Thèse Sc. Genève.

Zugl.: Oldenburg, Univ., Diplomarbeit, 2005

This thesis explores the period of prominence experienced by wigs and wig wearing in England from the late seventeenth to the latter decades of the eighteenth century. Its primary focus is the ‘raw material’ from which wigs were made: human hair. Being produced from a part of the body placed wigs in a unique position as fashionable items. The act of ‘making’ a wig entailed taking a natural entity growing on the head, and turning it into an intrinsically unnatural artefact. ‘Wearing’ a wig meant for the wearer to invest time in shaving or cutting his own hair. Questions about why this became such an important and fashionable practice are explored here by starting with the hair itself, a topic not generally considered by the extensive literature on eighteenth-century wigs and wig-wearing. My thesis highlights the diverse functions a wig could fulfil, by presenting hair in the context of eighteenth-century understanding of medicine and the body. These functions included protecting the wearer from the elements and potential contagion, projecting a more healthy or youthful appearance, and marking status or profession. This thesis considers how hair - as part of the body - became a highly desirable commodity, and the moral and physical implications this entailed. The physicality of the raw material affected those who traded in human hair and made a living out of producing wigs, as well as those who wore wigs that defined their public image. This thesis challenges existing work, which has tended to focus on gender and dress, by emphasising the connection of hair to the body and how this was translated into the conspicuous fashion for wigs.

In recent decades, many Chinese have experienced changes in their eating as a result of a shift from food shortages to an expansion of food markets. Many urban Chinese make choices from a variety of food, and food safety incidents frequently reported in the media have raised consumer concerns with food quality and the potential effects of foods on human health. Meanwhile, some urban dwellers worry about overweight, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, and other health threats as a result of, for example, diets that are high in fats and sugar. Some studies have examined how consumers respond to food-related anxieties in China. These studies have suggested that they may change their eating or shopping patterns and rely on external indicators such as, brands and vendor types. A number of these studies are based on quantitative calculations of patterns of participants’ behaviours or perceptions. However, they pay little attention to how ordinary people experience and deal with food-related anxieties. Moreover, individuals seem to be passive and dependent on institutional efforts to control food-related anxieties. With the use of interview and participant observation data, this research analyses how participants deal with the food-related anxieties they experience in everyday life through their daily food and eating practices. The research demonstrates participants’ activity to deal with their food safety and health concerns in light of Mauss’s (1973) concept of ‘body techniques’, and de Certeau’s (1984) discussion of ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’. By drawing on Mauss’s (1973) concept, the study offers an understanding of food-related anxieties and the practice of home cooking to deal with those anxieties through the perspective of embodiment. My research also challenges the existing literature which suggests ordinary people are passive and subject to institutional strategies to deal with food-related anxieties. With reference to Mauss (1973) and de Certeau (1984), participants have agency to respond to food safety and health concerns according to their acquired eating habits and the social circumstances to which they belong. The findings suggest that participants tactically use embodied knowledge and techniques of home cooking transmitted across generations to deal with food safety and health concerns in contemporary China.

The research at hand investigates how home is performed through foodscapes by focusing on the Turkish speaking communities in London. It is based on the premises that food has a strong connection to not just where home is, but how it manifests itself at different scales and registers of food activities in the ‘here and now’ of so-called migrant communities. Home is therefore taken as an act of dwelling that is both constitutive of and constituted by the specificities of the site of habitation. Based on Ingold’s conceptualisation of dwelling perspective, the research argues that the migrant skills deployed around food are trained and practiced in response to the environment of habitation (1993, 2000) as opposed to being imported as innate skills from the country of origin. Explored through the acts of eating, cooking, serving, sharing, celebrating and talking about food puissantly problematises the frameworks of host & guest migrants and home & host nations. Reflecting upon the constitution of home through food therefore has a double function: it liberates migrant homes from the geographical dominance of a past country where they are from and at the same time recognises the site-specific manifestations of their skills “within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings” (Ingold 2000, p. 186). The economic, social, cultural and affective mobilisations of the members of Turkish Speaking Community in London display the dynamism and heterogeneity that is inherent to both food and home. The variety of the ways in which the ethnically and linguistically diverse members of this vaguely framed group relate to themselves, to each other, to the city and to the larger discourses of community and nation are explored in this research through performative and multi-sited ethnographic tools. From shopping together with the participants for the dinner ingredients to formal interview settings, from cooking along to temporarily managing an eating out establishment, practicing with and within the contexts of the participants contributed to the knowledge formation for this research. Three interrelated yet distinct foodscape clusters emerged out of this research: Restaurants, British Kebab Awards and the households. The term foodscape here aims at encapsulating the multiscalar, interconnected, always in-the-making and at times inconsistent practices and discourses that emerge in each of these sites. Even though all ethnographic encounters took place in London, in a seemingly singular site, the research gained a multi-sited character due to the different power dynamics, ethnographic requirements, and different imaginaries offered by each of these clusters. These three registers, in their heterogeneity, show that home, looked especially through the lens of food, appears to be re-creative, generative, tactical, site-specific, and multifold series of dwelling acts, rather than being the geographical elsewhere of a migrant. By means of food, the migrant becomes the skillful dweller, and London becomes home.

Zugl.: Salzburg, Univ., Diplomarbeit, 2004 u.d.T.: Ortner, Christina: Das Thema Migration in der Krimireihe Tatort

Univ., Diss.--Halle, 2004.

Univ., Diss.--Bielefeld, 2006.

Univ., Diss--Göttingen, 2007.

Fachhochsch. für Soziale Arbeit, Diplomarbeit, /2007--Zugl.: Bern, 2006.