Although Moroccan female-initiated migration to Europe has captured the attention of scholars in various fields of study, the majority of these studies have focused on macro-level analysis of resettlement and integration patterns. These studies, however, have bypassed the subtle impact of the socio-cultural junction between Islamic ideals and Western values. The interchange of the socio-cultural values resulting from Moroccan female immigration to Spain have complicated the Moroccan system of honor and marriage, which has played a crucial part in defining gender roles, space, production and reproduction. Using participant observation, semi-structured interviews, oral histories, and focus groups, this study aims to examine the effects immigration to Spain have on honor and marriage for Moroccan immigrant women.

This dissertation addresses the question of how we should understand the cosmopolitan power to punish the criminal embodied in the new global criminal courts, and whether cosmopolitan law can serve as the basis for what an earlier generation of anthropologists would have called a culturally-neutral global order? The present project, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague, uses the case of Dusko Tadic, the first subject of a properly cosmopolitan law, as a lens to raise the questions of how we should understand the new cosmopolitan subjectivities being produced by the immanent institutionalization of a global criminal law and whether our historically-specific modern conceptualization of law is compatible with the maintenance of meaningful local political diversity and the rights of communities to live in a manner in keeping with their own history and traditions. It argues that, to get at the full implications of this process, we will need to take up the now largely neglected concepts of tradition and authority as a way to make sense of the legacies various pre-modern forms of authority continue to exercise in what is called modern law. The alternative genealogies here elaborated suggest that scholars would do best to try to understand law through the traditions of legal thought, disputation, and practice that preceded legal modernity, especially the classical republican and Roman law traditions in which virtually every aspect of modern legality (except the state and sovereignty) has a basis. It is argued that, with the first trial at the International Criminal Court, these historically-specific and local forms of authority are now the basis for the global legal system--pre-modern forms of authority which remain vital, even ascendant, in the age of cosmopolitan criminal law.

The rapid expansion of information and communication technology (ICT) has accelerated the distribution of work across geographically dispersed areas, and this transnational relocation of work is viewed as a seamless transaction by proponents of technological globalization. However, a close examination of the collaboration involved in Indian/Japanese software offshoring illuminates an array of difficulties that problematize the "seamlessness" of this endeavor. This dissertation investigated the complex social world of offshoring by focusing on analyzing India-Japan software offshoring, and the study revealed corporate control as well as workers' efforts and struggles to make this ICT-supported relocation of work function smoothly. Through the analysis of the interviews with Indian software engineers and liaison officers between companies and within companies, in combination with observations of their workplaces, this dissertation highlights the corporate demands for flexibility in two layers: demands for being flexible in macro-labor circulations, to function as "labor buffers," and being flexible in terms of micro-communication issues and clients' demands. At the same time, it also reveals that corporate control is not a monolithic and totalizing force, but a complex and contradictory process generated through the struggles and intense labor of both Indian and Japanese sides that attempt to connect the disjunctions and make the business look "seamless." This study illuminates the irony that the relocation of work can intensify labor for both sides because of clients' micromanagement and communication difficulties. In addition, it also captures workers' efforts to distance themselves from corporate control, and their attempt to utilize the "onsite opportunity" to pursue their own interest. By highlighting the corporate demands for dual flexibility, as well as layers of communication difficulties and contradictions in Japan-Indian offshoring businesses, this dissertation provides insight into an anthropological and sociological analysis of offshoring as a complex global social phenomenon.

This dissertation addresses the challenge of liberal democracies to deal with fundamental conflicts in society about, for example, political representation and natural resources, and the subsequent transfer of such conflicts into the criminal justice arena when actors fail to deal with competing demands in the political arena. In an exploration of tensions between law and justice, and the competing conceptions of "crime" and "harm," this work analyzes criminalization processes in three contentious episodes: the Chilean-Mapuche territorial conflict, the Spanish-Basque separatist conflict, and the eco-conflict in the United States. Although prosecutors invariably asserted their independence and the democratic mandate to "simply" enforce the law, this dissertation describes the gradual politicization of criminal proceedings as opposing actors implicated in the political struggle move into the criminal justice arena and make it subject to and the space of claim-making. This study not only challenges the belief that criminal law can be applied in an independent and neutral manner. Taking a constructivist perspective on the prosecutorial narrative and analyzing how mobilization and discursive action of "victims" and "prisoner supporters" aim to push or challenge criminal prosecutions, it describes in detail the ways in which such conflictive and interpretive processes fundamentally alter the logic and development of criminal prosecutions.

Since the start of Doi Moi (Renovation) over twenty years ago, Vietnam has increasingly opened its society and economy to the global capitalist economy and culture. The country has witnessed numerous changes in all aspect of everyday life, affecting individual men and women, their relationships with each other, and their relationships with other social and political institutions. My dissertation explores the challenges that three groups of dislocated men - men who were migrant laborers from a rural setting; men who were among the first methadone patients in the country; and men who sold sex to other men in Hanoi - were facing as they were struggling to build their manhood and to establish (or reject) aspects of culturally prescribed masculinities in post-Doi Moi Vietnam. I focus on their experiences with three structures, namely the market-bound socialist state, the fledgling capitalist market, and the patriarchal family, that together shape these men's everyday life struggles, their ethics of the self (especially their imagining of themselves as tru cot gia dinh, the pillar of the family), and ultimately their lives and health. I argue that in the context of post-Doi Moi Vietnam, these three powerful structures constitute, and are constituted by, the political economy of the male body, and that this relationship between structure and the body are best represented in the experiences of the men in this study. The male bodies examined here include: the exploitable body of migrant labors whose paths to manhood are limited by their lack of resources and capital other than their own sweat, tears, and flesh; the deviant body of men whose adherence to the regime of state-sponsored methadone is their only hope to recover from social death caused by their past heroin use; and the rejected body of men selling sex to other men who face the "problem of recognition." My analysis shows that their embodied forms of labor, whether on a highway, in a drug treatment center, or in a sexual marketplace, play a critical role in the making of their manhood. Their bodies are at the same time useful and disposable under the logics of power operated by the three powerful structures that offer possibilities, limitations, and various forms of desire (economic, erotic and ethical). While the male body of dislocated men bears great potential for man-making, they are also highly vulnerable to the exploitative practices of the state, to the vagaries of the market, and to disappointment of their own families. My dissertation shows various strategies, however seemingly premature, fragile and sometimes detrimental to their health, which these men deployed to overcome barriers and to make the best use of their limited resources in order to make their road to become tru cot gia dinh. These strategies, I will show, are forms of "strategic" and yet structurally determined decisions and action of these men, and they reflect constrained agency in confrontation with the "structural violence" that shapes experiences of dislocation, marginalization and stigmatization, and aggravates their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. My dissertation contributes to social science theory of men and masculinities by bringing to the center of analysis the lived experiences of men in post-socialist settings that are often at the margin in studies on men and masculinities. My dissertation also contributes to the burgeoning literature on men and HIV/AIDS, and men's health in general, through deepened analysis of the political economy of the male body and the relationship of this political economy with vulnerabilities in relation to HIV/AIDS and other health issues.

This work highlights civic events and celebration as functional components of Belfast, Northern Ireland's ongoing post-conflict regeneration. Exploring the broad networks that fund and organize such events through a material semiotic approach, this dissertation sketches an outline of the process that produces parades, and examines the motivations and intentions behind them. It finds that parades function within a negotiated process of "place-making" to convey idealized visions of a peaceful "New Belfast". In particular the tropes of multiculturalism and European identity are repeated as aspirational ideals for Belfast's regeneration. The parades display, and in doing so reify these ideals as a temporary reality. Longer-term effects of the parades are difficult to determine, but they may potentially change public opinion regarding the social space of the city center, leading to more integrated and liberal use of the city center. In these events, issues central to Belfast's political life--from tourism, physical redevelopment, to European integration--are addressed through carnivalesque play and performance, as the events' producers and participants imagine Belfast's future urban identity.

This dissertation takes the routine marginalization and erasure of Muslim presence in the contemporary social and political life of the western Indian state of Gujarat as an entry point into a genealogy of Gujarati regionalism. Through a historical anthropology of the reconfiguration of the modern idea of Gujarat, I argue that violence against religious minorities is an effect of both secular nation-building and of religious nationalist mobilization. Given this entanglement, I suggest that we rethink the oppositional relationship between religion and the secular in analyzing violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat. The modern idea of Gujarat, I further argue, cannot be grasped without taking into consideration how local conceptions of region and of religion were fundamentally altered by colonial power. In particular, I suggest that the construction of Islam as inessential and external to the idea of Gujarat is a legacy bequeathed by colonialism and its forms of knowledge. The transmutation of Gujarati Muslims into strangers, in other words, occurred simultaneously with the articulation of the modern idea of Gujarat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus in particular on the role of nineteenth-century regional history-writing, in which the foundational role of Islam was de-emphasized, in what I call the making of a regional tradition. By highlighting the colonial genealogy of contemporary discourses of Gujaratni asmita (pride in Gujarat), in which Hindu and Gujarati are posited as identical with each other, I argue that colonialism was one of its conditions of possibility. One result of this simultaneous reconfiguration of religion and region, I argue, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to inhabit a Hindu religious identity that is not at the same time articulated in opposition to a Muslim Other in Gujarat. Another consequence is that it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for Muslims to represent themselves or advocate for their rights as Muslim and as Gujarati. How the reconfiguration of a Gujarati regional identity is imbricated with transformations in conceptions of religion is part of what this dissertation seeks to think about. Furthermore, I argue that the marginalization of Muslims in Gujarat cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on organized violence or on the Hindu nationalist movement. While recent studies on Gujarat have focused mainly on the pogrom of 2002 to think about the role of the Hindu nationalist movement in orchestrating mass violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat, I argue that the pogrom of 2002 is but one part of a broader spectrum of violence and exclusion that permeates the body of the state and society. In addition, I suggest that one of the conditions of possibility for such violence is the sedimentation of a conception of Gujaratiness as identical with Hinduness that cuts across the religious/secular divide. Instead of focusing exclusively on the violence of the Hindu nationalist movement, I explore this process of sedimentation as it manifests itself in the intersecting logics of urban planning, heritage preservation, and neoliberal development in contemporary Gujarat. Through an analysis of the contemporary reorganization and partitioning of the city of Ahmedabad along religious lines, I show how it is continuous with colonial and nationalist urban planning practices of the early twentieth century. Using ethnographic examples, I also argue that the contemporary secular nationalist discourse of heritage preservation is both complicit in the marginalization of Muslims and continuous with practices of urban planning and preservation that were articulated in the late colonial period. Finally, my dissertation demonstrates the enabling nature of neoliberal logics in the organization of violence against Muslims in Gujarat and argues that anti-Muslim violence and prejudice are enabled by and intertwined with narratives about the promises of capital and progress. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this dissertation seeks to contribute to an anthropology of colonialism, nationalism, religion, secularism and violence in South Asia that is attentive to the continuities and discontinuities that are constitutive of the postcolonial present we inhabit. By historicizing contemporary debates and assumptions about Muslims in Gujarat and describing some of the genealogies that have contributed to their sedimentation, I hope to have argued that colonial legacies have enduring effects in the present and that the question posed by colonial forms of knowledge and representation is not merely epistemological or historiographical but also a political one. Written as a history of the present, this dissertation is motivated by a desire to imagine a future in which Hindu/Gujarati and Muslim are no longer conceptualized as oppositional categories; in which Gujarati Muslims are able to represent themselves as Muslims and in their own (varied) terms; and where Hindus are no longer invited and incited to inhabit a subjectivity that depends on making Muslims strangers to Gujarat.

This dissertation focuses on the transformation of Islamic theology through the experience of everyday life and politics in contemporary Delhi, as well as the changing role of nature and ecology in the experience of the sacred, across religious communities, in the post-colonial city. In the ruins of a fourteenth century palace in the center of modern Delhi, Hindus and Muslims from various castes and communities come to deposit photocopies of letters petitioning saintly jinn (superhuman spirits) for fulfillment of their personal and spiritual needs, many of them forming relationships with each other that could not exist outside this space. Firoz Shah Kotla is just one of several sacralized medieval Muslim ruins in the contemporary city. Through ethnographic and archival fieldwork, this dissertation investigates the sacredness of these ruins and their relation to the history of the city and to contemporary urban life. In Delhi, ruins are the anarchic spaces within the modern city where the pre-modern past, unregulated leisure time, and the experience of nature come together. The ruins serve as the ritual and social centers for a broader idea of religion, shared across caste and religious communities, which encompasses ethical orientations towards the self and the world linked to pre-modern ideas of justice, the valuation of dreams and visions, and an idea of nature as being inherently moral and miraculous. For both Hindus and Muslims, this broader idea of religion is linked to Islam. The sacral popularity of particular ruins emerges in the aftermath of traumatic violence inflicted by the colonial and post-colonial states, making them sites of apotropaic magic against "the magic of the modern (state)."

The anthropological study of dance is particularly relevant to scholars who work on theories of embodiment and social practice, as well as those concerned with the production of history and ideologies, for dance concerns the deliberate movement of the body across space and in time, and within a particular socio-cultural context. Based on a year and a half of ethnographic research at a pre-professional ballet school in New York City that specializes in teaching the "classical French" form, this study applies an anthropological understanding of ideologies and processes in education to classical forms of ballet. Its analysis of how the ideological system associated with the aesthetics of ballet is created and recreated, in relation to shifting concepts of tradition, suggests that the process of establishing and maintaining institutional boundaries and "sculpting" the bodies of students in the classroom frames the ways that students are related to, and develop relationships with, the ideologies that they encounter. Both the school, as an institution, and individual students are able to navigate and position themselves within the landscape formulated by these ideologies through the development of social networks, the formulation of individual institutional genealogies, and the development and presentation of choreography in selected venues. These processes illustrate the ways in which ideological systems are articulated, developed, and altered in relation to understandings of the human body.

The dissertation challenges sweeping generalizations in media discourses about China and African relations. Using Zambia as one of the best-case scenarios due to its political stability, welcoming attitude towards foreign investors and overall popularity among Chinese investors, the dissertation aims to disaggregate "China" and "Zambia" by focusing on individual and small group working relationships. It does so by elaborating on the basis and nature of different types of workplace relationships among Chinese and Zambians working together. Myriad relationships include alliances, friendships, group collaborations and modes of conflict and competition. Contextualized in two urban areas in Zambia, the study examines these relationships in three case studies, including a Chinese telecommunications company, Chinese and Zambian entrepreneurial ventures, and a Zambian construction firm. The Chinese telecoms company represents the best-case scenario of highly educated, skilled, and ambitious Chinese and Zambian technology professionals working side by side. This dissertation compares and contrasts interactions in this best-case scenario to more ad hoc individual and small group mining partnerships formed between Chinese and Zambian entrepreneurs. These cases highlight the diversity of Chinese and Zambian engagements at the ground level. Capturing the full complexity of their engagements also entail understanding Zambian-to-ambian interactions and relationships at the workplace. Thus, a third case scenario provides useful comparison data for how Zambian professionals interact with each other at a successful Zambian construction firm in comparison to the Chinese telecoms firm. Showcasing these three case studies illustrates the diversity of Chinese and Zambian engagements at the ground level and illuminates potential distinctive features in Chinese-to-Zambian workplace interactions and relationships missing or overlapping with Zambian-to-Zambian interactions. This dissertation explores the different dimensions of workplace relationships by scrutinizing different perceptions of trust and how trust underscores the formation of groups. By understanding the basis and nature of these relationships and interactions, I identify the strategies that Chinese and Zambians use to achieve their desired professional goals. Assuming that Zambians are not victims, I explore how they use their experiences and relationships to make improvements in their lives. In doing so, I identify potential spaces for Chinese and Zambian alliances that provide benefits to Zambians by encouraging entrepreneurial aspirations and instigating the growth of domestic firms in the near future. The benefits are accompanied by serious challenges, mainly concentrated on perceptions and handling of money. This study examines the challenges by analyzing how larger economic forces in China and Zambia play out in individual interactions and the effects of proper risks and rewards that have placed Chinese individuals and businesses at an advantage. As this dissertation illustrates through an analysis of business budgets as well as numerous court cases, the risks and rewards and complaints of labor violations are strongly tied to domestic policy and the weakening of nstitutions, the state and enforcement of laws. Because of the challenges, trust and relationships figure prominently in reducing risks and substituting for the legal contract. This dissertation relies upon grounded ethnographic methods, including participant observation, informal chats and 16 structured interviews with Chinese and Zambian employees at the Chinese firm and 12 structured interviews with Zambian employees at the Zambian firm. Interviews, documents and observations were used in a close case study of the establishment of Chinese and Zambian entrepreneurs in the mining industry. It also draws upon preliminary research conducted in 2007, 2008, 2010 and then a 13-month stint from 2011 to 2012. The initial inspiration was provided during a volunteer trip to The Gambia in 2003. In sum, this dissertation aims to challenge generalizations made in the media about a unified and neocolonial "China" and a cohesive and victimized "Africa." It challenges the generalizations by highlighting individual stories and exploring in depth the different kinds of relationships and interactions among Chinese and Zambian technology professionals and entrepreneurs. Since the pervasiveness of their interactions is a fairly new phenomenon, this dissertation uncovers the kinds of challenges and opportunities that emerge from the process of learning to work together. Finally, this dissertation seeks to identify the spaces where Zambians benefit from working with the Chinese and how they use different strategies to maximize the skills, experience and knowledge to their advantage.