This thesis is about children's health and well-being as constructed and maintained by villagers in Upper Egypt. It is based on primary data collected during eighteen months of fieldwork in a small village in the district of Abnube in the east of Assiut Governorate in the south of Egypt. The thesis also relies on secondary statistical and qualitative sources. This work makes three propositions concerning children's health. The first proposition is that children's heal th is a distinct part of the traditional medical cultures of Egypt and one that should be integral to the analysis of medical culture, pluralism, and services. More over, the focus on child health and ill-health provides a critical commentary to on-going debates about health and healing in Egypt. The second proposition is that the study of child health and ill-health is an essential and missing component of the ethnography of rural Egyptians. An awareness of the relevance of children, and of the efforts of families to keep them healthy, to the cultural, social, political, and economic construction of family and village can significantly add to anthropological understanding of the Egyptian peasant and village. The third proposition is that the study of health as a socially and historically constructed category is as important, if not more so, than the study of ill-health. This work looks at processes whereby health is conceptualized and their relevance to the ensuing constructions of ill-health. The work also tries to establish the relationship between village discourses on health and the discourse dominant in the language, services, and structures of modern biomedicine in Egypt. In this thesis, health is viewed as an arena where cultural, historical, social, as well as economic relationships and structures come to shape family practices and choices.

This thesis explores how, in the wake of momentous agrarian reforms implemented during the 1980s and 1990s, Vietnam succeeded in generating both a strong increase in agricultural growth, and remarkable trends in poverty reduction. Three specific channels of transmission between agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction are explored and evaluated empirically using the Vietnamese Living Standard Survey. Chapter 2 investigates the impact on agricultural investments of the strengthening in tenure security induced by Vietnam's 1993 Land Law, which set up a new land tenure system based on de jure private property rights. Idiosyncratic characteristics of Vietnam's land reform and the panel nature of the VLSS are taken advantage of to capture the exogenous changes in tenure security brought by the 1993 Land Law. By interpreting the results in the light of Vietnam's agrarian history, I shed light on the role of formal institutions during the process of establishing a new private property right system. Chapter 3 explores the role of education in promoting agricultural growth and documents how, in the 1980s, Vietnam emerged from thirty years of war with literacy levels that are normally achieved by middle-income countries. The differential in educational attainment between North and South Vietnam is used to devise an instrumental variable strategy and to evaluate the contribution of Vietnam's high initial education levels to rice yields. The results confirm the importance of literacy and numeracy skills as pre-conditions for agricultural growth but highlight the importance of non-linearities in the impact of schooling, and of factoring in information on the quality in education in order to better understand the processes through which education affects economic efficiency. Finally, Chapter 4 showed that growth in the agricultural sector had been remarkably pro-poor as it benefited even the poorest of the poor, probably because of favourable initial conditions for pro-poor agricultural growth.

Anthropogenic impact, through animal trade, climate change, habitat fragmentation and globalisation, is a principal cause of global species redistributions and community rearrangements. Species introduced accidently or intentionally to non-native ranges may adapt to survive and proliferate, and native species threatened by environmental change may need to adapt in situ, or track more tolerable conditions through extra-range dispersal. Under both scenarios, we must facilitate greater understanding of the mechanisms that underlie adaptation within a complexity of ecosystem dynamics, which in turn will inform management strategies for both introduced species, and preserving biodiversity. Here, I explore mechanisms that support adaptive potential to rapid environmental change across taxa, and model them to the introduced ringneck parakeet Psittacula krameri. This species has recently successfully traversed extensive climate gradients in establishing introduced global populations. Some of this success may be attributable to morphological, behavioural, physiological or phenological adaptations, and therefore the species represents an opportunity for exploring rapid adaptation. I initially review the navigation of dispersal and invasive pathways, and the importance of specific character traits toward adaptive potential, before identifying genetic and non-genetic adaptive mechanisms (pertinent across taxa) that may help explain observed establishment and population growth of the ringneck parakeet. Mutations as the basis for an evolutionary adaptive response are examined, alongside the significance that the origin and extent of such polymorphisms may have toward a rapid adaptive response. I consider the role of selective sweeps and polygenic models as genetic processes for an adaptive response, alongside non-genetic mechanisms such as phenotypic plasticity and epigenetics that may better support rapid adaptation. Finally, I assess avian literature to interpret genetic and plastic responses as explanations for adaptive potential.

The concept of ‘deviant burial’ has been part of archaeological vocabulary since the 1980s, but is still often used too casually to be meaningful. The term has been used to describe individuals who have been accorded alternative burial rites when compared to others within the same burial ground, region or time period. As ‘deviant burial’ is widely found in archaeological and anthropological contexts, there was need to examine the range of these alternative burial rites and to determine whether this differentiation at death was reserved for the ostracised and the punished. This study used a cemetery analysis of eight early Anglo-Saxon sites to test whether the accordance of ‘deviant’ or atypical burial rites was associated with a particular group of individuals or set of funerary motifs. A total of 1016 inhumed individuals were examined from East Anglia and North Lincolnshire (Lindsey) and entered into a searchable database before being subjected to a comprehensive statistical analysis. This identified atypical rites that were not necessarily associated with criminal punishment or negative treatment. This study found that individuals who were accorded differential burial treatment were not always found in an iniquitous context and could instead be interpreted as evidence of eccentricity at death.

The research concerns the Eritrean community resident in Milan where it originated around forty years ago. In this thesis I reflect on how people who migrated from Eritrea at different times, and young people who were born from Eritrean parents in Milan, perceive themselves as a community away from their native country; how they perceive the differences and similarities between each other and those considered to be outside this community; and how the memories of the past are perceived by people with different personal and social histories. Since this research relates to the formation of identities and perceptions of the self among a migrant community, issues are analysed with the awareness that movement, dislocation, and re-location have great impact on the perceptions of home and of the self in cultural, historical and social terms.

This thesis is about children and transnationalism. It is about the way in which children develop their identities in transnational communities in societies being transformed by globalisation. It is about the reproduction of societies through the socialisation of children and the tension inherent between this reproduction and social change. I set out to study children but became interested in adults' interactions with children and the nature of transnational communities and identities. As my fieldwork progressed I was drawn away from children into a study of families and societies. So, while children are the empirical focus of this thesis, there are many complementary sections which draw on evidence from adults or only discuss adults. As my description of Shirin and her brother above illustrates, processes and tensions are mediated by children often through seemingly contradictory attitudes and practices. I will investigate this phenomenon of contradiction and ambivalence as it characterises the experiences of the British Bangladeshi children I focus on and is key to understanding way in which identities are formed and experienced. [It] was conceived as part of the research project ‘Home and Away: South Asian Children's Representations of Diaspora', which was managed by my supervisor, Dr. Katy Gardner and Dr. Kanwal Mand. One aim of the project was to address a gap in research on the views of transnational children on issues of culture, belonging and identities. The project aims to investigate and bring to the fore the influence of the life course in migration research. This thesis contributes to these aims, but on its own can make only a partial contribution to this field. It is a snapshot of just over a year in the lives of a group of about twenty British Bangladeshi children between the ages of 8 and 12. Added to this material is additional data collected from a wider group of children in less depth, from younger and older siblings and from parents and other adults.

This thesis is a sociological study of Quakers in Ireland that investigates the impact that sectarianism has had on identity construction within the Religious Society of Friends. My research highlights the complex identities of individual Friends in respect of culture, national identities and theology – mirrored by the Society’s corporate identity. Jennifer Todd’s work on sectarianism and oppositional identities in Ireland provides part of the theoretical framework for this thesis. An identity matrix formulated from interview data is used to illustrate how different identities overlap and relate to each other. I argue that the range of ‘hybrid’ or multilayered identities within Irish Quakerism has resulted in tensions which impact on relationships between Friends and on the Society. The thesis discusses how Friends negotiate these ‘hybrid’ identities. Irish Quakers prioritise ‘relational unity’ and have developed a distinctive approach to complex identity management. I contend that in their external relations ‘Quaker’ represents a meta-identity that is counter-cultural in its non-sectarianism, although this is more problematic within the organisation of Friends. Furthermore, by modelling an alternative, non-sectarian identity, Friends are building capacity for transformation from oppositional to more fluid and inclusive identities in Ireland.

This thesis examines the ways in which a deeply entrenched nursing hierarchy is being reconfigured and challenged, and the status of nurses reshaped, in relation to wider political and social processes in the post-apartheid context. Specifically, it offers an ethnographic analysis of nurses working at Bethesda Hospital, a rural government hospital in northern KwaZulu-Natal. It argues that at this moment of liminal uncertainty characterising the current political and social transformation, nurses’ experiences are made meaningful both through a nostalgic reconstruction of the hospital’s missionary past, as well as through idioms that generate opportunities for – and a sense of control over – the future. These are all manifestations of a contemporary post-apartheid moment, yet they are also extensions of longer historical processes. This thesis, therefore, poses important questions about the nature of ‘transition’ in South Africa, and to what extent this has been marked both by rupture and continuity, in the localised context of a rural government hospital and its surrounding area. The thesis begins with an historical account of Bethesda hospital from its inception in 1937 as a Methodist mission hospital, and its eventual transfer to state control, describing a complex and changing micro-struggle for power in the context of a wider political economy of health care. It goes on to consider the influence of the hospital’s mission past on current practices, exploring the ways in which nostalgic memories feed into contemporary workplace debate. Such debate is framed by a context of severe and widespread ill-health exacerbated by the HIV/Aids epidemic, and the problems of staff shortage, fragmentation and poor pay and working conditions that provide ongoing and critical challenges to the institution and its employees. It considers how the moral concern provoked by this perceived crisis, and the preoccupation with hierarchy that has long been a feature of the South African nursing profession, are played out in relation to the emerging post-apartheid ideologies of ‘accountability’ and ‘rights’. Finally, it explores the ways in which nurses generate a mutual sense of purpose and control, while at the same time engaging in embattled struggles for status and self-recognition, through the practices of Born-again Christianity and international migration, showing how these offer new and powerful forms of status acquisition in the post-apartheid context. Based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Bethesda hospital between December 2006 and October 2007, this thesis engages with theoretical discussions about social change and relationships of hierarchy within – and beyond – the workplace. Finally, it contributes to debates about the shifting fields of nursing and health care delivery in the wider South African context of immense political and social transformation.

This thesis examines and exposes the work of one of the most enigmatic of capitalist institutions – the management consultancy – as that of financialisation. In recent decades financial markets have played an increasingly important role in the operations of the global economy, which has led to fundamental changes to managerial practices of the modern corporation. In particular, many authors, from a variety of disciplines within social sciences, have discussed the ascendancy of shareholder value as the ideology of corporate governance. But what is rarely examined is how shareholder value has been disseminated and installed as a corporate good. At the same time, there continues to be widespread ignorance about one of the major proponents of shareholder value – management consultancies. In short, we still do not know what consultancies do. I attempt to address this lacuna by examining how management is practised within management consultancy. Through an ethnography based on 16 months of fieldwork inside one of the world’s largest management consultancies, I show that shareholder value is an ethic of production which has to be made through a set of sociotechnical practices which are deployed in the pursuit of an ontological transformation – the enactment of the corporation as a financial asset. I highlight the importance of information technology (IT) in this endeavour, specifically, how it is incorporated in managerial techniques of “corporate culture”, which attempt to not only orientate employees towards the “needs” of financial markets, but also constructs them as financial objects. The work of consultancies is to establish the practice of managing labour as financial capital. This thesis draws on analytical approaches from science and technology studies to examine complex managerial systems and how they operate to produce an ethics of capitalism; it contributes to existing anthropological scholarship on the “new economy”, financial markets, corporate subjectivities and theories of value, and provides a novel example of how “fast capitalism” can be captured, ethnographically, through a methodology of collaboration.

This thesis is a study in economic anthropology. Opening with a critical estimate of the work previously done in the subject, it proceeds to an analysis of the economic life of the Maori, the method of functional observation and the correlation being followed. An account is first given of the environmental conditions of the native and the natural resources at his command. The social structure of the Maori community is then analysed and its relation to the economic organisation shown, special consideration being given to the problem of the position of the family in native life. By following the sequence of operation in a typical industry - bird snaring - it is shown how complex is the psychology of the Maori in his work, how motives of pleasure, pride, vanity and ambition round off the more purely utilitarian interests. Reference to other activities again proves that the native is capable of steady and industrious labour, when the proper stimuli are provided. The different forms of organisation in production are next described, with attention to the nature of leadership. The place of magic in economic life is reviewed at length, owing to its vital importance in assisting the stability and organisation of the work. A further set of problems is opened by consideration of the methods and principles of sharing out the product of labour as well as those of the ownership of the property, and the tenure of land. The nature of primitive economic values and of the system of exchange examined, while with the aid of maps the extensive nature of communication in oldern times is revealed. The radical alteration in the Maori economic structure consequent upon the coming of the European is analysed with its phases of initial impact, enthusiastic adoption of new culture forms, reaction, and renewed acceptance of the ways of white man. Finally it is emphasised how economic activity enlists forces of other social types to promote its own efficiency.