This dissertation proposes a political reading of the religious revival taking place in Tajikistan following the country’s independence in 1991. It considers the impact of the Soviet legacy on the place of religion in Tajik society and on different modes of religiosity. It also highlights the continuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet eras and the porous boundaries between the religious and secular realms in Tajikistan. First, the thesis describes the specificities of the Soviet secularization process and emphasizes the holistic character of the Soviet ideology. I suggest that the secularization of Central Asia should be understood not as the complete eradication of religion but as the societies’ accommodation to assertive secular policies, which produced a certain understanding of the place of religion in society. The research then looks at the resilience of Soviet values within both institutional and discursive traditions, as well as within individuals’ perspectives on religion. This dissertation avoids reifying the state and accounts for the great diversity of state actors’ strategies and interests as well as within communities. Finally, drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Tajikistan, the research depicts the religious revival from a local perspective by addressing the religious experiences of born-again Muslims. I suggest that Islamic values offset the Soviet holistic ideology, which can be explained by the affinities of religious and Soviet moral codes. The research also shows that increasing levels of religiosity contribute to social tensions around the definition of new moral standards in an uncertain socio-economic environment.

Lean management is an approach that has made a revolution in a several industries. The measurement of its approach usually deal with quantitative approaches. However, the expansion of this phenomena lacks of qualitative perspective. Therefore, this is new opportunity to explore new metric to determinate the level of leanness of the organisation. This thesis explores new approach to deal with measurement of leanness. Main goal is to analyse level of leanness in the company automotive industry through the ethnography research and propose improvement which increase current state in that company.

M. Phil. (Personal, Interpersonal and Professional Leadership) / Orientation: Personal experience of the phenomenon of transcendence and a preliminary literature review indicates that the phenomenon of transcendence can be better integrated within the Personal, Interpersonal and Professional Leadership (PPL) framework as well as within other leadership theories. Research purpose: The aim of the study is to conceptualise transcendence within PPL and leadership in general using auto-ethnography research methodology. Motivation for the study: Current leadership literature within PPL does not include the integration of the phenomenon of transcendence as a model towards spirituality and leadership. This gap can contextualise spirituality and leadership through transcendence. Research design: The research approach within this study was based a postmodernist qualitative philosophy. Auto-ethnography was used as methodology and also included a life history of another person to verify the auto-ethnographic data. Main findings: The study yielded an auto-ethnographic story with a rich and varied description of how a person can experience transcendence within the personal leadership field. The analysis of the collected data has revealed themes that can possibly contribute towards spirituality and leadership. Practical implications: The findings of this study might bring insight into the human ability of transcendence despite difficulty or suffering, and that can contribute to spirituality and leadership. Anticipated contribution: The study provides some understanding of how a person can still develop into a leader despite difficulties or hardship. This understanding can contribute to leadership development interventions, which can also be explored further in future.

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This study takes an integrative approach to intercultural adaptation by looking at the role of values (i.e. social norms) in the acculturation of Canadian expatriates living in Vietnam. By viewing intercultural adaptation as a process by which expats and host-members “establish (or re-establish) and maintain relatively stable, reciprocal, and functional relationships” (Kim, 2001, p. 3) with their environment, this study focuses on moments of apparent ambiguity, misunderstanding or malaise experienced by expats in their host-community. This emphasis will enable us to better understand how expatriates make sense of their values and social norms during these instances. This research not only sheds light on the ways in which expats make sense of their values, but also how their narratives and stories participate in creating, constituting, and cultivating certain figures during their intercultural adaptation process. The data gathered reveals that the ways in which expats make sense of their values during moments of malaise with their host-community varies quite meaningfully depending on various situational, institutional and personal factors at play during each interaction, as well as what matters most to expats during those moments. Thus, these findings assist in showcasing that misunderstandings experienced in the host-community are complex, as expats consider many factors in order to make sense of, respond to, and adapt to each individual situation.

Despite the emergence of narrative and humanistic anthropological perspectives on thriving indigenous textile technologies, indigo dyed textile products are often read as homogenous products, devoid of Yoruba women-dyers' symbolic narratives. This ethnographic research on indigo textile dyeing in Osogbo examines the relationship between textile production and ritual by focusing on how indigenous peoples are stimulated to create what they make and the textile makers' unit of expression. A key argument throughout the thesis is that the dyeing act is a ritual performance by women dyers in Osogbo a re-enacted symbolic performance of the formation and evolution of human sociality and the socialization of human beings. It is also a symbolic representation of motherhood (parenthood when it comes to the societal level) a process of inscribing the kadara (destiny) of a child and the development of iwa (character) and ewa (beauty) to be an omoluabi (good and cultured child) in Yoruba ontology. The thesis also explores alkaline water production processes as part of the indigenous indigo textile dyeing processes and the use of adire textile for communication in Osogbo the notions of colour and colour symbolism and the use of texts, proverbs and images on dyed textiles as communicative tools specifically to show the transformatory nature of rituals in indigo textile dyeing. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Anthropology and Archaeology / DPhil / Unrestricted

This dissertation is an examination of the ways English teachers may be complicit in reproducing an abstinence-based sex education discourse in their own classroom practices and discussions of literature. Working from disciplinary research in sex education, sociology, English education, anthropology, and public health, I explore English teachers\' experiences in negotiating the effects of, reactions to, and expectations for discussing sexuality, intimacy, and gender in a school community. Using feminist positioning theory and Bakhtin\'s concepts of dialogism and ventriloquism, I explore how teachers approach, grapple with, contribute to, and leverage dominant institutional discourses in their practices, thereby mediating knowledge, possibilities for conversations, and institutional norms. An amalgam of teaching philosophies, methodologies, and political ideologies underscores teachers\' voicing patterns and discursive positions, helping to further inform an understanding of how contentious social issues are negotiated in the classroom. The agentic discursive positions teachers take up provide insights into teachers as mediating agents within institutional discourses, but not necessarily as change agents of institutional norms. / Ph. D.

“Eclats et absences. Fictions ethnographiques” développe une enquête autour de la représentation ethnographique, donnant lieu à un ensemble de films où s’entrelacent l’anthropologie et la fiction : les “fictions ethnographiques”.Cette enquête sensible et pratique commence autour de la notion d’exotisme, en analysant la construction de “l’indigène” dans le “Nouveau Monde”. Ces premières recherches donnent lieu à des films mettant en scène de “jungles” in vivo et in vitro, en Europe et en Amérique, qui relient des jardins botaniques et serres tropicales aux archives de la colonisation. Ces films explorent ainsi les moments de “premier contact” entre voyageurs et autochtones. La fiction apparaît comme stratégie narrative pour faire contrechamp à une Histoire racontée majoritairement du point de vue des conquérants.L’enquête établit par la suite un dialogue avec l’anthropologie visuelle. Il s’agit d’opérer un déplacement par rapport à l’ “ethnofiction” articulée par Jean Rouch, tout en incluant les démarches le précédant et celles postérieures à lui, où l’ambigüité est de mise entre l’immersion ethnographique et la fiction. Un ensemble de nouveaux films est développé entre le laboratoire d’ethnographie expérimentale le Sensory Ethnography Lab de l’université de Harvard, la Colombie et le Mexique.Si cette recherche doctorale prends source dans l’analyse des représentations cinématographiques de “l’indigène”, elle évolue au fil du temps vers l’auto-ethnographie et l’autofiction, démarches auto-réflexives pour construire une place d’énonciation singulière. Ainsi, il ne s’agit plus de “parler sur…” une communauté (démarche propre du documentaire télévisuel), mais plutôt parler de “près d’(elle)” (en suivant les mots de la réalisatrice Trinh T. Min-ha) ou bien de “parler avec” elle (faisant écho à la formulation de l’anthropologue Eduardo Viveiros de Castro). La fiction et ses recours narratifs sont indispensables dans les films crées lors de cette enquête : elle construit un espace partagé, des laboratoires politiques pour penser l’émancipation sociale, individuelle et collective. Sol Negro (2016) et La Libertad (2017) constituent les pièces clés de cette dernière série.La création de ces oeuvres a aussi donné naissance à un ensemble d’écrits, d’articules publiés, de performances et à une exposition publique de fin de thèse, intitulée “Disappearing operations — Opérations de la disparition, Opérations disparaissantes, Opérations pour disparaître”. Cette exposition itinérante, matérielle et immatérielle, s’est déroulée entre le 30 novembre et le 15 décembre 2016, au Cinéma Le Méliès, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, les Beaux-Arts de Paris. / "Shards and absences. Ethnographic fictions” develops a survey around ethnographic representation, giving rise to a series of films in which anthropology and fiction intertwine: the "ethnographic fictions ".This sensitive and practical inquiry begins around the notion of exoticism, analyzing the construction of "the native" in the "New World". This initial research gives birth to films staging in vivo and in vitro jungles in Europe and America, which link botanical gardens and tropical greenhouses with the archives of colonization. These films also explore the moments of "first contact" between travellers and natives. Fiction appears as a narrative strategy to counteract a History mostly told from the point of view of the conquerors.The inquiry then establishes a dialogue with visual anthropology. A displacement is made in regard to Jean Rouch’s "ethnofiction", while including the practices preceding him, and those subsequent to him, with an intrinsic ambiguity between ethnographic immersion and fiction . A series of new films are developed between the laboratory of experimental ethnography Sensory Ethnography Lab of Harvard University, Colombia and Mexico.If this doctoral research takes its source in the analysis of the cinematographic representations of the "native", it evolves over time towards forms of auto-ethnography and autofiction, self-reflexive approaches to construct a place of singular enunciation. Thus, it is no longer a question of "talking about ..." a community (a specific approach of the television documentary), but rather of speaking "close to it" (following the words of the director Trinh T. Min-ha ) or to "speak with" it (echoing the formulation of the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro). Fiction and its narrative uses are indispensable for the films created during this inquiry: it allows building a shared space, political laboratories to think of social emancipation, on an individual and collective level. Sol Negro (2016) and La Libertad (2017) are the key pieces of the latter series.The creation of these works also gave birth to a set of writings, published articulations, performances and a public exhibition at the end of this thesis, entitled "Disappearing operations" . This traveling exhibition, material and immaterial, took place between 30 November and 15 December 2016, at the Cinéma Le Méliès, Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers and the Beaux-Arts in Paris.

This study investigates creating antiracist spaces and determining what an antiracist sociohistorical geography looks like. I argue that an antiracist sociohistorical geography is always necessarily unfinished and in a state of becoming. I introduce as my study site a section of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that was once a neighbourhood known as The Ward. At different times in the past, the land of this area was home to the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation, a Black community, a Jewish community, and a Chinese community. Through investigations of these historic racialized communities and through field site examination, I first document how current cultural representations within this space create racist exclusions. Next, through discussion of my experience with the Ontario Black History Society’s (OBHS) walking tour in and around this space, and through analysis of one-on-one interviews with OBHS representatives, I show the tour as creating starting points for developing antiracist geographies. Finally, by imagining the space devoid of racist exclusions, I illustrate what an antiracist sociohistorical geography might look like but also that the portrayal is a spatial and temporal moment and therefore unfinished. I combine an anti-essentialist antiracist historical methodology with critical discourse analysis and critical ethnography. My main finding is that inclusions of excluded racialized groups into dominant discourse can contribute to naming and perhaps troubling particular racisms, but do not automatically disrupt systems and structures that (re)create exclusions. To deconstruct these powers, antiracism must incorporate ongoing disruptions of dominance over space. My study shows the potential for shifting discursive meanings around racialized bodies in relation to each other and sociohistorical geographies they occupy. These shifts have implications for how sociohistorical spaces become forums of social studies and history education in everyday spaces and in schools, as people (re)learn to read bodies within sociohistorical spaces in antiracist ways.

The study applies an ethnography of speaking to the study of a bilingual child, with the construct of a frame as the unit of analysis. The child was observed and tape recorded playing a commercial game in Chinese with her mother, and in English with her father. Both activity frames and conceptual frames were analyzed toward answering (1) what frames were performed during game play (2) how those frames differed between Chinese and English (3) what conceptual frames were produced in languages spoken and (4) how those conceptual frames differed between each language. In brief, the study applied an ethnographic perspective toward describing how the organization of activity and language compared between both languages, through the play of a single game. The study discovered that each parent enacted different roles with the daughter during the play of the game. Whereas the mother, who had previous experience with game, performed an expert-novice role during game play, the father with his lack of experience in playing the game, took a novice-expert stance with respect to the daughter. The activity frames and conceptual frames followed accordingly, with the games in Chinese dominated by frames featuring directing and reporting on the part of the mother. In contrast, the English games reported the daughter dominating talk with informing and reporting functions of frames. Of the conceptual frames, Chinese presented game objects and events as changes of state; objects were evaluated according to notions of permission and convention. Conversely, English conceptualized objects as independent things existing with attributes, and events as discrete objects with defined spans of time. The study discovered a tight relationship between utterance, its function, and its frame for embedding topic-relationships. This relationship hints at dual activity-conceptual systems among bilingual children, warranting further attention by educators to integrate three dimensions into language classroom instruction: grammar form, speech function, and conceptual contents. As this study demonstrates, bilingual children do much more than talk in two languages. / Ph. D.