Taxidermy specimens and displays have become increasingly liminal features in contemporary society. Viewed variously as historical curios, obsolete relics or more malignantly as ‘monstrosities’, they can be a source of discomfort for many. Taxidermy objects have become uncomfortable reminders of past scientific and colonial practices which have sought to capture, order and control animated life and as such have become increasingly problematic items for their owners. As a result many taxidermy displays have been dismantled and mounts relegated to ‘backstores’ to gather dust. The paradox is that taxidermy as a practice is a quest for ‘liveness’, to impute life back into the dead. Much like the taxidermist, my goal in this thesis is to revive and restore: to renew interest in and reassert the value of taxidermy collections by recovering what I shall term as the ‘biogeographies’ of their making and continued maintenance. Considerable academic attention has been paid to the ‘finished’ form and display of taxidermy specimens inside cabinets, behind glass – in other words, to their representation. By way of contrast, this thesis recovers the relationships, practices and geographies that brought specimens to their state of enclosure, inertness and seeming fixity. These efforts are aligned with work in cultural geography seeking to counteract ‘deadening effects’ in an active world through a prioritisation of practice (Dewsbury and Thrift 2000), and elsewhere draw on research arguments and approaches originating in historical geography, and the history of science. The thesis firstly investigates historical developments in the scientific and craft practice of taxidermy through the close study of period manuals, combined with ethnographic observations of a practicing taxidermist. Critical attention to practice then facilitates the recovery of the lifeworlds of past taxidermy workshops and the globally sited biogeographies behind the making of individual specimens and collections. The thesis required the purposeful assemblage and rehabilitation of diffuse zoological and historical remains to form unconventional archives, enabling a series of critical reflections on the scientific, creative and political potentials of taxidermy.

The transformation of traditional gender ideology has been actively promoted in Mexican society over recent decades. While adults’ renegotiations of traditional ideals and their efforts to forge modern relations have received significant ethnographic attention, little is known about how children in Mexico engage with the contradictions inherent in the coexistence of old and new expectations. This thesis, based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, explores children’s readiness to resist gender divisions and embrace gender equality in the Mexican village of Metztitlán in the state of Hidalgo. The research focused on the, often contradictory, information that was made available to children at home, in the neighbourhood and in the school setting and on how children, aged between six and eleven, negotiated expectations that concerned aggressive behaviour, toy use and the division of labour. The thesis asks whether children regarded gender divisions as problematic and, if they did, whether this translated into readiness to resist traditional expectations through everyday interactions. It pays particular attention to how different kinds of audiences both influenced and were influenced by children’s resistance to gender divisions. The finding is that in domains, such as toy use or the division of labour, in which egalitarian alternatives to traditional expectations were available (e.g. through schooling), most girls and boys, in conversations with the anthropologist, expressed their allegiance to gender equality. However, children did not put these attitudes to work through interactions with peers and adults unless they found personally meaningful advantages in egalitarian arrangements. When they recognised tangible benefits of equality, they not only showed readiness to resist traditional divisions themselves but also to encourage adults to do the same.

This thesis will explore the agentive roles of material culture in ancient colonial encounters. It takes as a case study the Roman colonization of southern Britain, from the first century BC onwards. Using ethnographic and theoretical perspectives largely drawn from social anthropology, it seeks to demonstrate that the consumption of certain types of continental material culture by some members of communities in southern Britain, pre-disposed the local population to Roman political annexation in the later part of the first century AD. Once the Roman colonial project proper commenced, different material cultures were introduced by colonial agents to maintain domination over a subaltern population. Throughout, the entanglement of people and things represented a reciprocal continuum, in which things moved people's minds, as much as people got to grips with particular things. In addition it will be suggested that the confrontations of material culture brought about by the colonial encounters affected the colonizer as much as the colonized. The thesis will demonstrate the impact of a variety of novel material cultures by focusing in detail on a key area of southern Britain – Chichester and its immediate environs. Material culture will be examined in four major categories: Landscapes and Buildings; Exchange, Food and Drink; Coinages; Death and Burial. Chapters dealing with these categories will be preceded by an opening chapter on the nature of Roman colonialism, followed by an introductory one on the history and archaeology of southern Britain and the study area. The Conclusion will include some thoughts on the integration of anthropological approaches to archaeological interpretation. I intend that the thesis provides a contribution to the wider debate on the role of material culture in ancient colonial projects, and an example of the increasingly productive bidirectional entanglement of archaeology and anthropology.

This thesis represents the most detailed investigation into English royal funeral ceremonies 1570-1625 yet undertaken. It builds on earlier scholarship dealing with the French royal funeral and with the social history of death and burial in early modern England. When gathering my source material I consulted manuscript and early printed material at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Westminster Abbey, the College of Arms and the Bibliothèque Nationale. My approach is to consider royal funeral rituals in terms of performance. I endeavour to place each of the royal funerals in its immediate performance and broader cultural context. The evidence is analysed using an approach which seeks to take account of both the political and affective implications of ritual. Preliminary chapters establish the form of the English heraldic funeral and the French royal funeral, and assess the impact of the English Reformation on funeral ritual. I go on to discuss the funerals of Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, Prince Henry Stuart, Anne of Denmark and James I respectively. Included is a bridging chapter which briefly summarises the religious and cultural changes which took place under James I and their impact on funeral ritual. Royal funerals are seen as flexible rather than fixed. They were modified to meet changing political needs but such modifications were always in accord with broader cultural trends. My thesis demonstrates that royal funeral rituals were highly dependent on their performance and cultural contexts. The Epilogue looks at the implications my research has for readings of stage representations of funeral ritual and funeral symbolism in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. I show that royal funerals formed an important aspect of playhouse audience experience. Dramatists exploited that experience to show the operative nature of funeral ritual performance and the potency of its symbols for political propaganda.

Native American women played a key role in negotiating relations between settler and Native society, especially through their relationships with white men. Yet they have traditionally languished on the sidelines of Native American and colonial American history, often viewed as subordinate and thus tangential to the key themes of these histories. This dissertation redresses the imbalance by locating women at the centre of a narrative that has been dominated by discourses in masculine aspirations. It explores the variety of relations that developed between men and women of two frontier societies in eighteenth century North America: the Creeks of the Southeast, and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia. This dissertation complicates existing histories of Native and colonial America by providing a study of Indian culture that, in a reversal of traditional inquiry, asks how Native women categorised and incorporated white people into their physical and spiritual worlds. One method was through ritualised violence and torture of captives. As primary agents of this process women often selected, rejected or adopted men into the tribes, depending on factors that ranged from nationality to religion. Such acts challenged contemporary Euro-American wisdom that ordained a nurturing, auxiliary role for women. However, this thesis shows that ‘anomalous’ violent behaviours of Indian women were rooted in a femininity inculcated from an early age. In this volatile world, women were not shielded from the horrors of war. Instead, they became one of those horrors. Therefore, viewing anomalous actions as central to the analysis provides an understanding of female identities outwith the straitjacket of the Euro-American gender binary. With violence as a legitimate and natural expression of feminine power, the Indian woman’s character was far removed from depictions of the sexualised exotic, self-sacrificing Pocahontas or stoic Sacagawea. The focus on women’s violent customs, which embodied several important and unusual manifestations of Native American femininity, reveals a number of jarring behaviours that have found no home within colonial literatures. These behaviours included sanctioned infanticide and abortions, brutal tests for adolescents, scalp dancing and death rites, cannibalism, mercenary wives and sadistic grandmothers. With limited means of incorporating such female characteristics into pre-existing gender categories, the women’s acts were historically treated as non-representative of regular Indian lifeways and thus dismissed. Colonial relations are therefore analysed through an alternative lens to accommodate these acts. This allows women to construct their own narrative in a volatile landscape that largely sought to exclude those voices, voices that challenged dominant ideologies on appropriate male-female relations. By constructing a new gender framework I show that violence was a vehicle by which women realised, promoted and reinforced their tribal standing.

The object of this thesis is to explore the representation of ‘ Thainess ’ in Thai wedding magazines. The thesis adopts semiotic and multimodal analysis as methods to examine how cover pages, photographs, editorial contents and advertisement s in the magazines communicate their denotative and connotative meanings through primary markers and modality markers such as pose, objects, setting, framing, lights, shadow and colour tone. Subsequently , each image is examined through its depiction of people in the image to determine any st ereotypical cultural attributes that highlight a distinction between the traditionalised Thai and modernised Thai bride. This thesis argues that the legacy of Thailand ’ s semi colonial history constructs an ambivalent relationship with the West and Thailand ’ s self - orientalising tendency, as well as the diffusion of hybrid cultures and modern Thai beauty ideals. Self - orientalising tendencies and the desire to encapsulate ‘ Thainess ’ are thusly observed in the magazines ’ representation of traditional ‘ Thainess ’ with a nostalgic overtone, by linking the ideals of traditional beauty to the imagined qualities of heroines in Thai classic literature and aristocratic ladies from pre-modern Siam through fashion and traditional beautifying remedies.

A novel trajectory and attitude control and navigation analysis tool for powered ascent is developed. The tool is capable of rapid trade-space analysis and is designed to ultimately reduce turnaround time for launch vehicle design, mission planning, and redesign work. It is streamlined to quickly determine trajectory and attitude control dispersions, propellant dispersions, orbit insertion dispersions, and navigation errors and their sensitivities to sensor errors, actuator execution uncertainties, and random disturbances. The tool is developed by applying both Monte Carlo and linear covariance analysis techniques to a closed-loop, launch vehicle guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) system. The nonlinear dynamics and flight GN&C software models of a closed-loop, six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF), Monte Carlo simulation are formulated and developed. The nominal reference trajectory (NRT) for the proposed lunar ascent trajectory is defined and generated. The Monte Carlo truth models and GN&C algorithms are linearized about the NRT, the linear covariance equations are formulated, and the linear covariance simulation is developed. The performance of the launch vehicle GN&C system is evaluated using both Monte Carlo and linear covariance techniques and their trajectory and attitude control dispersion, propellant dispersion, orbit insertion dispersion, and navigation error results are validated and compared. Statistical results from linear covariance analysis are generally within 10% of Monte Carlo results, and in most cases the differences are less than 5%. This is an excellent result given the many complex nonlinearities that are embedded in the ascent GN&C problem. Moreover, the real value of this tool lies in its speed, where the linear covariance simulation is 1036.62 times faster than the Monte Carlo simulation. Although the application and results presented are for a lunar, single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO), ascent vehicle, the tools, techniques, and mathematical formulations that are discussed are applicable to ascent on Earth or other planets as well as other rocket-powered systems such as sounding rockets and ballistic missiles.

À partir de l'année 2000, au Chili, commence un phénomène de revendication identitaire d'un groupe d'autochtones, les Diaguita. Jusque là, les chercheurs affirmaient que les Diaguita avaient disparu pendant la Conquête espagnole et que leur culture était digne d'entrer dans les musées. Cependant, après un long processus de revendication et de nombreuses demandes à l'État, les Diaguita ont obtenu leur reconnaissance comme ethnie officielle en 2006. Au Chili, ils sont ainsi le dernier peuple autochtone qui a obtenu gain de cause. Ce processus a surgi d'une manière parallèle dans les vallées de l'Huasco et celle d'Elqui avec quelques particularismes. Ainsi, à la différence de ce qui est arrivé dans la Vallée de l'Huasco, dans la Vallée de l'Elqui un groupe de personnes, de manière individuelle et sans se connaître, a demandé à l'État qu'il reconnaisse leur identité diaguita. Ce mémoire se propose d'expliquer ces différents processus. Il éclaire ainsi comment un groupe de personnes qui n'ont pas de liens de parenté entre elles et ne vivent pas dans la même communauté ou le même quartier, qui ne maintiennent pas non plus des contacts quotidiens entre elles, ont pu au même moment se sentir membres d'un même groupe, partager la même identité.

Ce mémoire présente les résultats d'une enquête ethnographique réalisée à la Martinique à l'été 2006. L'intérêt de cette recherche repose sur une analyse des discours locaux portant sur le rapport à la responsabilité en contexte postcolonial antillais. La démarche ainsi entreprise procède d'une ethnoéthique, soit la mise à jour des repères moraux sous-jacents aux discours populaires portant sur les représentations de la responsabilité. Ainsi, cette étude démontre qu'il existe à la Martinique un rapport difficile à la responsabilité, influencé par des facteurs sociopolitiques historiques et contemporains. Les discours des acteurs locaux portant, entre autres, sur les responsabilités parentales, familiales et professionnelles, de même que les principaux modèles explicatifs de la maladie et des infortunes sont utilisés par certains Martiniquais en tant qu'outils permettant de légitimer et de donner un sens à la déresponsabilisation personnelle. Ces divers lieux d'expression alimentent ainsi tout autant ces difficiles rapports à la responsabilité. Cette recherche met également en lumière que la construction socioculturelle du rapport à la responsabilité en contexte postcolonial antillais est en pleine mouvance, ce qui reflète les processus de créolisation tout aussi dynamiques des sociétés caribéennes contemporaines.

Puvirniturmiut, les Inuit de Puvirnituq, comme les autres Inuit du nord du Québec (Nunavik) en général, ont vécu plusieurs décennies de changements culturels et leur conversion au christianisme en est un exemple. Au Nunavik cette conversion s'est opérée à la fin du 19e siècle alors que les Inuit vivaient encore en camps familiaux répartis le long de la côte. C'est au 20e siècle que la sédentarisation s'effectua. La transition au christianisme et la sédentarisation qui a suivi ont occasionné une nouvelle dynamique sociale alors que les institutions religieuses et politiques prenaient place. Cette étude explore la manière dont les Inuit ont accepté le christianisme qui exigeait l'aliénation de leur propre cosmologie, reflet de leur identité. Afin de comprendre comment ces changements se sont produits, des représentants d'institutions religieuses et politiques de la communauté de Puvirnituq ont été recontrés et des documents d'archives ont été consultés. L'approche retenue fut d'étudier comment les Puvirniturmiut de nos jours s'identifient eux-mêmes comme Inuit et comment ils dirigent leurs institutions locales. Est-ce que le christianisme a changé la culture Inuit et la façon dont les Inuit s'identifient? Les résultats tendent à montrer que les valeurs à la base de la culture Inuit n'ont pas changé substantiellement au cours de ces changements. Par exemples, la vie quotidienne des Inuit était gouvernée par des règles de conduite qui les guidaient, appelées allirusiit. Ces dernières n'existent plus sous leurs formes originales mais les Inuit continuent d'être guidés par des règles de conduite, comme par exemple celles du partage et de la prière. En quelque sorte, les changements vécus au cours des dernières décennies et même au cours des derniers siècles auraient façonné un style de vie permettant de s'adapter aux nouvelles idées tout en restant singulièrement Inuit.