of appropriation which functions in view of a future community founded upon the continuity of deaths towards an ever-receding presence.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the Iraqi diasporic community in the UK. It is based on two years of fieldwork research I conducted there between 2006-2008. I approach the formation of the diasporic community in light of utopian visions of a past colored by colonial struggle and high national aspirations, and in light of subsequent political developments that resulted in oppression, exile, and even occupation after 2003. I read the displacement of Iraqis as an example of the failure of the postcolonial state, represented by the emergence of the Baath regime in the 1960s and Saddam Hussein's rise to power in 1979. Throughout, I examine the heightened salience of sectarianism among Iraqis in exile and in Iraq since the 1990s. Instead of understanding sectarianism as a return to traditional loyalties, I argue that it is deeply linked to the issue of power and identity politics, which the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein's regime in the UK employed while in exile and institutionalized after the fall of the regime in 2003 with the support of the US Administration. This dissertation is, also, an ethnographic study of Iraq, and aims to make up for the dearth in anthropological studies on Iraq during the last four decades. In addition to questions related to exile and life in the UK, I seek to tease out accounts about Iraq, and about life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein's regime. The great majority of Iraqis fled Iraq because of Saddam Hussein's brutal oppression, and they all had family members who were killed, tortured or disappeared. With their hopes of return to Iraq shattered after the 2003 US occupation, these Iraqis have been reliving these tragedies every single day in the UK. This is the reality that travels with, and defines, them. Through the use of life history methodologies with Iraqi exiles from different socioeconomic backgrounds, I document the different social and political scenes prior to and after the late 1970s; the persecution suffered under Saddam Hussein's regime since the late 1970s; the journey to and life in exile in London; relationships among members of the diasporic Iraqi community therein; and the ways in which those in exile reconfigure the past in relation to the present developments.

My dissertation is an ethnographically inspired theoretical exploration of the crises of reading and writing in contemporary Japan. Each of the five chapters examines concrete instances of reading and writing practices that have been problematized in recent decades. By calling attention to underlying moral assumptions, established sociocultural protocols, and socio-technological conditions of the everyday, I theorize the concept of embodied reading and writing thresholds. The scope of analysis is partly informed by popular discourse decrying a perceived decline in reading and writing proficiency among Japanese youth. This alleged failing literacy figures as a national crisis under the assumption that the futurity of children's national language proficiency metonymically correlates with the future well being of its national cultural body. In light of heightened interests in the past, present, and future of books, and a series of recent state interventions on the prospect of "national" text culture, it is my argument that ongoing tensions surrounding the changing media landscape and symbolic relations to the world do not merely reflect changes in styles of language, structures of spatiotemporal awareness, or forms of knowledge production. Rather, they indicate profound transformations and apprehensions among the lives mediated and embodied by the very system of signification that has come under scrutiny in the post-Lost Decade Japan (03/1991-01/2002). My dissertation offers an unique point of critical intervention into 1) various forms of tension arising from the overlapping media technologies and polarized population, 2) formations of reading and writing body (embodiment) at an intersection of heterogeneous elements and everyday disciplining, 3) culturally specific conditions and articulations of the effects of "universal" technologies, 4) prospects of "proper" national reading and writing culture, and 5) questions of cultural transformation and transmission. I hope that the diverse set of events explored in respective chapters provide, as a whole, a broader perspective of the institutional and technological background as well as an intimate understanding of culturally specific circumstances in Japan. Insofar as this is an attempt to conduct a nuanced inquiry into the culturally specific configurations and articulations of a global phenomenon, each ethnographic moment is carefully contextualized to reflect Japan specific conditions while avoiding the pitfall of culturalist assumptions. Understanding how an existing system of representation, technological imperatives and sociohistorical predicaments have coalesced to form a unique constellation is the first step in identifying how the practice of reading and writing becomes a site of heated national debate in Japan. Against theories that problematize the de-corporealizing effects of digital technology within reading and writing, I emphasize the material specificity of contemporary reading and writing practices.

What do the practices and subjectivities of migrants disclose about the political economy and society of their host country? What meanings do they attach to working or studying abroad? What can be done to manage life while mitigating the effects of the state, the market, and xenophobia? This dissertation examines two relatively new distinct populations-Haitian university students and workers--in order to examine how class mediates migration experiences. More specifically, I considered how migrants, or what I call mobilites, live and understand their specific engagements with the state, market, and society across differences in race, class, gender, and citizenship. Their actual experiences of incorporation belie neoliberal understandings that would posit a neat alignment of their lives along a vector indexing the market value of their skills. In this monograph, I show how early 21st century Dominican Republic developed its particular economy and the political, legal, social, and spatial dynamics of Santo Domingo as a neoliberal capital city. Using that as context, I describe what the experiences of these students and workers reveal about the state and the economy of the Dominican Republic. Educational mobilites manage their educational studies in the context of the pressures of modern capitalism and of xenophobia within their host country. Labor mobilites, for their part, create subjectivities based upon specific meanings of work and interaction with the state, the market, and others in the street to inform their overall economic participation. The labor process and the commodity chains of the various trades in which Haitians participate reveal engagements with and contributions to various types of global flows. I found that through the practice of these trades, the Dominican state plays a role both the creation of Haitian entrepreneurs as well as the occasional stifling of their businesses. Analyzing their work also shows how the market might appear to mitigate anti-Haitianism. Along with their labor practices, Haitians create subjectivities related to their role as workers and as urban residents to facilitate their life in the neoliberal city. Inspired by the work of David Harvey, who states (2001) that the process of capital accumulation thrives upon and generates difference, and drawing on concepts from anthropology, mobility studies, political economy, and urban studies, I argue that examining the practices and subjectivities of these two groups reveal globalizations of a middling kind, one that is neither akin to that of a transnational elite nor of an ethnic underclass.

The extreme and violent deforestation of rural Haiti has led to a proliferation of environmental conservation aid over the past sixty years. In "Cutting Earth": Haiti, Soil Conservation, and the Tyranny of Projects, I provide an ethnographic examination of environmental conservation and the consequences and prevalence of 'the project' as a form of development aid. I analyze the history of soil conservation in Haiti, the increasing presence of `projects' in the countryside, the audit culture of aid, and the resulting impacts on environmental government and subjectivities. I focus on the largely ineffective, yet ubiquitous contour canal interventions. While ineffective at retaining soil, these canals become `successful' through their ability to be measured and accounted for as a development project. The growing prevalence of projects forms new relationships in the countryside and a political economy in which the acquisition, disbursal, and accounting of the project become of primary interest. This research demonstrates how logics inherent in the project form undermine environmental conservation and foster new norms and subjectivities in rural Haiti. Through an ethnographic account of how technologies of aid permeate rural Haiti, this research contributes to contemporary political ecology, Haitian studies, and the anthropology of development.