This text is based on more than two years of ethnographic research among country music fans in New York City. It specifically addresses what I, and many of my interlocutors call the "Brooklyn country music scene" (or sometimes, the "Brooklyn Country music scene"), a particular nexus of country music activity that was in existence during the time of my research, between the spring of 2005 and the winter of 2007/8. I explore the ideas, themes, practices and social structures that characterized this scene during the time of my participation. And I look into the lives and histories of individual participants, as well as the larger social context(s) in which they, and the scene, operated. Indeed, although this scene of musical practice is at the center of my research and this text, I view it in the widest terms as an entry point into thinking about the unique set of subjects involved, their lives and positionings, their broader ideas, experiences and practices, and where all of this fits in to a larger picture of contemporary American life. Throughout, I am centrally interested in the ways in which this scene represents not only a set of creative contemporary social and cultural practices, but also a complex engagement with an already symbolically laden social and cultural form: "country music." A review of the scholarly literature on the genre reveals that country has had a complex and often embattled existence in the United States. With a long history of mixed social and symbolic ties to some version of the rural, white, working class(es) (often, but not always, Southern), country has long been a source, and agent, of both longing and dread, from a wide range of subject positions and historical emplacements. Variously configured as an emblem of (or conduit for) "authenticity," "tradition," and "the folk," or, on the other hand, "commercialization," "backwardness," and "trash," country music has been engaged in range of complex, often highly ambivalent negotiations that speak to a number of different social and cultural conflicts. These have included, according to the literature, those pertaining to race, place, and gender, religiosity and nationalism, and more broadly, modernity, postmodernity, and the progress of global capitalism, among other things. But, class has tended to be the persistently central figure, according to this work. In looking at this particular scene, then, I argue that in engaging with country music, the people and music involved also engaged with this complex discursive history, and particularly this discourse about class. In this sense, I suggest that for participants in the scene, country music was a source for articulating a broad range of meanings and values, for working through a number of different experienced positionalities and conflicts, but that in a central way, it was a source for thinking about, working on and representing class-related experiences and meanings. Specifically, I suggest that it was a source for negotiating the increasingly fraught category of "middle-class-ness," and I explore the ways in which this scene provides a revealing example of "alternativity" as a distinctly middle-class structure of feeling, and tactic in the late/neoliberal capitalist United States.

This dissertation is an inquiry into the naturalization of war. It examines forms of life in a rural borderland that is also a battlefield through an ethnographic exploration of the intertwining of war and everyday living on Lebanon's southern border with Israel. Life in these parts, for the most part, revolves around tobacco farming, olive cropping, goat herding and other forms of agricultural practice generating subsistence and income and underpinning an ongoing presence in place. The southern borderland is also entangled in an ongoing war condition that cyclically erupts, disrupts, destructs, (re)constructs, and has done for generations now. War in South Lebanon has come to be inhabited as "natural"; it is by now a part of southern life, or better yet, insistently generative of a kind of life that continues - in whichever ways and outside of moral judgments - to be viable here. My inquiry unfolds as a journey through landscape as a place of simultaneous dwelling and warring and concerns itself with what constitutes ordinary living in a rural borderland that is also a battlefield. In what follows I explore how the tobacco-farming village communities of South Lebanon inhabit a long-term and ongoing condition of war in its ordinary, everyday and also violent guises. How do the pathways and rhythms of living in a rural-agricultural margin mesh with the materials and space-times of war? How are military conflicts past, recent and expected recognized, resisted, claimed, encountered, nurtured, inhabited as tabi'i, natural and `adi, habitual, normal? I conceive of this work as an attempt to place war in life; that is to think of war as a condition as generative and constructive (of life) as it is also destructive. What follows then is an ethnographic attempt to give breathing space to the life that goes on in a place of enduring war.

This dissertation uses the concept of fascism in order to examine the socio-culture of contemporary Japan. Defined in terms of its commodity structure, fascism turns out to be a relevant concept to Japan not only prior to and during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) but also from the postwar days to date. Against various forms of culturalism that claim that the country is essentially totalitarian and its culture is innately violent, I will argue that the country has shared fascist conditions with those other countries and regions that operate in the mode of mechanical reproduction. While the overall mode of mass-reproduction has been further articulated by different moments, such as late capitalism or post-modernism, the cultural and political condition of reducing singular lives and events into standardized forms has continued in these countries and regions roughly since the 1920s. My view will expand the horizon of studies of fascism, which has hitherto been limited to Europe between the two World Wars. At the same time, the view of fascism's generality should not be blind to local inflections and historical specificities. In this dissertation, I will examine such trans-war Japanese institutions as the ideologies of emperorship, formation of the petty bourgeois class, and corporatist organizations of gender and locality. My dissertation will ethnographically investigate the way in which these institutions have interacted with the country's modern capitalist everyday to result in fascist violence. The specific sites in which my ethnographies take place are the contemporary Tokyo and Yokohama suburbs (Chapters 1 and 3) and the Yasukuni Shinto Shrine in Tokyo (Chapters 2 and 4), among others. These ethnographies will elucidate how the categories of class, gender, and generation crisscross everyday pleasures and anxieties of commodification. Lastly and not least importantly, another historically specific element of postwar Japanese fascism is memories and traces of its prewar violence exercised on other Asians and Pacific Islanders. The problem of ill mourning seems to critically ground the postwar Japanese formation of fascist potentialities. The last chapter will discuss contemporary Japanese efforts for mourning and the accompanying issue of ethics.

Reparations are often theorized in the vein of juridical accountability: victims of historical injustices call states to account for their suffering; states, in a gesture that marks a restoration of the rule of law, acknowledge and repair these wrongs via financial compensation. But as reparations projects intersect with a consolidation of liberalism that, in the postsocialist Czech Republic, increasingly hinges on a politics of recognition, reparations concomitantly interpellate minority subjects as such, instantiating their precarious inclusion into the body politic in a way that vexes the both the historical justice and contemporary recognition reparatory projects seek. This dissertation analyzes claims made by Czech Romani Holocaust survivors in reparations programs, the social work apparatus through which they pursued their claims, and the often contradictory demands of the complex legal structures that have governed eligibility for reparations since the immediate aftermath of the war, and argues for an ethnographic examination of the forms of discrepant reciprocity and commensuration that underpin, and often foreclose, attempts to account for the Holocaust in contemporary Europe.

This dissertation explores how political ideals, knowledge and participation are shaped, articulated and contested in and out of school for and by Maaori and Paakehaa secondary school students, school staff, families and communities with data generated through ethnographic research in Aotearoa/New Zealand (ANZ). The state of education in ANZ is both stable and precarious; stable because it is a national school system with a standardized curriculum and hiring standards regardless of whether a school is public or private with a central unit (Ministry of Education) responsible for overseeing these elements and education policy; and precarious in the sense that the school-age population is becoming increasingly diverse and must meet the needs of Maaori and Paakehaa, as well as Pacific Islander and Asian students. This is particularly imperative for Maaori and Pacific Islander children as they are less likely to have attended preschool when compared to their Paakehaa and Asian counterparts, and have higher dropout and unemployment rates. Schools are important sites of cultural production representing the nexus of unceasing, multidirectional exchanges of ideas, knowledge and practices contributing to students' development of political awareness and participation through school organization, pedagogy, and social relations. Viewed through the lenses of the anthropology of education, learning and identity development, social and cultural capital, critical pedagogy and political literacy, I demonstrate the relationship between schooling, citizenship, society and identity using data I generated while conducting 15 months of ethnographic research in two secondary school settings: a state-integrated, coed Maaori boarding school, and a public, coed secondary school. I underscore students' experiences in social interactions, and formal and informal education practices imbedded in particular historical, political, sociocultural and economic contexts. I generated data utilizing research methods consisting of participant observation, interviews and surveys to document school and non-school events and experiences including cultural performances, assemblies, classroom sessions, field trips, staff and faculty meetings, in addition to protests, media coverage and court proceedings for Maaori activists and other political activists accused of domestic terrorism in October 2007. Finally, I use the terrorism raids as a vehicle to discuss the role public pedagogy plays in educating the public, and relate my findings to the anthropological literature on indigenous movements and cultural homogenization to address the bidirectional interplay between globalizing forces and local effects on identity formation and cultural processes.

Encompassing transnational practices of marriage and kinship within the scope of domestic research provides a critical vantage point by which to examine how families are able to access, value and use education. Exploring arranged marriage as a register for larger social formations, this 2 year study shadowed the lives of Bangladeshi ESL students attending high school in Detroit’s inner city. As a ‘Coming of Age’ ethnography, this study examined the life trajectories of working class Muslim students navigating between the institutions of transnational kinship and the Detroit Public Schools. The competing and often contradictory agenda of multiculturalism and racial integration reveal the dysplasia of ethnic working class subjects living within the interstices of biracial America. This paper describes how multicultural discourse’s myopic engagement with the feminine served to mute the systematic disenfranchisement of working class Bangladeshi men while constructing feminine narratives of discontent. As a ‘coming of age’ ethnography, this 2 year study examines the life trajectories of young Bangladeshi men and women navigating between the institutions of transnational kinship and American urban education. Whereas the bodies of working class Muslim school girls became the sites for inscribing competing ideals of modernity, self-realization and womanhood, boys were condescended toward as enjoying chauvinistic privilege by the family. The lack of academic achievement for boys was oftentimes rationalized as the general chauvinism of the family’s patriarch. However, boys also bore the balance of family finances without the authority to dictate their own life trajectories. For Bangladeshi students in Queens, Segarajasinghe-Ernest explained “the school experience is the single most important factor in reconfiguring female students’ aspirations” (Segarajasinghe-Ernest 2004: 73). In describing the reshaping of desires, Segarajasinghe-Ernest was confronted by ontological narratives of hopes, dreams and eventual disappointment. The desire to academically achieve in an attempt to transcend the restraints of class and kinship was described against the dramatic trend of arranging marriage for girls at younger ages. Similarly, Sarroub (2005) explored the dichotomous world of Yemeni girls attending high school in Dearborn, Michigan. She argued that public schools served as a space for exploring and contesting competing religious and cultural pressures. By documenting the dogged eagerness with which girls pursued formal education, Sarroub demonstrated how girls negotiated their obedience to their families, in their efforts to stave off marriage. However, the binary construction of education versus marriage in recent ethnography may only recapitulate Orientalist assumptions of ethnic cultures as patriarchal. The research asks: How do Bengali students adapt practices of kinship, or purdah to the racial politics that animate Detroit’s urban school reform? Purdah, literally meaning veil or curtain, is a highly gendered, poly cultural and syncretic set of practices separating spaces of purity from defilement. By separating or shielding one’s kinswomen from the public eye, families are able to uphold particular practices of discernment regarding religious purity and social stature. The reduction of transnational working class strategies for survival, which often depend on both children and adults as well as men and women and extended family contributing to a common household income, to a reified issue of women’s equality framed arranged marriage as unchanging, dogmatic and dehumanizing to women, implicitly blaming the cultural “conservatism” of family for the abrupt eclipse of many young women who were once academic hopefuls. Examining the role of extended family may contribute toward an ethnological dialectic between the traditions of Comparative and International Education (CIE) and American Educational Anthropology by problematizing various sorts of domestic norms, sociological measurements, humanist discourses and cultural biases embedded in national level research (Ogbu 1981). Though Bangladeshis students were initially inspired by the prospect of transcending cultural and class boundaries, they were confronted by an educational apparatus which was not necessarily egalitarian, nor merit-based. Within the various socio-cultural constraints of the inner-city public school, Bangladeshi students had to contend with either ending their education in order to work, or to prepare to struggle upstream against a steep, expensive and oftentimes bleak academic learning curve, if they decide to enroll at a university.

This study examines the narrative of newly arrived immigrants and how they express their experiences in Sweden with different expectations on them and their narrative. It focuses on individual stories told in interviews with five individuals who have come to Sweden from war-torn countries in the last three years. The narratives are primarily analyzed through Erving Goffman’s theories on self- presentation and Ulf Palmenfelt’s theories on how individuals are positioning themselves through their narratives. The study discusses the expectations from the person’s family, from the interviewer and the Swedish society. It shows that the narration is shifting depending on the audience. This paper investigates how newly arrived immigrants relate their narratives to position themselves based on the understanding of them as immigrants in a Swedish context. When telling about their experience to their families the narrative is changing, and it is primarily important for them to communicate their well-being in the new country. I have a big part in production of the empirical material, since I function as someone ’in-between’. I am a part of the Swedish community but also someone that the informants are deputing their story to. The narrative conveyed to me is both taking the Swedish audience into account, but also explaining how they feel when people are seeing them as immigrants.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 1952. / Typescript (carbon copy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-136). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Iowa, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.