This study is an investigation of how cultural traditions can militate against the education of women in Zambia with a focus on the Tumbuka tribe. Ethnographic methods were employed over a period of three months in a village in the Eastern Province of the country. Data were collected through participant observation, focus group and in-depth interviews, narratives, and documents. A total of 47 participants comprised the sample. This research cuts through multidisciplinary fields such as social sciences, education and anthropology. Through thematic analysis data were analysed. Evidence in this research demonstrates that patrilineal groupings are strongholds of the patriarchal predisposition and that patriarchal attitudes and cultural traditions do not recognize women as equal partners with men. The Tumbuka women‟s experiences and beliefs reflect socio-cultural traditional norms that tend to limit gender equality, and compel women to accept and justify male domination at the expense of their own status and to regard consequent inequalities as normal. Evidence demonstrates that the initiation rites, an active institution for girls of pubescent age, interfere more with the school-based education of girls. The women are active social agents as well as passive learners who will not allow the girls they are coaching to question the reason or purpose for some traditional practices that are oppressive and directly cause them to fail to complete their schooling successfully. The strong hold that the cultural traditions has on the locals has further resulted in conflicts with modern schooling, which is viewed as disseminating „white‟ man‟s culture and values. Established in this research is the fear and suspicion that the locals have on the outcome of their children learning these values that they see as alien to their own. The modern education provided in school is perceived as a force that undermines cultural values. It is viewed as presenting an inherent challenge to the cultural traditional control measures that are in place. Arguably, while ethnic traditions should be respected and sustained because they define one's identity, aspects of culture which are discriminatory, restrictive and tend to devalue women‟s physical, emotional and psychological development should be eliminated because they are retrogressive. Therefore the argument that deep seated socio-cultural traditions play a significant role in encumbering female education is proven.

The historical geography of farming in the West Central Region of Scotland has been under-researched. Generalisations based on research relating to other parts of the country are misleading because the development and forms of agriculture in the West Central Region were distinctive. Traditionally this is an area of dairy farming which, during the research period (c.1850-1930) was characterised by small family labour farms. The concentration of small farms, on which the faming family and a few hired workers formed the core labour-force, and where the distinctions between employer and employed were less than on the large arable farms of the East, had consequences for rural social structure, mitigating the effects of capitalism. Through a small set of family labour farms, and the families associated with them, the thesis takes a grassroots approach to exploring the pattern of life on the farms of the Region, with particular regard to gender relations. The survival of such farms, contrary to Marxist expectations is investigated, along with the resilience of the farms during the period of ‘The Great Agricultural Depression.’ Glasgow, the economic capital of the Region, underwent phenomenal growth during the nineteenth century, and had a massive impact upon local agriculture. Glasgow and its satellite towns were a market for agricultural produce, and a source of imported livestock feed, and fertilisers. The fashions, in the town, for consumer goods and non-traditional foodstuffs spread out to the surrounding Region, and interaction between town and country was facilitated by the development of the railways. The significance of farm location in relation to Glasgow is assessed.

This study examines changing gender roles and women&amp / #8217 / s status under the light of t&ouml / re/yasa and shar&amp / #299 / &amp / #8216 / a among the Inner Asian Turkic and Mongolian societies and Ottomans in Anatolia especially between the thirteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries. In this frame, this study traces gender roles and women&amp / #8217 / s status in Inner Asia before the influence of Islamic culture and civilizations by using oral and written sources as well as anthropological studies. It also focuses on the formation of t&ouml / re and yasa among Inner Asian societies and shar&amp / #299 / &amp / #8216 / a in the Muslim world. Finally, this study investigates gender roles and women&amp / #8217 / s status in relation with customary (yasa/t&ouml / re and &ouml / rf-i sultani) and religious laws (shar&amp / #299 / &amp / #8216 / a ) among the Mongol Ilkhans, Timurids and Ottomans. Gender roles and women&amp / #8217 / s status are examined according to political, social and cultural characteristics of these dynasties from a comparative perspective.

This study aimed to demonstrate the effects of the contextual factors (socio-economic conditions and level of urbanization) on family processes and outcomes related to women. The family processes of interest were spousal relations relative power, feelings of mastery, and self evaluation of women in familial roles. Another aim was to investigate the effect of participation in the activities of family support and women education programs on women&#039 / s attitudes in relation to family roles. I studies with an accidental sample of 145 women in various districts of Kadik&ouml / y, istanbul. There were three groups of women (1) women living in poor districts of Kadik&ouml / y and in touch with &quot / Family Guiding/ Solidarity Center&quot / of Kadik&ouml / y Munucipality, (2) women living in the same districts but not in touch with (FG/SC), (3) women living in central-whealthy neighborhoods of Kadik&ouml / y. There were three main predictions / (1) education was predicted to determine economic status, which would influence mastery. Mastery in turn, would affect spousal relationsand decision making processes in family. Finally, spousal relations would predict self-evaluation (2) urbanization was predicted to influence modern attitudes toward spousal roles positively and traditional attitudes negatively, (3) women who were in touch with FG/SC were predicted to have more favorable attitudes toward modern spousal roles, but less favorable toward traditional spousal roles. The model of the first prediction revealed that / economic status determined mastery, which influences warmth and equality. Warmth and equality in turn influences individual&#039 / s self evaluation. As expected in the second prediction, urbanization was negatively related to traditional attitudes. Comparison of the three groups revealed that, women living in pheripheral districts showed more favorable attitudes towards traditional gender stereotypic duties of women, and maledominance than women living in central districts. Women living in pheripheral districts and intouch with FG/SC, showed more favorable attitudes toward women&#039 / s participation inlabor market than women living in the same area but not in touch with FG/SC, and women living in the central districts.

This study contributes to the current literature on time, gender, migration, culture and identity by bringing insights into how time is perceived and experienced by Syrian women who are settled and working in the UK. It is a topic that is little known in the extant literature, and that differs in its dynamics form the western literature. The notion of time has been widely debated but with little reference to its impact on the perceptions and individual experiences of migrant women, who engage with culturally different time structures and different time schedules. The spatial experiences of those women represented by their mobility across cultural boundaries seem to be affecting how migrant women perceive and organise time. Throughout the study, the Heideggerian interpretive phenomenological perspective has been adopted to make sense of and interpret the meanings and experiences provided by the participants of this study. This has been selected to allow space for considering and acknowledging the impact of the personal experience and prior knowledge of both the researcher and the researched subjects. Perceptions of time and time experiences have been found to be much diversified across personal, social and cultural contexts which are marked by spatial or geographical boundaries. Also, time structures and time schedules have been institutionally gendered across the cultures of both countries: Syria and the UK, but with varying degrees. Empirically, this study can help work organisations and agencies interested in working with migrant people to understand the diversity of perceptions and experiences of migrant female workers in the UK to enable them offering the care and services tailored to the needs of those migrants. In doing so, this research is hoped to improve the quality of work and social contributions of migrant women in the UK. Methodologically, this phenomenological inquiry contributes to the field of empirical and socio-political knowledge as well as the understanding of moral, aesthetic, and personal welfare debated in the migration literature. It contributes to the understanding of human experiences in relation to the notion of time, in isolation of any concern to predicting or prescribing any theory.

This study is concerned with the sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls by white men in the antebellum South. Interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s are studied alongside nineteenth-century narratives of the formerly enslaved in order to make calculations of the scale of abuse in the South, but also to discover which conditions, social spaces and situations were, and possibly still are, most conducive to the sexual abuse of women and girls. This thesis is separated into two parts. Part One establishes a methodology for working with testimony of the formerly enslaved and determines the scale of sexual abuse using all available 1930s interviews with people who had lived in Louisiana and Texas under slavery. This systematic quantitative analysis is a key foundation from which to interpret the testimony of abuse that is explored according to different forms of sexual violence in Part Two. It is argued that abuse was endemic in the South, and occurred on a scale that was much higher than has been argued in previous studies. Enslaved people could experience a range of white male sexually abusive behaviours: rape, sexual slavery and forced breeding receive particular attention in this study due to the frequency with which they were mentioned by the formerly enslaved. These abuses are conceptualised as existing on a continuum of sexual violence that, alongside other less frequently mentioned practices, pervaded the lives of all enslaved people. Common features existed along the continuum. Abuse was intergenerational in nature for both the abusers and the abused. Light-skinned enslaved children born of rape were far more likely to become victims of abuse themselves and young enslaved girls were prematurely sexualised. Sexual abuse was brought into the white domestic space through the institution of sexual slavery, white children were thus unconsciously schooled in the abusive sexual mores of southern society from an early age. Abuse was quite open among white male family members. Other institutions existed that normalised and legitimised abuse, such as the fancy-girl trade and sexual interference through forced breeding practices that included eugenic manipulation and the use of ‘studs’. Despite this, enslaved women showed remarkable levels of emotional survival and initial reflections are made on the ways in which women could resist and cope with sexual abuse. Testimony suggests that abuse was discussed amongst the black community, support was rarely denied to victims, and there was no stigma was attached to children born of rape. With recent revelations on the scale of the institutionalised sexual abuse of women and children, as well as vast modern sex-trafficking networks, there are special opportunities presented through the current cultural climate in order to understand the southern experience. The South is reframed as a ‘culture of abuse’ where sexual violence against enslaved people was naturalised and culturally reproduced.

This thesis draws on Freud to understand the innate human need to create boundaries and argues that ambivalence is an inescapable dilemma in their creation. It argues that a re-reading of Freud’s major thesis in Totem and Taboo via an engagement with the Dionysos myth and cult scholarship allows for a new understanding of dominant forms of hegemonic psychic and social formations that attempt to keep in place a false opposition of polis and phusis, self and Other, resulting in the perpetuation of oppressive structures and processes. The primary methodological claim of the thesis is that prior psychoanalytic engagements with cultus scholarship have suffered from being either insufficiently thorough or diffused in attempts to be comparative. A more holistic and detailed approach allows us to ground a psychoanalytic interpretation in the realities of said culture, allowing us to critique Freud’s misreading of Dionysos regarding the Primal Father and the psychic transmission of the Primal Crime. This thesis posits that Dionysos needs to acknowledged as a projection of the Primal Father fantasy linked to a basic ambivalence about the necessity of boundaries in psychosocial life. Using research from the classics and psychoanalysis alongside Queer and post-colonial theory, as well as extensive fieldwork and primary source analysis, this thesis provides a grounded materialist critique of psychoanalysis’ complicity in reproducing a false dichotomy between polis and phusis, a dichotomy that furthers the projection onto marginalised groups whose othering is linked to a fear and desire of a return to phusis and denial of its constant presence in the psyche and polis. This re-reading of Dionysos challenges the defensive structures, which are organised around ideas of subjectification that posit that phusis must be severed from polis/ego and projected onto Dionysos and all groups that threaten the precariousness of these boundaries.