During the Cold War era, the island of Jinmen was the frontline of the Republic of China in its military standoff with the People’s Republic of China. From 1949 to 1992, the life of the islanders was profoundly disturbed and altered by wars and militarization generated by the bipolar politics. Despite this, the localized patrilineages dating from imperial times remain central to the organization of local social life. Grounded on fifteen months of fieldwork in a patrilineal community, this dissertation demonstrates the significant roles of kinship and kinship-related rituals in sustaining the local social fabric through turmoil and uncertainty during and after the Cold War. The first part of this thesis focuses on lineage ancestral sacrifices, domestic worship, and funerals. The continuation of rituals that sustain patterns of interpersonal relationships is argued to constitute a means of negating the destruction of social order experienced in the period of military control and conflict. Yet, against the background of these ritual continuities, the thesis also examines how they have been adapted to shifting circumstances, such as the involvement of military and political authorities in folk ritual practices as a means for securing their legitimacy, and the material changes in rituals that have accompanied rapid commercialization from the 1990s. The second part focuses on the impact of the Cold War on local political and economic life and state-society relations. Despite some salient changes, the ways that people define their social roles and relate to one another are shown to have remained largely framed by values and morals from the sphere of kinship. Kinship therefore actually continues to constitute a distinctive feature of the local political-economic structure, countering an often-seen formula assuming causal relations between the dramatic political-economic changes and the declining role of kinship or “traditional” values in orienting people’s life and action.

Young women walk the forefront of transformation as Bangladesh liberalizes its economy, decentralizes its state functions, and submits its poverty-alleviation plans to markets. Targeted by “financial-inclusion” and entrepreneurship-training programs as both the objects and instruments of economic growth, women such as Bangladesh’s iconic “iAgents” navigate the shift from kinship and patronage-based moral economies of development to a detached marketbased one. Cycling through impoverished villages to provide information services via Internetenabled laptop computers and digital medical equipment, iAgents attempt to generate an income sufficient to support their families. This thesis explores the socio-structural features and relational effects of market-driven approaches to poverty alleviation. Situating social enterprise within Bangladesh’s history of development models, it begins with the role of development resources in constituting the country’s new middle classes and patron-client relations. For clients, embarking on ventures such as iAgent represents personal, kinship, and ethical projects of improvement, despite social stigma for engaging in undignified work. As they undergo entrepreneurial training, young women encounter disciplinary devices not as bureaucratic and rationalizing measures but as extensions of the class, gender, and ideological projects of their middle-class social-enterprise superiors. iAgents occupy an ambiguous position between competing community and enterprise models of expectation. These new economic arrangements assert unsteady social positions, relationships, and agentive potential for people in rural Bangladesh. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (April 2013-July 2014), this thesis contributes to the anthropology of economic action. It argues that, contrary to the linear and communicative models of economic activity employed in development projects and academic theories about market devices, structural and relational ambiguity is a primary product of social entrepreneurship and is also necessary for such enterprises to function. Ambiguity serves as a resource used by project actors, in unequal ways, in the relational work of negotiating recognition and authority in precarious circumstances.

This thesis is about the emergence, materializations, and transformations of revolutionary subjectivity amongst male Syrian migrant workers in Beirut. It documents how these processes surfaced within, and impacted on, their daily life. On the basis of over twenty-four months of participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and oral history collection, it identifies some of the key mechanisms through which the uprising was experienced and lived out at a distance. For an extended period, Lebanon has maintained a significant population of Syrian migrant workers. Many arrived in Beirut before the first rumblings of the uprising, but when it broke, some temporarily returned to Syria hoping to participate via peaceful protest or, later, armed resistance. Yet many also found space in Beirut, through new communication technology and face-to-face interaction, to take part in the uprising. The often neglected perspective of Syria’s labouring diaspora is critical because, for these ‘rebel-workers,’ the same socio-economic pressures that structured their initial decisions to migrate from the countryside to sell labour power in the city resembles what many have identified as the material foundations for the uprising itself. The study begins with an outline of Syria’s history and its political economy to reveal how the Ba’athist state once achieved a degree of legitimacy amongst impoverished and rural workers. Legitimacy was won with thanks to a system that prevented absolute poverty and rising inequality. When this system collapsed, a major support base for the state fell away. From this foundation, the remaining chapters describe how the journey to ‘rebel’ became variously represented, reinforced and re-made. To reveal how uprisings are experienced at a distance, and how rebel identities form in conditions of displacement, these subjective processes are described in chapters that evaluate, in turn, the nature of populist political language; the role of electronically circulated art objects; the emergence of martyrdom commemoration practices across new media networks; the challenges to maintaining patriarchal gender identity in exile and finally the proliferation of conspiratorial discourse. I conclude that the Syrian uprising was fundamentally populist in nature and thus powerfully explosive, but external structures ultimately determined its transformation into a simultaneously civil and proxy war. While this transformation was at first ‘resisted,’ these revolutionary subjectivities ultimately appeared as if they were beginning to fold into, and reflect, the degradation of the uprising itself.

In this thesis I explore the knowledge practices of the Pastaza Runa, an indigenous group of the Ecuadorian Amazon. A central claim in my work is that processes of knowledge acquisition among the Runa involve an acknowledgement that human bodies, as well as non-human ones, share a network of ‘likeness’. This is not to be located specifically in the possession of a soul nor in the ‘shared’ substance of the body. For the Runa, humans share with non-humans specific ‘patterns’ of action, which I call ‘forms’. Things can affect humans (and vice versa) because they share a certain formal resemblance. Such resemblance is not found in discrete entities, but rather in the movements between entities. As such, forms cannot be reduced to the physicality of a singular body: they are subject-less and inherently dynamic. The concept of forms developed in this thesis seeks to think about the relationship between human and objects in ways which go beyond ideas of ensoulment or subjectification. Such focus is central to my analysis of the relationship between humans and objects, and, in particular, between women and their ceramic pots. I explore the connection between women and pots by following closely the sequences of elaboration of ceramic vessels. Pottery making is intimately linked to women’s capacity for engendering novelty. I suggest that, for the Runa, the differentiation between women and men is not ‘made’ but rather given a priori. The ‘givenness’ of this difference has major implications for what one - as a Runa woman or man - can know or do. Thus, I explore how women, by virtue of their capacity for giving birth, are thought to be ‘inherently’ inclined towards ‘exteriority’. By virtue of such ‘outward’ propensity, women need to engage in processes of making knowledge visible to the eyes of others. This ‘exteriorizing’ process has important consequences for the ways men and women are respectively thought to become ‘acculturated’. Ultimately this work also aims to examine how processes of ‘change’ - a key concept in Amazonian cosmologies - are inevitably gender inflected.

This thesis offers an ethnographic analysis of everyday life in a post-catastrophe landscape shaped by two major disaster-processes – Hurricane Katrina (in 2005) and the BP oil spill (in 2010). By exploring local cultural ‘becoming’, it argues that the impact of these disaster-processes should not be conceptualised within a bounded period of ‘recovery’, but should be understood as forming part of the on-going construction of local landscape and everyday lived experience. The community of southern Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, where this study was based, has an on-going relationship with hurricanes and oil spills, which occur (or threaten to occur) with such frequency as to normalise the experience of disaster in local social life. Katrina and the BP oil spill were outliers of experience due to their vast scale and relative impact, but they were experienced by a community where local narratives of past catastrophes (such as the major hurricanes of the 1960s), and the direct experience of multiple smaller disaster-processes were deeply woven into local culture. Furthermore, beyond the impact of these catastrophes this community was already experiencing widespread cultural and economic precariousness. Firstly, where local hierarchies of power (largely centred around White men) had become increasingly threatened in the latter part of the 20th century, and secondly, where local economic activity was characterised by high levels of instability and irregular employment. These catastrophes were therefore experienced in a context of already on-going structural precariousness, which in turn was impacted by the on-going ‘recovery’ from these large disaster-processes. It argues that while material or institutional reconstruction may be successfully measured in terms of recovery goals or milestones, the cultural impact and ‘recovery’ from these catastrophes should be conceptualised as forming part of the never-ending process of ‘becoming’, ultimately woven into the on-going experience of mundane everyday life.

This thesis explores the complexities and processes involved in minority groups' negotiations with the state over the terms of their belonging in the national polity. It is based on fieldwork among the Banwaon, a non-Muslim minority group in the southern Philippines, not previously described in the literature. In the context of on-going insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, the Banwaon are divided: One leader called the katangkawan has become a paramilitary organiser supporting the state‘s counter-insurgency program. Other Banwaon leaders of the Tagdumahan association assert political autonomy from the state. The thesis follows the latter, and their responses to the katangkawan. Almost all Banwaon are implicated in illegal logging. Given timber‘s value as a commodity, Banwaon tenure rules have evolved so that landowners also own the timber standing thereon. However, the katangkawan proposed to have the entire Banwaon ancestral territory titled, invoking a state law recognizing ancestral land ownership. The Tagdumahan responded adversely to this project, because of its implication in counter-insurgency and the katangkawan‟s role in it. The impact of counter-insurgency on the Banwaon is explored. The response of a Banwaon community occupied by the military suggests a pattern of sedentarisation in response to the state‘s growing control of the surrounding forests. A second community suffered from threats from a death-squad allegedly controlled by the katangkawan. Village leaders had difficulty addressing this problem because of the way the katangkawan blurs the line between state and Banwaon society. Electoral politics as a response to threats is also examined. The thesis uses Rosaldo‘s notion of ‗cultural citizenship‘ (2003) in its analysis, to provide a platform for dialogue with Scott‘s characterisation of state-minority relations (2009). Finally, two particular factors are explored: The complexity of the dynamics governing the Tagdumahan‘s attempt to maintain autonomy, and state laws on ancestral land titling.

This thesis is about migrants’ everyday encounters with Italian immigration law and its bureaucracy. Centred on research conducted in an advice centre for migrants, I explore the ways in which various actors within the immigration nexus (migrants, brokers, advisers and officials) interacted with what I call the documentation regime. The documentation regime was characterised by pervasive uncertainty. Everyday encounters with it created frustration and anxiety for migrants and those who worked on their behalf. The bureaucracy’s arbitrary nature, however, also allowed for its manipulation. Rule bending and loop-hole finding characterised the strategies which migrants developed in order to successfully navigate the regime: strategies which were referred to as “Italian-like”. Immigration law, therefore, simultaneously produced migrants as both structurally marginalised and as resourceful and tactically astute agents, embedded within a particular social context. While focusing on migrants’ active navigation of the regime highlights their agency and resourcefulness, I do not suggest that these were acts of resistance. Rather, I wish to situate their practices within the wider socio-economic setting in which they took place. Although in some ways migrants became insiders through their bureaucratic encounters, they did not escape the racialised category of low-level worker. The requirement of a work contract for legal status, and the kinds of work available to migrants, continually reproduced their marginalisation in Italian society, even among the most integrated. By exploring the situation of the second generation, who were socially Italian yet subject to the same immigration laws as their parents, I highlight the racialised discrimination which migrants experienced. It is this situation which motivated migrants’ desire to move on from Italy, which was considered as only a stepping-stone country: an entry into the rest of Europe and beyond.

This doctoral research explores the complexity of ethical life of the marginalized Muslim minority in the Indian secular state, drawing on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a village in West Bengal. The thesis revolves around the observation that West Bengali Muslims demonstrate and emphatic concern with dharma (ethics of justice and order),which is foremost reflected in the increasing presence of Islamic reformism. On the basis of a comprehensive exploration of the vernacular categories, ethics and practices of West Bengali Muslims, from personhood and sociality, to politics and plurality, the thesis demonstrates that Islamic reformism is a particular expression of a desire for holistic ethical renewal. This takes places in the context of pervasive corruption and political violence; a history of ambiguous communal politics; structural inequality; and the sense of ethical failure incited by suspicion and discrimination of Muslims. For Muslim West Bengalis, the crisis of Indian secularism is at once in the denial of substantive citizenship, and in the impossibility of a holistic regeneration of dharma. The thesis demonstrates that while these two desires are not inherently contradictory, but embedded in the ‘transcendental social’ of West Bengali Muslims, they are circumstantially contradictory given the secular epistemology of the modern state. Therefore, West Bengali Muslims continue to be denied not only substantive citizenship, but also human dignity. The thesis presents an analytical approach and theoretical framework that go beyond the categories ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ to bring to the forefront people’s ethical dispositions and practices, and the vernacular engagements with modernity through locally meaningful categories. Taking seriously the conceptualisation and practice of ethical life outside the secular West requires a critique of a secular conception of ethics. Drawing on Maurice Bloch’s model of the ‘transcendental social’, in conjunction with an analysis of virtue ethics and original ethnography, this thesis offers and innovative model of ethical reality that suggests that social imagination is the source of ethics.

This thesis is based upon ethnographic field research conducted in and around the predominantly Māori-populated town of Ruatoria; a small rural settlement situated in the sparsely inhabited heartland of the iwi (tribe), Ngāti Porou, on the east coast of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s North Island. The thesis investigates the apparent paradox concerning how and why the Jamaican Rastafari movement appeals to, and has invigorated, rather than obliterated the Māoritanga (Māori culture) of a group of Ngāti Porou who self-identify as ‘The Dread’. Thus far, anthropological analyses of the Rastafari movement have tended to characterise its manifestation as a religion of protest, a religion of resistance or a religion of the post-colonially oppressed. In this thesis I destabilise such interpretations by demonstrating that we can best understand The Dread’s assimilation of Rastafari through their articulation of aspects of Māori cosmology charged with promoting communion with God, gods and ancestors. Theoretically, this thesis combines traditional ethnographic explorations of hierarchy, identity, myth and comparative Rastafari, with more recent approaches to the anthropological study of ontology, cosmology, human-ancestor and human-environment relations. I also consider key methodological implications that attention to the latter analytical approaches ensue. By situating my analysis of The Dread’s articulation of cosmology and mythic narrative at the interface of ontology and agency, I tease out what I term the ‘divergent mono-ontological perspectives’ that emanate from disagreements between the primordial siblings over whether to instigate the creation of the cosmos and individuation through an act of rupture, or to remain united within the original cosmogonic whole. As the first ethnographic study to locate an occurrence of Rastafari discourse within an ontological context, this thesis contributes to the literature on Māori cosmology by elucidating the mediation of tensions between autonomy and unity thatcontinues to inform intra-tribal relational dynamics in the Māori present.

This thesis focuses upon village oracles in Buddhist Ladakh who provide ritual services to clients when they are in trance and possessed by gods. Village oracles are discussed in the context of a customary division made by Ladakhis between the lay and clerical components of their society. They are among the few layy ritual specialists and are consequently accorded less esteem than their monastic counterparts for they are associated with the lower reaches of the pantheon and with inferior ritual techniques. Moreover, Ladakhi village oracles attract suspicion because of the manner in which they are created. They are elected through affliction which is gradually, but only precariously, contained as the spirits responsible are domesticated in their human vessels. The process of initiation is seen in terms of the transformation of a probable demonic affliction into a capricious divine power. This process is analysed further through rituals associated with witchcraft possession and monastery oracles. Village oracles were once overwhelmed by affliction, like witchcraft victims, and it is never clear that these erstwhile patients have become healers, nor that they have turned their demons into gods. Village oracles are also related to practitioners in the monastery. The gods evoked by monastery oracles were converted to Buddhism in "historical" times and, today, they join the side of religion in the continuing conquest of enemies. The gods embodied by village oracles may also be seen as converts but, by comparison, their conversion is a much more uncertain affair. It is argued that village oracles are best understood in terms of their position in-between affliction in the village and a respected ritual power in the monastery. The analysis suggests similarities with spirit mediums elsewhere who are likewise associated with movements away from affliction towards ritual powers.