In the eighteenth century, European rulers pursued a common policy of enlightened centralism, which assaulted the rights of self-governing corporations in the name of material, social, and economic progress. For the towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, enlightened centralism began under King Stanislaw August Poniatowski (r. 1764--1796) and continued uninterrupted through the partitions of Poland into the mid-nineteenth century. Employing the petitions, financial records, and demographic data of a select group of towns from Poland and Ukraine, this study investigates the consequences of enlightened centralization for the political and economic lives of burghers, Jews, and other town dwellers in Poland-Lithuania and some of its successor states: the Russian Empire (after 1795), Austrian West Galicia (1795--1809), the Duchy of Warsaw (1806--1815), and the Congress Kingdom of Poland (after 1815). A particular emphasis is placed on the fate of so-called private towns, which possessed royal charters and rights of self-government but belonged to individuals. When divorced from the effects of nineteenth-century industrialization and population growth, enlightened centralization in the towns of Poland-Lithuania did not produce the economic growth, administrative efficiency or social improvements that served to justify the abrogation of self-government in the minds of Enlightenment writers and many modern historians. Instead, centralizing policies weakened the political rights of townsmen, imposed enormous administrative costs, and substituted an ineffective and legalistic system for local control. Private towns fared the worst under centralization because state control undermined the ability and incentive of owners to offer attractive conditions to townsmen, and these unusual entities experienced an absolute decline in population and wealth after 1795.

Modern Ukrainian Paganism is a new religious movement that draws upon beliefs and practices from over a thousand years ago. It represents a mode of resistance to both the political oppression of Ukraine and the dominant position of Christianity in that country. Paganism spread among the urban Ukrainian intelligentsia in the North American diaspora after World War II, and developed actively in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, while experiencing a great decline in the diaspora, it is rapidly growing in Ukraine, involving many different Pagan communities and thousands of believers. / Pagans draw on a variety of sources including both historical chronicles containing information about old Slavic mythology and contemporary rural folklore that is believed to maintain remnants of the old pagan worldview. Although many folkloric forms have been appropriated by the Christian church, contemporary Pagans consider these elements to have originated in pre-Christian times and reclaim them for their own needs. / This work is the first extended study of Ukrainian Paganism in its post-Soviet East European context and in the North American diaspora, simultaneously comparing it with Western Paganism. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation of rituals and interviews with Pagans in both Ukraine and North America, as well as on archival and published materials. / While focusing predominantly on the revival of pagan folklore within this movement, this thesis demonstrates how the imagined past has become important for constructing an alternative national identity in modern contexts of socio-political turmoil. The thesis suggests that this cultural revival often has little to do with historical reality, since there is limited primary information available. Like other revivals, it involves the construction of new cultural forms through creative interpretations of the ancestral past. Moreover, the obscurity of the past allows individualistic interpretations that result in many variations of similar forms. These forms are examined in their relationship to the concepts of nationalism, gender, charisma and power, religious syncretism, and aesthetics. This work is multidisciplinary in nature as it draws upon theoretical frameworks developed in fields of folkloristics, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and art criticism. It contributes to the understanding of modern cultural processes that shape the national consciousness of people in various parts of the world.

<p>This dissertation explores the place of Irish-Gaelic language (Gaeilge) television and film media in the lives of youths living in the urban greater Dublin metropolitan area in the Republic of Ireland. By many accounts, there has been a Gaeilge renaissance underway in recent times. The number of Gaeilge-medium primary and secondary schools (Gaelscoileanna) has grown throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, the year 2003 saw the passage of the Official Languages Act (laying the groundwork to assure all public services would be made available in Gaeilge as well as English), and as of January 2007 Gaeilge has become a working language of the European Union. Importantly, a Gaeilge television station (TG4) was established in 1996. This development has increased the amount of Gaeilge media significantly, and that television and film media is increasingly being utilized in Gaeilge classrooms.</p><p>The research for this dissertation was based on a year of fieldwork conducted in Dublin, Ireland. The primary methodology was semi-structured interviews with teenage second-level-school students who were enrolled in compulsory Gaeilge classes at two schools in the greater Dublin area. Simultaneous examination of social discourses, in the form of prevalent television and film media, and the talk of the teenage students I interviewed led me to discern a "locality production" process that can be discerned in both these forms of discourse. While it is noted that this process of locality production may be present anywhere, it is suggested that it may be particularly pronounced in Ireland as a result of a traditional emphasis on "place" on the island.</p><p>This dissertation thus makes a contribution to Irish and Media Studies through an analysis of Gaeilge cultural productions in the context of increased effects of globalization on the lives of the youth with whom I did my research. Additionally, this dissertation contributes to an on-going critique of identity-based theorizations through contribution of an alternative framework.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Carol Leff. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-203) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This study examines the spread of in-life biographies (biographies written and published while their subjects were still alive) in Italy during the later years of the Risorgimento and the early years of Unification. These biographies, whose subjects ranged from the already famous to those being promoted as new political leaders, took a well-established literary form and applied it to the exigencies of the day. That this was a relatively new method of political engagement is seen through the numerous interventions by authors and editors justifying their choice of living subjects and excusing the fact that these were not traditional subjects with explanations of impartiality and necessity. As the Italian nation continued forward, such writings begin to be extended to less blatantly political subjects, such as the economic and social self-improvers touted by Michele Lessona (who followed the more famous Samuel Smiles of England) and the fictional Sicilian fishermen of Giovanni Verga's I Malavoglia. This continued push to describe in biographical terms the lives of living Italians reveals a widely neglected aspect of the biographical genre, namely that writing the life of a still-living figure is fundamentally different than writing the life of a deceased individual whose life course cannot be in any way changed by the publishing of a biography. The work that both begins and ends this study, a very early biography of Benito Mussolini, serves to illustrate the possibilities contained in this subgenre as well as the reasons for which it should continue to be studied as a form distinct from that of traditional biography. / Romance Languages and Literatures

<p>This thesis explores the phenomenon of canonical revision by migrant and postcolonial writers in Spain and Italy. By recycling, rewriting or revising canonical works or film movements of the host countries in which they work, these writers call attention to Spain's and Italy's concerted attempts to perform a European identity. In doing so, they simultaneously challenge the literary categories into which they have been inserted, such as "migrant" or "Hispano-African" literatures. Rather, these writers illustrate that these categories, too, work in tandem with other forms of exclusion to buttress, rather than challenge, Spain and Italy's nationalist attempts to overcome their-"South-ness" and perform European-ness.</p><p>The thesis consists of four chapters, each focusing on a different migrant writer. The first chapter examines how Amara Lakhous, an Algerian-Italian writer, models his novels after the film genre of the commedia all'italiana in order to make national and ethnic identity categories look like theater and spectacle. The second chapter analyzes how Najat el-Hachmi, a Catalan writer of Moroccan birth, rewrites a classic of Catalan literature (Mercé Rodoreda's The Time of the Doves) to challenge the oppositions between "immigrant" and "native," while also articulating a transnational, feminist critique of patriarchy. The third chapter studies how Francisco Zamora Loboch, an Equatorial Guinean exile in Spain, re-interprets Don Quijote as an iconically anti-racist text. The fourth chapter studies how Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo, a Congolese-Italian writer, recycles Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet in his novel Rometta e Giulieo in order to challenge the polarized dichotomy of "migrant" and "canonical" writing.</p><p>My work both draws on and critiques several, interrelated fields of scholarship, including Southern European studies, Afro-European studies, Mediterranean studies, migrant literary studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as criticism pertaining to specific canonical works these writers revisit in their works. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that a critique of racism or xenophobia in contemporary Spain or Italy necessitates not only a critique of the Global South against Eurocentrism, but also a simultaneous critique of Europe's North-South divide.</p> / Dissertation

<p> The abstract is not available from PDF copy and paste.</p>

<p> In the past ten years or more, social complexity has taken center stage as the focus of archaeologists working on the Eurasian steppe. The Middle Bronze Age Sintashta period, ca. 2100 - 1700 BC, is often assumed to represent the apex of social complexity for the Bronze Age in the southern Urals region. This assumption has been based on the appearance of twenty-two fortified settlements, chariot burials, and intensified metal production. Some of these studies have incorporated the emergence and subsequent development of mobile pastoralism as their primary foci, while others have concerned themselves primarily with early forms of metal production and their association with seemingly nascent social hierarchies. Such variables are useful indicators of more complex forms of social organization usually accompanied by strong degrees of demographic centralization and social differentiation.</p><p> This dissertation explores the relationship between demographic centralization and the balance between social differentiation and integration based on the data collected during archaeological survey of 142 square km around and between two Sintashta period settlements, Stepnoye and Chernorech'ye, located in the Ui River valley of the southern Urals region, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian Federation. Because of the multi-component nature of archaeological survey, materials recovered date from the Mesolithic to the twentieth century. However, the focus was on Bronze Age materials to better identify and evaluate changes between demographic centralization and social differentiation.</p><p> Center-hinterland dynamics and the use of historical capital (materials, practices, and places re-used in identifiable ways) were evaluated from the Middle Bronze Age Sintashta period through to the end of the Final Bronze Age. Based on the results of the Sintashta Collaborative Archaeological Research Project (SCARP) project, the ongoing work of Russian scholars, and the results of this dissertation, there is considerable evidence that it was in the Late Bronze Age that social complexity may have become more pronounced, even as the demographically centralized Sintashta period communities dispersed. The results of the landscape and materials analyses indicate strong possibilities for land-use and craft traditions carried through to the end of the Final Bronze Age, with such traditions acting as historical capital for later communities. </p>

<p> This is an interpretative phenomenological study examining the lived experiences of five long-lasting, self-report satisfied, German-American military couples, using semi-structured interviews. Each bicultural couple that participated was married thirty years or longer and consisted of one German native wife and one American veteran husband. Eight themes emerged from the data: (a) tri-cultural marriage experiences; (b) faith, religion, belief systems; (c) intimacy; (d) overcoming: good coping, commitment, and humor; (e) respect and appreciation systems; (f) trust and fidelity; (g) communication and the need to improve; and (h) keeping things alive.</p><p> <b>Keywords:</b> Bicultural marriage, Long-lasting marriage, Phenomenology, and Veterans</p>

<p> Demonstrations in response to the harsh austerity budget in Greece which cut valuable government services, and the civil unrest in Athens specifically, are an outward, visible response to economic crisis. In an androcentric society such as Greece, women are disproportionately affected by the austerity measures because of the feminization of budget cuts. This ethnographic study explores how middle class women in Athens are coping economically, politically and socially in a national and global financial crisis. Through studying middle class Greek women, one can intensively illustrate the faults of neoliberal economic policies that pride themselves on the creation of the so-called middle class while simultaneously eliminating it. This research examines the survival strategies and adaptation methods of middle class women in Athens as well as placing them within the global economic context further displaying the fallacy of neoliberal economic policies as an economic growth agenda.</p>