<p>This dissertation ethnographically examines the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns in Yachen, a mega-sized Tibetan Buddhist encampment in eastern Tibet that emerged in the 1980s and is now a leading center of Tibetan Buddhist revivalism in post-Mao China. Over 10,000 nuns make up the vast majority of the permanent residents in this community (approximately 2,000 monks live there as well), but few scholarly discussions have taken place regarding the lives and practices of the nuns in Yachen or in Tibetan Buddhist revivals in China in general. This dissertation, therefore, calls attention first to the lack of proper research on these nuns by providing ethnographic accounts of their everyday lives in “China’s Tibet.” By placing the nuns and their lives at the center of discussion, I was able to realize the significance of examining the material, sensory, and mobile events and occasions through which alternative political logics and possibilities appear in the practice of Buddhism and in Sino-Tibetan politics. This alternative politics—which I call the politics of tranquility—presents itself through the mobilities and material engagements of the nuns in Yachen, and offers a stark contrast to the existing dichotomous understanding of Sino-Tibet relationships. Therefore, second, I argue that mobilities, as well as material and sensory engagements, are essential to the practice of Buddhism and the lives of the nuns in Yachen, without whom the current Buddhist revivalism, in Yachen at least, would not be possible. </p><p> Following my Introduction (Chapter 1), I begin my chapters by presenting the distinctive mobilities of the nuns. Most of the nuns whom I have known in Yachen are escapees, running away from their homes to become nuns in this remote region; their mobilities, against all odds—both physical and social—are what initially make Yachen possible (Chapter 2). Upon arrival, in the face of the harsh spatial regulations imposed by the Chinese state, they engage in building residential huts for themselves; these building activities are primarily responsible for Yachen’s accelerated expansion and thus for its potential political tension (Chapter 3). In Chapters 2 and 3, I also argue that the nuns’ mobilities and building practices, which have rarely been taken seriously within the Buddhist revival in China, in fact constitute the fundamental process of making Yachen, i.e., of making the sacred. In addition, by living with the nuns, I was able to observe their intimacies and secrets through the lens of their transgression and confession. I consider the act of transgression as one of the most political ways to give an account of the self as Buddhist practitioner, as nun, and as woman (Chapter 4). I argue that the nuns actively, provocatively, and riskily (re)shape Yachen’s norms and morality through their acts of transgression and confession. Finally, by drawing on food consumption and eating habits among the nuns in Yachen, I tackle the highly intertwined issues of ethnicity, money, religion, and ethics in Buddhist revivalism as well as in Sino-Tibetan relations (Chapter 5).</p> / Dissertation

The concept of the croft (Sw. torp) is complex. From the 17th century crofts were small tenant holdings on a farm or estate. Along with changes in society since c. 1850, they were converted into freehold farms, second homes or left to ruins. They acquired new functional, social and symbolic values and today the croft is mostly associated with a rural idyll. The aim of the thesis is to study the transformations of the croft since1850 in order to understand how and why it has survived as a place and acquired the meanings it has. Thus the construction of place is in centre of attention. This process is approached from three angles: the materiality of the croft, ideas and representations of it and various practices relating to it. This is studied through historical documents and maps, text analysis and interviews, in part through three case studies in Uppland, Småland and Värmland. The main conclusions are that great changes notwithstanding, there are continuities in all three dimensions of the croft. This combination of inertia and change is central to how and why the croft has survived. The study also shows the importance of timing between available rural dwellings and a demand for such dwellings. Another conclusion is that the idealisation of the croft is old and not only a present day phenomena. Further, the different dimensions of the croft and the relations which can be found between them have been important for the transformation and survival of the croft. The materiality, immateriality and practices of the croft in the past remain parts of what constitutes it today, together with those dimensions in the present. The study shows the possibilities inherent in focusing on the intertwining of various dimensions and periods of time for the understanding of the processes of place construction.

The scope of this study focuses on the concept of In Between with the intention of creating a space of transition and connection between inside and outside, and the simultaneous perception of the two environments. This study will explore the idea of the In Between within the context of a proposed student garden for Edmonton Clinic North, located within the University of Alberta campus in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The intention is to present a design idea that responds to transitioning from one environment to the other as well as exploring opportunities in creating a place that creates the sense of In Between. The concepts of inside | outside, materiality and precedents are researched and analyzed to inform the understanding of the In Between. This research will contribute to the schematic design of the site that exhibits the sense of In Between.

Based on the assumption that the work of contemporary Swedish poet Helena Eriksson, in various ways elaborates the inseparable relation between body and language, this study aims to investigate how this view of language comes to expression in her poetry. Stepping from a theoretical background of feminist perspectives on the body, as well as recent theories on poetic materiality, the analysis points out how the concepts of aesthetic and/or linguistic materiality, social and technological materiality, and what can be described as the ethical dimension of materiality, all as termed by Jesper Olsson and Fredrik Hertzberg, take on feminist implications in Eriksson’s poetry. Through the theory of feminist anthropologist Vicki Kirby and her account of Derrida’s general view of writing, the study makes use of a deconstructive approach to the later work of Eriksson. It is shown in the analysis how this poetry can be effectively mirrored against Kirby’s concept of corporeography, in order to make visible the elision of the breach between meaning and materiality. In this respect, Kirby’s theoretical device ”The body as the scene of writing” in particular, is vastly adapted. Arriving at its conclusion, the study suggests that by engaging the body in the writing of poetry, allowing it to re-inscribe the scripture already made upon it by culture, the poet as woman can preserve her subjectivity and her sense of corporeality.

Bakgrund: Bristen på riktlinjer för väsentlighetsbedömning lämnar ett stort utrymme för revisorns professionella omdöme i väsentlighetsbedömningen. Revisorn måste använda sitt professionella omdöme vid väsentlighetsbedömningen, speciellt med hänseende till klientens branschtillhörighet, vilket ger upphov till inkonsekventa väsentlighetsbedömningar. Syfte: Studiens syfte är att förklara hur revisorernas väsentlighetsbedömningar påverkas av klientens branschtillhörighet. Metod: Studien har ett positivitsikt synsätt och använder en kombinerad metod av både kvalitativ och kvantitativ metodik. Studien utförde för- och efterintervjuer samt en enkätundersökning. Datan samlades in via SurveyMonkey och hanterades samt analyserades i statistikprogrammet SPSS. Resultat och slutsats: Revisorernas professionella omdöme som används i väsentlighetsbedömningarna ger upphov till skillnader i väsentlighetsbedömningarna. Skillnaderna kan delvis förklaras av klientens branschtillhörighet eftersom det inte finns specifika riktlinjer för hur väsentlighetsbedömningarna ska utföras beroende på klientens branschtillhörighet. Resultatet visade att revisorerna inte lägger en lika stor vikt på samma komponenter i väsentlighetsbedömningen beroende på klientens branschtillhörighet. Studiens slutsats är att väsentlighetsbedömningen påverkas av klientens branschtillhörighet genom att revisorerna inte lägger en lika stor vikt på samma komponenter i väsentlighetsbedömningen i de undersökta branscherna. Studiens bidrag: Studien ämnar ge insikt i att förklara hur väsentlighetsbedömningen påverkas av klientens branschtillhörighet. Tidigare studier har inte undersökt variabler i faktorn bransch som påverkar väsentlighetsbedömningen, vilket denna studie har tagit hänsyn till. / Background: The lack of guidance on materiality assessments leaves a large space for the auditors’ professional judgment in assessing materiality. The auditor must use professional judgments on materiality assessments, especially with regard to the clients’ industry affiliation, giving rise to inconsistent materiality assessments. Aim: The aim of this study is to explain how the auditors’ materiality judgments are influenced by the clients’ industry affiliation. Method: The study uses a positivistic approach and uses a combined approach of both qualitative and quantitative methodology. The study used pre- and post interviews and a questionnaire survey. The data was collected via SurveyMonkey and handled and analyzed in SPSS. Result and conclusion: The auditors professional judgment used in materiality assessments give rise to differences in materiality assessments. The differences may be partly explained by the clients’ industry affiliation as there are no specific guidelines that cover materiality assessments specifically for clients with different industry affiliations. The result of this study showed that the auditors do not put an equal amount of importance on the same components of the assessment in regards to the clients’ industry affiliation. The study concludes that the assessment will be influenced by the clients’ industry affiliation since the auditor does not place as much importance on the same components of the materiality assessment in the surveyed industries. Contribution of the thesis: The study aims to provide insight to explain how the assessments will be influenced by the clients’ industry affiliation. Previous studies have not examined the variables in the factor industry that affect materiality assessment as this study has taken into account.

This study explores how Swedish migrants on the Costa del Sol in Spain create belonging and how this is expressed in migration stories and practiced in the daily life. The migrants are part of a migration phenomenon that is conceptualized as lifestyle migration, often to destinations in association with tourism and leisure. Based on ethnographical fieldwork carried out among Swedish migrants within the Swedish infrastructure of institutions, organizations and private enterprises on the Costa del Sol, the thesis examines how belonging is created adopting a phenomenological and constructivist perspective on transnational and diasporic practices. This is accomplished through studying migration stories, where the migration experience is being told, structured and made meaningful for the migrants. In addition, it focuses on internal and external identification and positioning on location on the Costa del Sol. Another concern is the study of how the migrants relate to notions and practices of new home, and old home. The thesis presents how belonging is shaped on a collective basis within the Swedish infrastructure, despite the fact that the interviewees make up a diverse group in different ages, with different reasons for dwelling along the coast, with different migrant experiences, with different approaches to living a transnational migrant life in-between the old and the new country, and with different degrees and range of incorporation to the local society. The study shows how a transnational position is created with a plurilocal frame of reference. It is marked by simultaneously expressing attachments and affiliations to several localities and contexts across territorial borders, shaped by past and recurrent travels and communication, and connected to the Swedish diasporic collective that can function as a compensatory source of national affiliation for the Swedish migrants on the Costa del Sol.

In my encounter of Peter Zumthor’s Seniors’ Home and Kolumba Museum, I found architecture to affect well-being within the daily course of life. I saw the Seniors' Home contribute to the dwelling of the entire being of the elderly residents within the challenging yet hopeful season of life they face in aging, while at Kolumba Museum I encountered an experience of aesthetic embodying meaningful knowledge that addressed not only my mind but also my heart. Centered on the inherent operative dimensions of aesthetic at these two buildings—as an intervention, as a material reality, as an image, and as something we are positioned in and move in—and deepened by aesthetic philosophy and spiritual readings, I seek for an awareness of the way architectural decisions influence the human journey through space and time, and for principles and considerations that supplied and realized this architecture to be vitally contributive. The thesis is a meditation on the vitality of the medium, searching for a relevance that can justify architecture not as mere shelter that barely satisfies nor as inessential excess, but as an efficacious act that can satisfy the human being who encounters it and truly improve well-being in its existing. The thesis posits that architecture is fundamentally a craft and an act of giving a gift to the other. Its created existence in space and time is capable of producing lasting good in the world, if the design of architecture, through love, is primarily concerned about its affect on the other and the world rather than its object.

The scope of this study focuses on the concept of In Between with the intention of creating a space of transition and connection between inside and outside, and the simultaneous perception of the two environments. This study will explore the idea of the In Between within the context of a proposed student garden for Edmonton Clinic North, located within the University of Alberta campus in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The intention is to present a design idea that responds to transitioning from one environment to the other as well as exploring opportunities in creating a place that creates the sense of In Between. The concepts of inside | outside, materiality and precedents are researched and analyzed to inform the understanding of the In Between. This research will contribute to the schematic design of the site that exhibits the sense of In Between.

I set out to learn something basic about architecture, something foundational on which to situate the conceptual and rhetorical exercises played within the studio. In settings both academic and professional I had been encouraged to reduce my study of architecture to a cerebral and retinal game of sorts played out via ever-increasingly seductive imagery. It seemed apparent that in order to think about architecture I should have been involved in an act of architecture. My intentions, albeit naïve, were to engage architecture on its own terms, through its own medium, to return to first principles, if there ever were any, and to acquire a form of embodied architectural knowledge inseparable from its material becoming. There was no amount of hypothesizing, theorizing, no amount of digital sophistication that could supplant the basic educational experience gained from involving myself with real materials, in a real place, with a fully engaged being. With this in mind I journeyed into Ontario’s North, with little more than a hammer and saw and a desire for experience, that most brutal of teachers. I would engage in a basic act of building as a method of acquiring a deeper understanding of the subject I had been studying for several years yet whose essence I felt I knew very little about. The resultant document, informed by traditions of the primitive hut, records a journey towards architectural embodiment; it resides as an argument for the reintroduction of embodied forms of learning into the education of the architect.

The essay is an interdisciplinary work linking History of Religion and Archaeology. The work is based on the study of the finds from a unique archaeological Italian Bronze Age site. The evidence in question has been recently excavated on the outskirts of the modern town of Noceto, Parma province, in northern Italy. It is dated to the end of the local Middle Bronze Age, which corresponds roughly to the 14th century BCE, and belongs to the local so called Terramare culture.   The site consist of a large wooden basin, which once stood in a relatively dominant position within a local Bronze Age village. The basin has been always completely filled with water. Thanks to the particular environmental conditions in the pool, organic material of cellulosic nature, such as wood, preserved very well. We therefore have very precise data about the structure itself and about an astonishing number of finds that have been retrieved from the basin. The basin was apparently used for a limited period of time, which has been estimated of a few generations or a maximum of 100 years. It was apparently used as a sort of “offer place” and hundreds of finds have been sunk in its water. Although depositions in wet areas are very common all over Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the Bronze Age, no other built structures such as the Noceto’s basin are known so far. Noceto provides strong indications of religious nature, since no productive activities or every day practices could be detected in connection to it.   With an eye to the debate on the materiality of religion, the aim of the essays is in the first place to investigate and discuss how the religious nature of the place can be understood, when working solely on the results of the religious activities that once have taken place around its margins. Secondly, the aim is also to attempt using the evidence from Noceto to discuss more broadly issues of Bronze Age religion.   The analysis of the material is carried out considering deposition rituals from the point of view of performance and agency theories. It is argued that the finds from the pool acted as indexes of agency and were part of performative event that linked together the people carrying out and/or watching the ritual, the place and the divine expressed by the place.   Considering that the significance of ritual performance has been seen, among other things, in the transformative power that is contextually assigned to rituals, it is believed that the finds from Noceto’s basin likely embodied an attempt to establish or secure positive transformations possibly in people life and in fundamental productive activities such as for instance agriculture. The sacred role of water during the Bronze Age has been addressed by several scholars, but it is generally connected to the ritual “usage” of particular places such as wetlands, caves, rivers and so on. Noceto’s basin provides the possibility for the first time to analyse an attempt to artificially and magnificently bring the sacred into a settlement area and thus possibly create the premises for more controlled or regular/regulated religious activities. / Uppsatsen är ett tvärvetenskapligt arbete som länkar samman religionshistoria och arkeologi. Arbetets fokus ligger på de arkeologiska fynden som grävdes fram från en unik rituell anläggning från Norra Italien. Anläggningen i frågan befinner sig i utkanten av staden Noceto, i Parma-provinsen. Den är daterad till slutet av den lokala mellersta bronsåldern, vilket ungefär motsvarar 1400-talet f. Kr.   Anläggningen är en stor träbassäng, som en gång stod i en relativt dominerande position innanför ett boplatsområde. Bassängen har från början varit helt fyllt med vatten. Tack vare de speciella miljöförhållandena i poolen, organiskt material, såsom trä, har bevarats mycket bra. Vi har därför precisa uppgifter om själva strukturen och om ett förvånande antal fynd som fanns i bassängen. Anläggningen användes tydligen under en begränsad tidsperiod, som uppskattats av några få generationer eller maximalt c:a 100 år. Det arkeologiska materialet från poolen tyder på att det har haft en funktion som offer-plats och att hundratals objekt har sänkts i sitt vatten. Fastän deponeringar i våta områden är vanliga över hela Europa och Medelhavsområde under bronsåldern, liknande byggnader till Nocetos bassängen är än så länge inte kända. Nocetos pool ger starka bevis av religiös karaktär, eftersom tecken på produktiva verksamheter eller vardagsaktiviteter inte kunde upptäckas i den.   Med hänsyn till debatterna om religions materialitet är syftet med uppsatsen i första hand att undersöka och diskutera hur platsens religiösa natur kan förstås, om man bara arbetar med resultaten av de religiösa aktiviteterna som ägde rum kring den under bronsåldern. För det andra är målet också att försöka använda bevis från Noceto för att diskutera mer allmänna frågor kring bronsålderns religion och religiositet.   Materialet har analyserat med utgångspunkt i performance och angecy teorier. Det hävdas att fynd från poolen fungerade som indexes of agency och var ett grundläggande element av de rituella performansen som genomfördes vid bassängen.   Med tanke på att en grundläggande funktion i rituella performansen anses ligga bland annat i den transformativa kraften som tillskrivs ritualer, är förslaget att fynden från Nocetos bassäng uttrycker ett försök att åstadkomma positiva omvandlingar möjligen i människolivet och/eller i grundläggande produktiva aktiviteter såsom till exempel jordbruk. Den heliga rollen av vatten under bronsåldern har tagits upp extensivt. Särskilda platser, som våtmark, grottor, floder, källor och så vidare, har används för att deponera offer. Nocetos bassäng ger möjlighet för första gången att analysera ett försök att skapa en helgedom i ett bosättningsområde och därigenom att även skapa förutsättningar för möjligtvis kontrollerade eller regelbundna religiösa aktiviteter.