Based on the author's long term fieldwork from 2005 to 2008 in Qiaoxiang, a rural Hakka community in Xingning County, Guangdong Province, Southeastern China, this dissertation examines how the revival of tradition in contemporary China can be understood through the dynamic interaction and negotiation among state, villagers and local elites. This ethnography describes the history and reality of tumultuous social change in the community, especially in Maoist and post-Maoist times, and shows how the villagers living in weilongwu, a characteristic lineage or multi-family compound of the Hakka heartland, have managed to mobilize political, social and cultural resources to deal with outside forces in contemporary China. I analyze how the Maoist state's attempts to break down kinship ties failed and how kinship's importance has been maintained and strengthened in both collective and post-collective periods. This dissertation focuses on how the participation and collaboration of ordinary villagers and village elites facilitates a vigorous revival of tradition, including the establishment of organizations at the level of lineage and community, the reediting of genealogies, the rebuilding and renovation of ancestral halls, and most importantly, the reactivation of kinship rituals. I demonstrate how the active engagement and complicated entanglement of socialist state, overseas power and other contemporary forces has shaped and reshaped the social and cultural landscape of the local community. I argue that the revival of tradition is by no means a remnant of the past or a total invention; instead, traditions are forming within the fluctuating context of Late Imperial legacy, state imposition and uncertain modernity. I also argue that the ordinary villagers are not passive subjects of domination by state power or other forces; instead, they are sophisticated activists possessing the strategic competence and wisdom to deal with the circumstances in which they live. In this sense, tradition should be taken as the practice of ordinary people in an ongoing process of inventing and becoming.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Anthropology, Johannesburg 2015 / Research in the mining community of Carletonville focused on how individuals negotiate and contest different value orientations in trying to construct a workable moral economy. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews and observations of respondents from lower and higher wage classes, the report deconstructs the elements of differential value sets that are redefining and sometimes destabilizing the moral economy and underlining views of inequality. Wage disputes are seen not only as mine workers' expressions of economic injustice but perhaps more crucially as a form of control and protection of their craft and status. The dominance of global economic governance and decision-making is leading to more acute internal divergences but can also be a starting point for a discussion about the impact of conflicts in social values. / XL2018

This dissertation is based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with seminarian women in Iran in the summer of 2008, and from 2010 to 2011. I ask, after having unprecedented access to the howzeh elmiyeh (seminaries) after the revolution, what have been some of the consequences for the howzevi? And, how do women in the howzeh elmiyeh see themselves? Through grounded method of analysis, I have found that in their pursuit of what constitutes `a good life', the howzevi of this study were actively attempting to transform themselves and the howzeh setting, their social relationships, and the greater Iranian society at large by exploring resources available to them within a set of constraints. These limitations were often not only self-imposed but also intensified with increased access to particular networks. In the following chapters I argue for an alternative way of looking at, and talking about, the howzevi who are now positioned in institutions that have emerged at the core of the ongoing struggles to shape a particular Iran. The term howzeh elmiyeh (seminaries) may be defined as Islamic theological institutions of higher religious learning where a personal teacher-student transmission of knowledge, oral and written, of Islamic Jurisprudence and other ancilliary Islamic sciences would take place. As you may know, in Muslim populated countries like Pakistan, the howzeh is also known as a madrasa. Unlike devotees of Catholic seminaries, however, students of the howzeh elmiyeh neither observe celibacy nor are physically secluded from the rest of society. Rather, they are, and have been, an integral part of the urban landscape in Syria, Egypt, Iran and Iraq from the ninth century A.D. (Berkey 2003; Bulliet 1972; Chamberlain 1994). The howzevi of this study were between the ages of eighteen to sixty years-old, and were at different stages of their education. Some were unmarried and in the early stages of their education. Some were married with children and completing doctoral research, while others were simultaneously teaching seminary classes, working on women's Islamic rights, and partaking in the Dars- e Kharij class (the highest level in the seminary) with Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the Supreme Leader. Belonging to the ultra- religious conservative population in Iran, their history of mobility was limited inside the home before the 1979 revolution. Absent in the anthropological literature of women in the Middle East and women in contemporary Islamic higher education, the institutionalization of the howzeh elmiyeh (seminaries) for women in Iran was a project that had been in the works before the revolution. Its formalization emerged publicly only in 1984 through the combined efforts of groups of revolutionary Islamist women in petitioning Ayatollah Khomeini for the establishment of Jami'at Al-Zahra in Qom. By Islamicizing public space, the revolution also enabled these women to move into the public sphere. Since then, the howzeh elmiyeh for women has been an ongoing statewide project through the active participation of women who credit the 1979 revolution for widespread access to this form of education. This opening amounts to a yearly average of 65,000 women attend the women's howzeh all over Iran, excluding graduates since about 1984. Annually, the howzeh elmiyeh turns away ten percent of applicants (Sakurai 2011) because the infrastructure cannot yet accomodate the demand for women's enrollment. This support for the howzevi remains unparalleled throughout the history of Shi'i Islamic scholarship in the Shi'i Islamic world. After the 1979 revolution, the access which the women of the intellectual clerical elite had to Islamic education for women was extended to "all women"; all women, who, at least, were willing to observe the social constraints of the howzevi lifestyle, regardless of the socioeconomic group they belonged to, and/or the fact that they did not come from an intellectual Shi'i scholarly family. This served a purpose, however. The revolutionary state appropriated the concept of the howzeh elmiyeh for women (Adelkhah 2000) in order to produce a specific type of revolutionary woman. Notwithstanding, as the revolutionary state created a new public space for Islam (Adelkhah 2000), it also provided new leadership opportunities for women (Afary 2009; Najmabadi 2008; Sedghi 2007). Women students were able to embark on a fully-funded path towards potentially becoming, among other Islamic scholarly aspirations, a mujtahideh, a woman who may derive religious rulings for herself, a process called ijtihad, and who are also able to engage in discussions about Islamic laws and its applicability in Iranian society. This research is in conversation with how women in the Middle East are neither passive nor homogenous (Abu-Lughod 1993; Holmes-Eber 2003; Mahmood 2005; Osanloo 2009; Torab 2007), as well as within the discourse on society and the women's movement in Iran (Adelkhah 2000; Afary 2009; Afshar 1998; Bahramitash 2008; Kamalkhani 1998; Kian-Thiébaut 2002; Kunkler & Fazaeli 2012; Mahdavi 2007; Mir- Hosseini 1999; Moghissi 1994; Najmabadi 2008; Osanloo 2009; Paidar 1995; Poya 1999; Sakurai 2011, 2012; Sedghi 2007; Torab 2007; Varzi 2006).

My dissertation is a story of journey. In one sense it speaks to the ways in which my assistant, Fei, and I decided to attempt research inside a very small internet radio station that I came to call Youth Web Radio (YWR) for the purposes of this dissertation. YWR was the first licensed internet radio station in China. It was a station intended for a young audience. It was also the brainchild of the Beijing Communist Youth League and the product of university-educated creatives. It operated out of Beijing from 2005 to 2018, and fully closed down due to a lack of the resources necessary to make a full transition from a project of the party-state to a viable profit-generating commercial organization. At times the story I write moves around the idea of fieldwork. The actual time I spent in the field was from November 2014 to July 2015. But the journey that I write in this dissertation entails more than the days when we were on the ground in Beijing for the research. It includes narrative that speaks to how previous trips and life experiences started to build an energy and desire in me to do some kind of post graduate work in China, or rather on an aspect of what I had been experiencing in China, which had much to do with education. It also includes narrative that speaks to the circuitous path it took to find YWR as a field site, but also as a focus or draw for an attempt at ethnography. At other times the story I write moves around the conception of time though never in a straightforward explicated sense—more so in the way the narratives reach into different pockets of my life at different moments, and find their way into the story. I somehow couldn’t write this dissertation without including pieces from moments in my life that in one sense felt removed from the task at hand, which was to tell an ethnographic tale of a sole fieldwork experience. Yet in the sense of lens and connection, they felt utterly important to our story and as if to leave them out meant leaving out a piece of the truth of the writing. Though this story is about my personal journey, I write it as our story due to the ways in which it is also about the different people I have encountered in my life in time and in place, to of course include the fieldwork experience, and who I see as contributors to the way the story unfolds—scholars, thinkers, friends—and in the sense of this being an anthropological endeavor as interlocutors as well. In this dissertation, lived transition is about both interlocutor and anthropologist, the story the interlocutor tells and that the anthropologist writes is also about the transition in which the anthropologist herself is engaged. Through this lens of lived transition the dissertation speaks to my own life and in doing so speaks to how a group of young people narrated “becoming a company” and “internet radio” in China’s government-monitored media industry, and as to how I came to write their story as our own.

The main aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between landscape, memory and heritage. It aims to establish that landscape is not only an inseparable part of the intangible process of memory, but also the formation and perpetuation of cultural and individual identity. The composition of heritage, including the sociocultural and biophysical, is therefore a complex result of varying interactions between memory and landscape, as perceived by the living custodians. The intangible values of meaning, memory, lived experience and attachment, in relation to people's connection to locality and landscape, are traced back to the tangible fabric of place. Through means of qualitative and quantitative anthropological fieldwork methods and an extensive literature review, the sociocultural profile of the Mpondo is briefly documented. The subsequent case study explored a site in the Eastern Cape on Ngquza Hill, where the oral traditions and memories connected to the site are mapped. These elements were accessed through employing the theories of mnemotechnics. / Anthropology and Archaeology / M.A. (Anthropology)

The main aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between landscape, memory and heritage. It aims to establish that landscape is not only an inseparable part of the intangible process of memory, but also the formation and perpetuation of cultural and individual identity. The composition of heritage, including the sociocultural and biophysical, is therefore a complex result of varying interactions between memory and landscape, as perceived by the living custodians. The intangible values of meaning, memory, lived experience and attachment, in relation to people's connection to locality and landscape, are traced back to the tangible fabric of place. Through means of qualitative and quantitative anthropological fieldwork methods and an extensive literature review, the sociocultural profile of the Mpondo is briefly documented. The subsequent case study explored a site in the Eastern Cape on Ngquza Hill, where the oral traditions and memories connected to the site are mapped. These elements were accessed through employing the theories of mnemotechnics. / Anthropology and Archaeology / M.A. (Anthropology)