With forty-nine officially recognized ethnic groups, Kenya has long struggled with ethnic politics and tribalism. Ethnic tensions within the country often erupt and lead to violence during high political seasons, significantly impacting the economy and threatening national stability. In Kenya’s three major cities, where pluralism is more likely than in smaller towns, ethnic tensions exist submarinally as potential harm to social wellbeing and ever-present danger to communal flourishing. This study is a digitally conducted ethnographic study of city-living Kenyans investigating how they navigate citizenship and negotiate belonging and exclusion to make sense of the tribalism challenge in their daily existence. Affirming Kenya as a national combination of indigenous communities, the study acknowledges the moral processes that contribute to public presence and performance between several active centers of belonging and exclusion, namely: indigeneity and cosmopolitanism, ethnicity and nationality, and ultimately, individual and community. Contemplating the impact of living in these liminalities for Kenyan city-dwellers, the study attends to the nature of kin-making and boundary-forming that transcend communal commitments and are navigated on social media and other online platforms. As argued in this research, the digitization of kinship temporarily lifts closed boundaries to allow for moral deliberation and negotiation over social challenges. The study thus affirms that communitarian formations and malfunctions in the public sphere make room for Kenyans to reclaim, rearticulate, and reassign both the ethnic and national aspects of their identity. Identifying social activism as an avenue, which supports the forbearance of kinship ties for social change, the research addresses the digital public sphere’s role in facilitating an arena for moral accountability, subjective morality, and communal reasoning towards moral transformation. / 2026-03-07T00:00:00Z

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-105). Also available on the World Wide Web.

This thesis traces the ways of explaining the generative process by the eastern Peruvian descendants of the Capanahua. These predominately Spanish-speaking people tend to emphasize the discontinuity with their ancestors, a little known Panoan-speaking indigenous population of the Western Amazon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and transcriptions of recorded conversations, this presentation follows and reconstructs a salient frustrative-generative dynamic in a wide range of representations, wherein alterations of self-containment or perceptibility incept the processes of differentiation and discontinuity. These processes guide a local conception of “descent” as infliction. Implications of this dynamic are examined for the formulations of kinship. The familial relations, explicitly based on notions of consanguinity and filiation – are cast in an ambiguous, if not predominately negative light. Procreation is formulated in predatory, parasitic terms, and shares dynamics with pathogenic causality and aetiology. As such, it does not naturally contribute to reproduction and continuity, but rather frustrates it by introducing difference into the vertical axis. Such results also produce horizontal differences and hierarchies, encoded as the person's divergent, hidden “descent” in the always “mixed” social life. This image of the generative process is instrumental to understanding the villagers' explanations of the acculturative processes. Because representations of acculturation focuses on the idiom of procreation and its frustrative results, it appears as the very function of procreative dynamics. This produces a series of associations between the progeny and sociality, focusing on their inherently “third” or external position and perpetual dividuality of belonging/containing. Such ambiguity might be tamed and everted, to produce cleansing or encompassment that counteracts the divisive continuity of time (qua descent, history, or kinship). In a contemporary context, these formulations are seen reflected in the villagers' construal of the Peruvian state as the urban environment that is hierarchically closer to the ideal originality and beautiful imperishability than the smaller, isolated unities of rural ancestors.

My research explores what laws, such as laws surrounding immigration, child custody, and divorce, negatively affect polyamorous individuals in the U.S. and how people's perceptions of barriers differ along lines of gender-sexual-racial-class identities. My applied research is conducted for my client, a CNM-friendly attorney in D.C. I investigate the experience of polyamorous people that use lawyers they perceive as consensually non-monogamous (CNM)-friendly. I probe what it means to be "CNM-friendly," how one promotes oneself as a CNM-friendly lawyer to potential clients and the world at large, and the relationship between being a CNM-friendly lawyer and activism.

Openness about sperm and egg donation and the regulation of donor anonymity or non-anonymity are new phenomena. How do affected families, clinics, and regulators deal with information about gamete donors and the donation itself? And how does this knowledge management contribute to the creation and enactment of kinship? Addressing these questions in Germany and Britain, this ethnography makes a comparative contribution to the empirical and theoretical analysis of kin-formation and social change. Maren Klotz reveals a contemporary renegotiation of the values of privacy, information-sharing, and connectedness as they relate to the social, clinical, and regulatory management of kinship information. Transparency, not genetics, is the moral imperative, and instead of an unambiguously discernible “geneticization,” her findings on donor non-anonymity and parental openness display a pattern of “transparentization.” This pattern represents a shift in authority over kinship away from the sometimes highhanded reproductive medical profession towards concerned groups, parents-by-donation, and policymakers.

This paper explores how Scottish-Americans have contributed to Scottish national dialogues by laying roots for future generations in the form of early ethnic organizations as well as religious and social practices, engaging in discussion about what it means to be both white and ethnic, sustaining forms of traditional culture through Scottish Highland Games, and interpreting their personal experiences with ethnic and national identity as a way of negotiating their relationships with Scottish nationalism. The 2014 referendum on Scottish independence offered historical circumstances that were both relevant and exhilarating to explore these topics under. This exploration incorporates both interview and survey data gathered from Scottish-Americans.

From Ravenstein onwards, historians considering the causes of migration have stressed the importance of economic factors. Whilst work related issues have been shown to prompt the majority of migrations, the role of extended kin deserves further attention. Plakans and Wetherell found that, the ‘placing [of the] domestic group within a larger kin context’, seen as the next logical research step as long ago as the 1970s, was an issue that remained largely unaddressed in 2003. Here the impact of the extended family, on migration decisions and the likelihood of residential persistence, is investigated. Evidence for community cohesion has been sought and kinship links have been investigated; both have been found to influence the residential patterns of individuals. This research has revealed that, whilst economics may provide the impetus for a move, cultural factors and the role of non-resident kin played a far greater part in the decision to migrate, or not, than most previous studies have acknowledged. It has been shown that, although kinship impacted upon both, reasons for emigration were very different from those for migration. The substantial role played by religious belief, not only as a motivation for the emigration of extended family groups, but also as an issue influencing the choice of destination, is a particular feature of the findings of this study. In 1994, Pryce and Drake were ‘making a strong plea for the adoption of rigorous intellectual approaches in migration research’ and the methods used here address this appeal. A technique of total reconstruction and longitudinal tracing has been employed in order to investigate the inhabitants of three small areas of North Devon. A comprehensive range of sources has been used and an in-depth examination of exemplar migrants and the residentially persistent, has allowed possible motivations to be scrutinised. In this way, the details of the structures and processes observed become clearer. In the context of family reconstitution, Barry Reay wrote of ‘a dearth of such studies of nineteenth-century England’ and it is intended that the methods used in this research will facilitate a wider understanding of the factors that motivated migrants in Victorian rural England. Whilst considering the influences of kin and community on migration patterns in the three study areas, the relative roles of other factors have been taken into account. It has been necessary to look at economic patterns and to investigate how, for example, farming and fishing, and any nineteenth century changes therein, affected the lives of the inhabitants. In an area where, and at a time when, non-conformist religion took a particular hold, the effect that the faith of these individuals had on their decisions to move, or stay put, has been assessed. Thus, the issues of faith, fish, farm and family are all borne in mind when studying the motivations for the migration decisions of the inhabitants of the three settlements.

<p>Survival of a Perverse Nation traces the ways in which contemporary Armenian anxieties are congealing into the figure of the “homosexual.” As in other post-Soviet republics, homosexuality has increasingly become defined as the crisis of the times, and is understood by many as a destructive force linked to European encroachment. In Armenia, a growing right-wing nationalist movement since 2012 has been targeting LGBT and feminist activists. I suggest that this movement has arisen out of Armenia’s concerns regarding proper social and biological reproduction in the face of high rates of emigration of especially men in search of work. Many in the country blame this emigration on a post-Soviet oligarchy, with close ties to the government. This oligarchy, having quickly and massively privatized and liquidated industry and land during the war over the region of Nagorno-Karabagh (1990-1994) with Azerbaijan, created widespread un(der)employment. A national narrative attributing the nation’s survival of the 1915 Genocide and dispersion of its populations to strong morality preserved by institutions such as the Church and the family has now, in the post-Soviet era, ruptured into one of moral “perversion.” This dissertation is based on 15 months of ethnographic research, during which I participated in the work of two local non-governmental organizations: Public Information and Need for Knowledge, an LGBT rights organization and Women’s Resource Center, a feminist organization. I also conducted interviews with 150 households across Yerevan, the capital city, and did in-depth interviews with other activists, right-wing nationalists and journalists. Through psychoanalytic frameworks, as well as studies of kinship, I show how sovereignty – the longed for dream for Armenians over the last century – is felt to have failed because of the moral corruption of the illegitimate figures that fill Armenian seats of authority. I, thus, examine the ways in which a missing father of the household is discursively linked to the lack of strong leadership by a corrupt government, producing a prevalent feeling of moral disintegration that nationalists displace onto the “homosexual.”</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation analyses an ethnographic study of how people in a peri-urban, agricultural village in western Kenya have responded to the questions of who will care for children, and how, when those children’s parents, or other primary caregivers, have died. It examines the practical and ideological implications of wide-scale orphaning among a population that has experienced increased numbers and proportions of orphaned children mainly due to HIV/AIDS, as well as the gradual depletion of resources in terms of both the availability of middle-aged adults and the security of economic livelihoods. The research explores how specific caring relationships, as well as general sociality, have been challenged, adapted, and affirmed or rejected normatively and practically in this context. The research revealed a high degree of questioning in people’s efforts to forge responses to children’s orphaned situations. Rarely was there unambiguous consensus in the study context concerning what should be done in response to children’s orphanhood in light of families’ diminished livelihood capacities. More broadly, there was a distinctive concern with how such situations might be appraised in moral terms. The analysis therefore focuses on three main concerns, including: how to understand uncertainty as a condition of life, and the implications of this; how a shared perspective of uncertainty has spurred a concern with morality in the study context, and specifically galvanised a moral economy of kinship; and how the concern with morality affected what was deemed at stake in people’s lives.