This thesis examines the ritual worship within a monastery from the Dzogchen lineage of Tibetan Buddhism situated in Karnataka, South India. During the Cultural Revolution in Tibet, many monasteries were destroyed and the monks fled to re-establish their religious practices in exile in India. As a result, Tibetan Buddhism now has a much wider international participation group. My research looks specifically at the Dzogchen Buddhist doctrinal understanding of purity and its embodiment in the trikaya; the three pure bodies. I consider the rituals practised in the pursuit of the trikaya, and the associated social processes that are thought to enable the embodiment of purity. I explore folk notions of purity and how they shape bodily experience for the multi-national community that congregate together at the monastery. Practitioners of Dzogchen Buddhism believe that the embodiment of purity results in a dissolution of the body and leads to an “immaterial body”. The achievement of the immaterial, however, is wholly dependent on a very physical, material set of rituals. Drawing upon doctrinal and folk notions of purity, I propose a four-part analytical understanding of purity; that purity exits on a continuum, that the Dzogchen lama is both a symbolic and literally pure, that purity is able to be transmitted, and that purity is situational but dependent on the presence of the lama. I support my argument with ethnographic data from the rituals of the khatag exchange [offering of ceremonial scarves], rabnye [the sanctification of statues], and two types of embodied worship: prostrations [full length bows] and kora [circumambulation of sacred sites].

Graciously We Receive is an ethnographic documentary film about Hearts for Homes, a volunteer Christian outreach organization that does no-cost home repairs for low income elderly homeowners. Graciously We Receive examines the symbiotic relationships between volunteers and the homeowners, addressing the need to be needed by meeting the needs of others. Using qualitative research methods derived from the social sciences, Graciously We Receive represents an advancement in media-based research methods. with the introduction of quick cine-ethnography, which combines quick ethnography methods and grounded theory for data acquisition and analysis, Graciously We Receive applies anthropological research methods to documentary film production.

Perhaps the most controversial topic in the whole field of South African Bantu ethnography is that of the institution known variously as lobola (Zulu-Xhosa), bohadi, boxadi, bohali (Sotho) or mala (Venda). In its simplest form it can be defined as the handing over of some consideration, usually cattle, by the father of the bridegroom to the father of the bride on the occasion of a marriage between their children. No subject has been so widely discussed nor, unfortunately, given rise to so many misconceptions in missionary, administrative and lay circles, and it is imperative that some scientific investigation be made to ascertain, as accurately as possible, the exact nature of this institution and its significance in Bantu society. A glance at the literature shows that this topic has certainly not remained unnoticed by travellers, missionaries and others who have come into contact with our native peoples, either professionally or otherwise, but many of their observations are vitiated by prejudice and such subjective evaluations as: "The individual woman is less than a human being, she is merely a channel through which the children are delivered to the purchaser. It is truly not woman purchase, it is a wholesale transaction in child-life.", and the use of such terms as "sale" and "wife barter". Others say it plays an important stabilising part in native marriage. Thus in all contact situations, but particularly in the native Church and in the law courts, there is marked perplexity - and inconsistency - in dealing with the custom, all tending to increase the confusion and maladjustment of our native peoples - especially among native Christians. It is submitted, therefore, that the time is propitious for a detailed study of this institution, and this the following thesis attempts to do.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The field of ritual studies has often been relegated to the disciplines of religious studies and anthropology, and typically understood within a religious context. However, this dissertation applies the study of ritual to a nonprofit organization as a distinct organizational culture that engages in mission driven work that, at times, can also function as a series of deeply meaningful rituals; within ritual studies, this process of practical work taking on enhanced meaning is known as ritualization. Utilizing Ronald Grimes' categories of ritual sensibilities (specifically decorum, magic, ceremony, liturgy, and celebration), this research sought to better understand how the work of The Lord's Acre, a nonprofit community garden dedicated to addressing the conditions of food insecurity, can similarly be viewed as ritualized activities. The study was conducted through the use of intensive participant observation and interviews conducted between 2018-2020 on site in Fairview, North Carolina. The research uncovered several important revelations. First, the work of the garden often hinged upon the use of ritual language, spaces, and objects, and some of the rituals defied the clear categorization under Grimes' schema. Instead, ritual attitudes toward the work under observation became blends of multiple categories, such as celebratory ceremonies, thus helping to reify Grimes' theory. Secondly, at times, the rituals undertaken at the organization resembled rites of passage popularized by Arnold van Gennep and also sustained periods of liminality, or communitas, popularized by Victor Turner, especially in the organization's attempts to build community through educating others about food insecurity. Finally, the research discovered that the practice of liturgy, conventionally thought to reside within religious nonprofit organizations, was active within the organization and thus may also be alive and well within secular nonprofit organizations.

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1999 Dozier Award Winner / Welfare reform, in its attempts to order the lives of women on cash assistance, uses time as a means of controlling women. Single mothers living in poverty experience, perceive and use time in ways that the state welfare bureaucracy fails to recognize and/or refuses to work with. Poverty is anchored in a historical and cyclical dynamic based on low valuations of people's time, structured by race, class and gender. This essay shows how specific temporal sequences, orderings and flows are implicated in the etiology of poverty, forming cumulative feedback loops that challenge the linear trajectory of the welfare-to-work model. It argues that the welfare state bureaucracy practices a powerful politics of time, consisting in the imposition of forms of order and rigid temporal structures on the highly contingent and unpredictable lives of the poor. These temporal devices of control, rather than facilitating women's efforts to move from dependence to self-reliance, only exacerbate their struggles to manage the vagaries and irregularities of time in their lives. Time thus constitutes a locus of struggle in the welfare relationship, between women on welfare and the welfare agency.

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