Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Political Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 409-437). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR39049

This ethnographic study explored the social and cultural context of Maldivian women???s emotional, social and psychological well-being and the subjective meanings they assign to their distress. The central question for the study was: How is suffering and distress in Maldivian women explained, experienced, expressed and dealt with? In this study participant observation was enhanced by lengthy encounters with women and with both biomedical and traditional healers. The findings showed that the suffering and distress of women is embedded in the social and economic circumstances in which they live, the nature of gender relations and how culture shapes these relations, the cultural notions related to being a good woman; and how culture defines and structures women???s place within the family and society. Explanations for distress included mystical, magical and animistic causes as well as social, psychological and biological causes. Women???s experiences of distress were mainly expressed through body metaphors and somatization. The pathway to dealing with their distress was explained by women???s tendency to normalize their distress and what they perceived to be the causes of their distress. This study provides an empirical understanding of Maldivian women???s mental well-being. Based on the findings of this study, a multi dimensional model entitled the Mandala for Suffering and Distress is proposed. The data contributes a proposed foundation upon which mental health policy and mental health interventions, and curricula for training of health care providers in the Maldives may be built. The data also adds to the existing global body of evidence on social determinants of mental health and enhances current knowledge and developments in the area of cultural competency for health care. The model and the lessons learnt from this study have major implications for informing clinicians on culturally congruent ways of diagnosing and managing mental health problems and developing patient-centred mental health services.

This ethnographic study explored the social and cultural context of Maldivian women???s emotional, social and psychological well-being and the subjective meanings they assign to their distress. The central question for the study was: How is suffering and distress in Maldivian women explained, experienced, expressed and dealt with? In this study participant observation was enhanced by lengthy encounters with women and with both biomedical and traditional healers. The findings showed that the suffering and distress of women is embedded in the social and economic circumstances in which they live, the nature of gender relations and how culture shapes these relations, the cultural notions related to being a good woman; and how culture defines and structures women???s place within the family and society. Explanations for distress included mystical, magical and animistic causes as well as social, psychological and biological causes. Women???s experiences of distress were mainly expressed through body metaphors and somatization. The pathway to dealing with their distress was explained by women???s tendency to normalize their distress and what they perceived to be the causes of their distress. This study provides an empirical understanding of Maldivian women???s mental well-being. Based on the findings of this study, a multi dimensional model entitled the Mandala for Suffering and Distress is proposed. The data contributes a proposed foundation upon which mental health policy and mental health interventions, and curricula for training of health care providers in the Maldives may be built. The data also adds to the existing global body of evidence on social determinants of mental health and enhances current knowledge and developments in the area of cultural competency for health care. The model and the lessons learnt from this study have major implications for informing clinicians on culturally congruent ways of diagnosing and managing mental health problems and developing patient-centred mental health services.

This thesis examines the appropriateness of the current secondary school curriculum in the Republic of Maldives within an overall context of national education and development planning. Emphasis is placed on access to secondary education by all. In pursuing this aim, data was gathered on aspects of the economy and demography of the country as well as government policy on education. Data was also gathered on student performance in the period 1985�1992, and subsequent employment characteristics of graduates. The framework of analysis adopted for this thesis encompasses the special problems faced by Small Island States in their efforts to provide education for their people. Links between education planning and development planning are explored in depth. The analysis of the data established that the current system of education contributes to increasing social inequalities. Further, it was established that this system cannot be sustained in the long term. It has been argued in this thesis that this system of education could, in the long term, contribute to the demise of national and cultural identity. Hence, it has been argued that the current curriculum is inappropriate for the people of the Maldives at this juncture. On the basis of the findings of this thesis, a broad outline of an alternative education system which could be developed, and the assumptions about development made by this model is presented.

The Maldives atolls, the very top of one of the largest modern carbonate platforms, occupy the central and largest part of the Chagos-Laccadives ridge located in the equatorial Indian Ocean. In the central part of the archipelago, the large atolls form two parallel north-south relatively continuous chains surrounding an internal basin, the Inner Sea, with water depths not exceeding 550 m. The Maldives carbonate system, uniquely evolved through a combination of global sea level fluctuations, subsiding history, and more regional seasonally varying monsoon circulation. Although the long-term evolution of this system is relatively well-established, the understanding of the detailed evolution of the Maldives carbonate edifice in the last 5 million years has remained limited. The latest phase of its stratigraphic evolution is explained by a shift from a well-developed Miocene-Pliocene progradational pattern to a mostly late Pliocene-Quaternary aggradational depositional signature. This last aggradation phase, forming the atolls the way we know them today, consists of stacked inner neritic limestone sequences, separated by a series of exposure horizons. The succesive periods of atoll exposure and re-flooding are recorded in the Inner Sea by late Pliocene-Quaternary glacial/interglacial clearly cyclic deposition of periplatform oozes. This cyclic sedimentary pattern also appears in the internal prograding geometry of carbonate drifts in the Inner Sea. A200 m-thick deep carbonate sediment drift was first observed on a Shell E-W seismic line north of Gaafaru Falhu atoll in the NE corner of the Maldives Inner Sea, in a range of water depths from ~300 to 500 m. During the NEOMA 2007 research cruise on the RV Meteor lead by Universität Hamburg, the deep water sandy drift in the area north of Gaafaru Falhu atoll and an adjacent deeper muddy drift was extensively surveyed via 12 kHz multibeam bathymetry, a 4 kHz sub bottom profiler (Atlas Hydrographics), multi channel high resolution seismics, and three box and piston cores. My study focuses on understanding the Plio-Quaternary overall evolution of the set of adjacent sandy and muddy drifts, just north of Gaafaru Falhu Atoll. The sandy and muddy drift interconnected internal geometries observed in the available seismic data sets are integrated into a sequence stratigraphic framework. Analyses of two piston cores collected from the upper part of the muddy drift and a box core from the top of the sandy drift determine the overall downcore lithology variations and made possible the development of high-resolution chrono and cyclo-stratigraphies. In the muddy drift periplatform sequence, downcore cyclic variations in, (1) sediment coarse fraction, (2) Sr counts as proxy for atoll-derived fine aragonite, (3) planktic foraminifer oxygen stable isotope composition, in addition to carbonate preservation and biostratigraphic markers, were determined. These downcore lithologic and geochemical variations in the muddy drift were tied to the seismic lines imaging the sandy-muddy drifts to resolve the timing of the carbonate sandy drift establishment and its overall evolution. Based on this aforementioned interpretation, the results of my research document the nature and timing of the longer-term evolution of the sandy and muddy drifts over multiple glacial-interglacial sea level cycles in the last 3 million years. Once the timing of the drift was determined, the prograding internal architecture of the sandy drift was examined and interpreted in the context of the relatively well-established Plio-Pleistocene sea level fluctuations and the bottom current variations

Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Asian climate varies on various spatial and temporal scales and has a wide spectrum of climatic characteristics. Climate variability, especially decadal to inter-annual scale rainfall variability across Asia has gained considerable attention of climatologists over the last century due to the fact that rainfall variability is known to have caused considerable damage to southern Asian nations. Until recent, much of the existing literature on southern Asian climate focused on India and it is only recently that studies have focused on countries other than India. Although the Maldives is a nation within southern Asia (lying in the Indian Ocean southwest of India), literature on precipitation patterns over the Maldives and its connection to the Asian monsoon is lacking. This thesis examines the variability of precipitation over the Maldives in relation to the Asian monsoon, since proper knowledge of the spatial and temporal variations of precipitation is essential for managing the water resources and agricultural sector of the Maldives. Yearly and monthly rainfall across the Maldives indicates that the rainfall varies temporally and spatially. Despite spatial variability of mean annual rainfall (January-December total) showing rainfall increasing from north to south, it was found that on average the northern and southern parts of the Maldives have received less rainfall during the monsoon season (May-November). This suggests that the mean annual rainfall maximum for the Maldives occurs between central and southern parts of the Maldives during the monsoon season. The Maldives monsoon rainfall is characterised by inter-decadal and inter-annual periodicities with a frequency of 12.9 and 2.5-4 years, and intra-seasonal periodicities (10-20 days and 30-60 day) in daily time series of monsoon rainfall for different regions of Asia. The fact that no objective criteria previously existed to identify monsoon onset and withdrawal dates in the Maldives, the criteria developed here for defining the monsoon season objectively for this region indicates that on average the rainy season or monsoon commences between 4 May and 13 May (mean onset dates based on outward longwave radiation (OLR) index and rain and wind criteria, respectively) and terminates in late November (21 and 23 November: mean withdrawal dates based on rain and wind, and OLR index criteria, respectively) for the Maldives. The mean length of the rainy season (LRS) based on the OLR index is 204 days, the mean LRS based on rain and wind is 11 days shorter (193 days). Results also demonstrate that the earliest monsoon onset for the Asian region occurs in the south of the Maldives in April. Correlation coefficient maps generated between Maldives monsoon rainfall and meteorological parameters suggest that the most significant parameters that influence the interannual variability of the Maldives monsoon rainfall (MMR) are mean sea level pressure, surface air temperature, OLR, sea surface temperature (SST), and the zonal wind and relative humidity at various levels. Temporal consistency checks carried out for these parameters with the MMR led to the elimination of some of these predictors (which have less influence in the variance of MMR). The predictors which explained a significant amount of variance in the MMR were retained, including surface relative humidity during April (SRHAPR), 850 hPa level relative humidity during May (850RHMAY) and 500 hPa relative humidity for May (500RHMAY). These parameters were then used to formulate a regression model (using backward regression) for the prediction of Maldives monsoon rainfall. The predictors included in the model account for a significant part of the variance (76.6%, with a correlation coefficient, CC = 0.9) in MMR, indicating the usefulness of the model for medium-range prediction of MMR before the core monsoon season commences. Global scale processes such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon influence the weather and climate around the globe, with ENSO considered to be one of the strongest natural phenomena influencing the climate of Asia on inter-annual time-scales. The association between the Maldives monsoon rainfall and ENSO events demonstrates that deficient/excess monsoon rainfall over the Maldives and India region is linked to the strong/moderate El Niño and La Niña events, respectively. During strong/moderate El Niño events, about 71.4% of the time the Maldives/India region experiences deficiencies in monsoon rainfall, while the Maldives/India region experiences excessive monsoon rainfall about 75% of the time during strong/moderate La Niña events. One of the regional scale processes that influence the climate of Asia is Eurasian snow cover. No previous studies have directly examined possible relationships between Eurasian snow and Maldives monsoon rainfall. The possible relationship between Eurasian snow cover (ESC) and the Maldives monsoon rainfall, explored in this research for the first time, appears to be only very weak. The results also demonstrate that the inverse relationship between the ESC and the Indian monsoon has weakened over recent decades. The correlation coefficient (-0.34) between Indian monsoon rainfall and ESC obtained for the 1973-94 period dropped to -0.18 for the 1979-2007 period. The inter-annual variability of the Indian and Australian monsoon rainfall experiences a remarkable biennial oscillation, which has been referred to as the tropospheric biennial oscillation (TBO). It is believed that the land and ocean surface conditions in March-May (MAM) over the Indo-Pacific region play an important role in monsoon transitions. The Maldives monsoon rainfall transition from relatively strong/weak to relatively weak/strong in consecutive years demonstrates a TBO connection (via a biennial tendency in Maldives monsoon rainfall). In relation to the Maldives monsoon rainfall, TBO strong years occur about 47.1% of the time, while weak TBO years occur about 52.9% of the time. Only some of the El Niño and La Niña onset years correspond to strong TBO years, with El Niño onset years (1982, 1987 and 2002) corresponding to weak TBO years, while La Niña onset years (1988 and 2000) corresponding to strong TBO years. Variability (spatial and temporal) in Maldives precipitation associated with global and regional scale processes results in flood and drought events that have downstream impacts, such as on water resources and the agricultural sector of the Maldives. Excess (wet) or deficient rainfall years identified for the period 1992-2008 indicate that the central region is most vulnerable to flooding (5 years with excess rainfall: 27.8% of the time), while the southern region is least vulnerable to both flooding (2 years with excess rainfall: 11.1% of the time) and drought (2 years with deficit rainfall: 11.1% of the time). The northern and central regions show an equal number of years with deficit rainfall (3 years: 16.7% of the time), indicating that they are equally prone to drought events. Furthermore, field survey results demonstrate that about 23, 31 and 37% households (respondents) from the northern, central and southern regions experienced flood events. About 79, 58 and 77% of the farmers from the northern, central and southern areas also experienced floods on their farms. On the other hand, field survey results also suggest that the 49-63% of the households in outer islands of the Maldives and 48-62% of farmers experience shortage of rainwater.

The thesis is an exploration into the ways in which island communities living in coral reef environments value the surrounding reef resources. This research is conducted in seven communities in the Maldives. A qualitative approach is used as this inquiry involves gaining insight of human perceptions and behaviours. Discussions and interaction with participants in community activities and participant observation were the main inquiry methods used. Specifically, the research focuses on sand from the beach, coral from the house reef and fish in the island lagoon. The exploration of reef values show that multiple reef values exist and they are constantly changing. How communities interact with the resources and how the communities itself had changed over time contribute to this change in resource value. Physical and social factors, such as resource type, availability and location, physical characteristics of islands, community size, and socio-economic conditions, contribute to the changing reef values. Based on these changing values, it is recommended to go beyond one formal governance rules that fits all. Instead local adaptations based on local ways of valuing need to be considered. A most notable change impacting reef values is the migration of families to the capital. This reduces their interactions both with the reef environment and other community members. In addition, the current globalised education is causing the development of a predominantly globalised worldview among the present generations. In this new worldview, the sacred is separated from the secular. Thus, spiritual and moral beliefs have become isolated from resource management practices. I also find it of concern that local worldviews are being negated at the expense of concern for the global environment. I highlight the importance of schooling to instil knowledge about our local environments and local worldviews. It is also through education we can re-integrate the sacred into our practices and such changes need to be starting at an individual level.

In the fiercely competitive globalized tourism industry, where there is growing concern for the development of sustainable tourism, tourism stakeholders are confronted with the challenge of creating innovative product differentiation and effective marketing that will increase yield and promote sustainable tourism development. Food is a fundamental part of the tourist experience. Increasingly, local food is used in tourism as an integral part of the visitor attraction to enrich tourist experiences. Local food acts as a differentiating feature for destinations and can play an important role in increasing visitor yield, stimulating growth in other economic sectors and promoting sustainable occupations. The close relationship between local food and culture enables the promotion of cultural heritage by promoting local food. Thus, linking local food and tourism has the potential to create more sustainable tourism practices and outcomes. This study evaluates the role of local food in tourism promotion. It also focuses on economic development, exploring the potential for creating linkages between local food and tourism in the context of sustainable tourism practices. The research is based on a case study of the Republic of Maldives, a country which has gained success in the international tourism market by promoting the natural beauty of its tropical islands. Like many Small Island Developing States (SIDS), tourism is the key to the Maldives’ economic development. But a heavy reliance on imports and a large expatriate labour force cause a significant leakage of tourism revenue. Tourism has been developed under a one-island-one-resort concept. This has created tourist enclaves that limit distribution of tourism benefits among local communities. Hence, Maldives’ tourism needs ways to broaden economic linkages and increase tourism yield. Broader visitor experiences that enhance product attractiveness in ways that still conserve and protect the fragile ecosystem are also required. This research utilized content and discourse analyses and surveys in a mixed-methods approach. Content analysis of printed and web-based tourism marketing materials reveals that food is not featured prominently as a tourist attraction in the Maldives. Surveys conducted among operators and experts indicate considerable support for and the potential benefits of, linking food to tourism; these stakeholders also state that they believe there is a strong desire on the part of tourists to experience local food. A range of issues and constraints that work against linking local food and tourism are revealed; these include under-developed transportation and logistics, shortages of skilled staff, and a lack of communication between producers and tourism operators. A variety of suggestions on linking local food to tourism are presented with recommendations of potential local foods and food-related events that could be successfully integrated into the tourist experience.

In the fiercely competitive globalized tourism industry, where there is growing concern for the development of sustainable tourism, tourism stakeholders are confronted with the challenge of creating innovative product differentiation and effective marketing that will increase yield and promote sustainable tourism development. Food is a fundamental part of the tourist experience. Increasingly, local food is used in tourism as an integral part of the visitor attraction to enrich tourist experiences. Local food acts as a differentiating feature for destinations and can play an important role in increasing visitor yield, stimulating growth in other economic sectors and promoting sustainable occupations. The close relationship between local food and culture enables the promotion of cultural heritage by promoting local food. Thus, linking local food and tourism has the potential to create more sustainable tourism practices and outcomes. This study evaluates the role of local food in tourism promotion. It also focuses on economic development, exploring the potential for creating linkages between local food and tourism in the context of sustainable tourism practices. The research is based on a case study of the Republic of Maldives, a country which has gained success in the international tourism market by promoting the natural beauty of its tropical islands. Like many Small Island Developing States (SIDS), tourism is the key to the Maldives’ economic development. But a heavy reliance on imports and a large expatriate labour force cause a significant leakage of tourism revenue. Tourism has been developed under a one-island-one-resort concept. This has created tourist enclaves that limit distribution of tourism benefits among local communities. Hence, Maldives’ tourism needs ways to broaden economic linkages and increase tourism yield. Broader visitor experiences that enhance product attractiveness in ways that still conserve and protect the fragile ecosystem are also required. This research utilized content and discourse analyses and surveys in a mixed-methods approach. Content analysis of printed and web-based tourism marketing materials reveals that food is not featured prominently as a tourist attraction in the Maldives. Surveys conducted among operators and experts indicate considerable support for and the potential benefits of, linking food to tourism; these stakeholders also state that they believe there is a strong desire on the part of tourists to experience local food. A range of issues and constraints that work against linking local food and tourism are revealed; these include under-developed transportation and logistics, shortages of skilled staff, and a lack of communication between producers and tourism operators. A variety of suggestions on linking local food to tourism are presented with recommendations of potential local foods and food-related events that could be successfully integrated into the tourist experience.