This dissertation examines transnational family practices between Kyrgyzstan and Russia. Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan experienced intensive internal and external mobilities. As one of the poorest Soviet republics, independent Kyrgyzstan continued to battle with poverty and high unemployment, which pushed nearly 20% of its population to seek jobs internationally. Transnational families have become a norm for Kyrgyzstan that receives the equivalent of one-third of its GDP in remittances. Using the transnational perspective, I explored the role of migration in reconstituting 'family practices' (Morgan, 1996, 2013). In a multi-sited ethnography of family life between Alcha village and Yakutsk city, the study demonstrates the everyday lives of transnational family members maintaining ties across time and space. Treating families as groups of configurations, rather than households, the study illustrates the multitude of family and kin relationships and networks that family members are embedded in. Through the examination of remittances and monetary ties, communal celebrations, arrangements of caregiving in migrants' absence, the study describes the contradictory effects of migration. I argue that migration has dramatically transformed and reconstituted family life. Divided and fragmented, Kyrgyzstani transnational families continued to maintained strong ties with home. I demonstrate that transnational families coped with the contradictory consequences of migration that shifted the family meanings, practices, constitution, and architecture of Kyrgyz family lives. The dissertation argues that Kyrgyzstani families, characterized by extended family relations, are nonetheless increasingly engaged in nuclear family type of relations in the transnational social fields.

This thesis is a multi-sited ethnography of sub-Saharan migrants' journeys through Libya and by boat to Malta. Its overall aim is to understand how undocumented migrants make and conceptualise their complex journeys through shifting regulatory landscapes. The thesis draws upon, and consequently develops, understandings of migrants' mobilities, both within anthropology and wider migration studies. Over the course of their journey through Libya and Malta, sub-Saharan migrants move across uneven topographies in place and time, from the vast expanse of the Sahara Desert to the turbulent Mediterranean Sea, from situations of detention to everyday houses in society, from the hands of smugglers to the arms of the law. To this end, the thesis is guided by three wider objectives. First, investigating how different forms of mobility are part of migrants' journeys. Second, examining how migrants navigate such journeys. And third, understanding the ways in which migrants encounter and negotiate borders en route. These objectives are engaged with through a multi-sited ethnography tracing migrants' journeys through five contexts: sites of confinement and detention in Libya, everyday spaces of Libyan society, the boat crossing, and finally the legal framework in Malta. These varying contexts prompt comparisons across particular sites, processes and practices on a journey, highlighting elements that might be generalized and those that are specific. The ethnography is presented in five chapters, their sequence mirroring the overall journey of migrants through Libya and Malta. Unpacking the journey and mobility, this thesis develops a set of interrelated arguments. First, it deconstructs the notion of migrants as a homogenized group of people on a linear trajectory aimed at Europe. It goes beyond typologized understandings of migrants, such as legal, illegal, refugee or asylum seeker, that fix migrants into static categories linked to the state or specific crisis situations. Second, it front-stages the journey as a focal point of inquiry, thereby addressing a theme under-acknowledged in the anthropology of mobility and migration. This enables a move beyond state-centric and isolated understandings of migrants' mobilities to one that accounts for the multiplicity of journeys and processes en route. Third, this emphasis on the journey highlights the importance of thinking through relations involving multiple actors and bordering encounters. Taken together, these arguments advance important insights into the anthropologies of mobility and migration. The thesis makes wider contributions by conceptualizing an 'architecture' of the journey, constituted by three inter-related components: mobility, navigation, and borders. They offer a more nuanced understanding of migration and mobility in (post-)conflict settings, one that not only has implications for understanding sub-Saharan migrants' journeys through Libya and by boat to Europe, but one also relevant to other crisis contexts as well.

This MA thesis presents the results of an investigation about the Hispanic Americans in Prague. Relying on a transnationalist theoretical approach, this research presents an empirical description about the existing ties between the transmigrants and their city of residence, analyzing the migration networks and the transnational practices that arise during the migratory experience. We wish to demonstrate the measure in which the transnational migration is going to foment the exchange of symbolic goods between the country of origin and the country of reception of the transmigrant, and how this exchange is often triggered by the feeling of nostalgia that is frequently associated with the transmigrants experience. To approach these problems in the thesis we focus on the portrait of the migration networks, and on various strategies adopted by migrants from Latin America. Thus we are able to discover the transnational practices of migrants, their integration strategies, and the tools which facilitate to keep the contact with their homeland, and native civilization/culture. The exchange of symbolic goods is one of the very important instruments. We discover them through the testimonies of the transmigrants, which constitute the frame of this investigation, and function as a window on the nature of the...

This PhD thesis is a multi-sited ethnographical study (Marcus 1995) of globalized world through focusing on the social life (Appadurai 1986) of one of the well-known Vedic mantras (the Gayatri Mantra) as a globalized phenomenon and a commodity. Chanting of mantras (Hindu sacred chants in Vedic Sanskrit; pronunciation, intonation and rhythm of which is prohibited to change in the Brahmanic discourse) which had been a local cultural practice, has become a globally known phenomenon. During the globalizing process of their cultural transmission from India to the West and later to the Czech Republic, the mantras have gained new sound forms, new social and cultural contexts, new functions and new meanings. Contemporary cultural productions of mantras are a thick example how the present inter-continental connectedness works in everyday life, music and in the relationship to the Sacred. Selected places on this trajectory will be sites of the fieldwork. The project will research, how the transmission process happens, what music forms it takes, and what meanings are attached to them by their agents.

This PhD thesis is a multi-sited ethnographical study (Marcus 1995) of globalized world through focusing on the social life (Appadurai 1986) of one of the well-known Vedic mantras (the Gayatri Mantra) as a globalized phenomenon and a commodity. Chanting of mantras (Hindu sacred chants in Vedic Sanskrit; pronunciation, intonation and rhythm of which is prohibited to change in the Brahmanic discourse) which had been a local cultural practice, has become a globally known phenomenon. During the globalizing process of their cultural transmission from India to the West and later to the Czech Republic, the mantras have gained new sound forms, new social and cultural contexts, new functions and new meanings. Contemporary cultural productions of mantras are a thick example how the present inter-continental connectedness works in everyday life, music and in the relationship to the Sacred. Selected places on this trajectory will be sites of the fieldwork. The project will research, how the transmission process happens, what music forms it takes, and what meanings are attached to them by their agents.

This dissertation investigates the rhetorical constitution of a religio-political social collective which has come to be understood as Christian Reconstruction (CR). CR is guided by conservative Calvinism (Reformed theology) and upholds the ideas of theonomy, postmillennialism, and presuppositional apologetics. Some of the leaders associated with CR are R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North, Gary DeMar of American Vision and Doug Phillips of Vision Forum. A few of its key practices are homeschooling, the father ‘returning home,’ and having as many children ‘as God will allow,’ (a vision aligned with the Quiverfull movement). It is primarily a national movement within the United States, not limited to a singular geographical location or denomination. This study provides a comprehensive overview of CR, illustrating how the grammars of CR are animated, embodied, and upheld in peoples’ lives and practices. Through the observation of conferences and events, and the collection and examination of media materials, this analysis takes a constructivist approach to piecing together the discursive fragments that constitute CR. CR grammar is richly embedded in a web of interaction, media, technology, images, bodily adornment, performance, music, games, and consumer culture. My theoretical framework utilizes the work of critical cultural theorists (Gramsci, 1971; Butler, 1990; Hall, 1976, Laclau, 2005) in combination with theories of constitutive (Burke, 1950; Charland, 1987; McGee, 1975) and visual rhetoric and display (Olson, Finnegan & Hope, 2008; Prelli, 2006; Selzer & Crowley, 1999) to examine the types of social, cultural, and political subjectivities, practices and institutions that are constituted within the CR community. It focuses primarily on the patriarchal identities within CR families as well as the focus on nationalistic teaching about Christian American history as methods for changing the culture of America. I consider the hegemonic machinations of CR grammars in constituting these identities. Finally, this study makes available a methodology and method for the study of dispersed “peoples” and their discursive lives. I demonstrate that multi-sited ethnography, combined with the theories of constitutive and visual rhetorics and critical cultural studies provides a systematic heuristic with which to inquire into a people, its culture, activities, identities, and how they constitute themselves.

In dieser Dissertation untersuche ich die Forschungswege von sechs Wissenschaftlern, die in verschiedenen Disziplinen und Institutionen in den Vereinigten Staaten und in der Tschechischen Republik arbeiten. Um dies zu tun, verwende ich sogenannte „multi-sited“ ethnographisch-methodische Strategien (d.h. Strategien, die Anthropologen verwenden, um Kulturen an zwei oder mehr geografischen Standorten zu vergleichen), mit dem Ziel, informationsbezogene Verhaltensweisen dieser Wissenschaftler im global vernetzten akademischen Umfeld zu untersuchen, englisch abgekürzt „GNAE“, ein Begriff, der sich speziell auf die komplexe Bricolage von Netzwerkinfrastrukturen, Online-Informationsressourcen und Tools bezieht, die Wissenschaftler heutzutage nutzen, d.h. die weltweite akademische e-IS, oder akademische Infrastruktur (Edwards et al. 2013). Die zentrale Forschungsfrage (RQ1), die in dieser Dissertation beantwortet wird, ist: Gibt es, gemäß der multi-sited ethnographischen Analyse der beteiligten Wissenschaftler in dieser Studie—Personen, die Forschung in verschiedenen Disziplinen und Institutionen sowie an unterschiedlichen Standorten betreiben—Hinweise darauf, dass ein signifikanter Anteil der nicht-institutionellen/informellen informationsbezogenen Forschung über Mechanismen im GNAE, die nicht von Bibliotheken unterstützt werden, betrieben wird, sowie (RQ2): Was für Muster sind vorhanden und wie beziehen sie sich auf informationswissenschaftliche und andere sozialwissenschaftliche Theorien? Und drittens (RQ3): Haben die Resultate praxisnahe Bedeutungen für die Entwicklung von Dienstleistungen in wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken? Ethnographische Strategien sind bisher noch nicht in der Informationswissenschaft (IS) eingesetzt worden, um Fragen dieser Art zu untersuchen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass eine informelle Informationsexploration nur bei zwei Wissenschaftlern, die mit offenen Daten und Tools einer verteilten Computing-Infrastruktur arbeiten, zu finden ist. / In this dissertation I examine the pathways of information exploration and discovery of six scientists working in different research disciplines affiliated with several academic institutions in the United States and in the Czech Republic. To do so, I utilize multi-sited ethnographic methodological strategies (i.e., strategies developed by anthropologists to compare cultures across two or more geographic locations) to examine the information-related behaviors of these scholars within the global networked academic environment (GNAE), a term which specifically refers to the complex bricolage of network infrastructures, online information resources, and tools scholars use to perform their research today (i.e., the worldwide academic e-IS, or academic infrastructure [Edwards et al. 2013]). The central research question (RQ1) to be answered in this dissertation: According to the multi-sited ethnographic analysis of scientists participating in this study—individuals conducting research in various disciplines at different institutions in several geographical locations—is there evidence indicating a significant allotment of non-institutional/informal information-related exploration and discovery occurring beyond official library-supported mechanisms in the GNAE?, and—part two (RQ2) of the central research question—What (if any) patterns are exhibited and how do these patterns relate to information science (IS) and other social science theories? Both RQ1 and RQ2 are exploratory. I additionally ask (RQ3): What might all this mean in the applied sense? by showing examples of services piloted during the research process in response to my observations in the field. Multi-sited ethnographic strategies have not yet been employed in IS, as of the date of publication of this thesis, to examine such questions. Results indicate informal information exploration occurring only with two scientists who use of open data and tools on a distributed computing infrastructure.

Abctract In my diploma thesis I deal with actions that happen around bulk containers, that are intended to collect larger pieces of domestic waste and that are periodically placed in public space in Prague. I consider the bulk container as an actor, which leads us to particular practices of guarding, disposession and collecting stuff (from the container). I use method of multi-sited ethnography to investigate how the value of disposed objects change according to actions around container and according to change of the context in which it is newly placed. I identify several kinds of value, that are inscribed to wasted objects by their new owners. Waste can become valuable with regard to its economic potencial (as a thing or material that can be sold), with regard to possibility of its further practic use (as a household equipment or material), with regard to its estethic value (as an indicator of taste or as an artefact) or it can gain some specific kind of value in socially engaged context. It is possible to consider the bulk container as an actor of recyclation. I research how various groups of people that are concerned with reusing of waste, interact and how are their interactions, their relationships and their specific practices constitutive for reality of waste in surrounded area of the cotainer and...

Esta tese oferta uma mirada antropológica sobre a agência da noção de bullying situada como uma categoria de acusação social no cotidiano contemporâneo brasileiro. Nascido como construto científico durante os anos 70, na região escandinava, o bullying conferiu nome a condutas, típicas em escolas, de intimidação sistemática entre pares, no interior de um decurso civilizatório no Ocidente que passa a atribuir reconhecimento a agressões de feitio moral. No Brasil, a acepção de bullying populariza-se apenas mais tardiamente, em meados da primeira década dos 2000. O espraiamento do conceito no país, inclusive para além dos muros das instituições de ensino, se dá num período sociopolítico específico: aquele de operação sem anterioridade na história nacional de um conjunto de políticas públicas nos campos da inclusão econômica e da diversidade social, alavancadas pelos governos presidenciais do Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). Essas iniciativas estatais colocam em primeiro plano tensões seculares presentes na sociedade brasileira perante alteridades e iniquidades de naturezas diversas. Tal quadro desencadeia uma série de disputas e confrontos que agência da noção de bullying trabalha por traduzir, comunicar e, concomitantemente, abastecer. Para problematizar isso, esta investigação apresenta-se como uma etnografia multissituada, a perseguir agenciamentos do bullying em diferentes domínios – científico, estatal, educacional, mercadológico e midiático – , em escalas sociológicas micro, intermediária e macro, a partir de acontecimentos ordinários e extraordinários. Os resultados apontam, de um lado, para um construto que, uma vez legitimado científica e politicamente, se revela potente em desencadear processos de subjetivação e estratégias de militância, capazes de denunciar uma gama de segregações e agir sobre elas. De outro lado, contudo, essas mobilizações encontram limites na exata medida que o conceito possui para subsidiar investidas neoliberais de gestão de populações, as quais demandam o autogoverno dos indivíduos em prol de uma pacificação ideal, mediante suspensão de contextos ético-políticos amplos e consequente perpetuação de desigualdades. A consideração dessa dupla faceta própria ao construto do bullying se coloca, assim, fundamental para pensar produções acadêmicas, políticas públicas, programas escolares de intervenção, produtos e serviços, bem como coberturas noticiosas, em ação no passado, ativos no presente ou, ainda, a serem planificados no futuro em favor dos direitos humanos e da justiça social. / The present dissertation offers an anthropological perspective on the agency of the notion of bullying as a category of social accusation in the Brazilian contemporary everyday life. Born as a scientific construct during the 1970’s in the Scandinavian region, the concept of bullying, within the Western civilization course that now recognizes moral character aggressions, gave a name to typically school-based conducts of systematic intimidation between peers. In Brazil, the notion of bullying is popularized only later, in the first decade of the 2000’s. The concept’s dissemination in the country, even beyond the walls of educational institutions, occurs in a specific sociopolitical period: an unprecedented moment in the national history for the operation of a set of economic inclusion and social diversity policies, leveraged by the presidential governments of the Workers’ Party (PT). These state initiatives bring to the fore secular tensions regarding alterities and inequalities of different natures that have always been present in the Brazilian society. Such framework unleashes a series of disputes and confrontations that the agency of the bullying notion works to translate, to communicate and, at the same time, to instigate. In order to problematize this scenario, this investigation presents itself as a multi-sited ethnography, pursuing bullying agencies in different domains – scientific, state-owned, educational, marketing and media – on micro, intermediate and macro sociological scales, by means of ordinary and extraordinary events. The results point, on the one hand, to a construct that, once legitimated scientifically and politically, proves itself potent in triggering processes of subjectivation and strategies of militancy, capable of denouncing a range of segregations and acting on them. On the other hand, however, these mobilizations find limits in the exact measure that the concept has been subsidizing neoliberal population management efforts, which demand the self-government of individuals for the ideal pacification, through suspending broad ethical and political contexts and consequently with the perpetuation of inequalities. Considering this double facet of the bullying construct is therefore essential for thinking about academic productions, public policies, school intervention programs, products and services, and also the news coverage which were in action in the past, active in the present, and to be planned in the future in favor of human rights and social justice.

Esta tese oferta uma mirada antropológica sobre a agência da noção de bullying situada como uma categoria de acusação social no cotidiano contemporâneo brasileiro. Nascido como construto científico durante os anos 70, na região escandinava, o bullying conferiu nome a condutas, típicas em escolas, de intimidação sistemática entre pares, no interior de um decurso civilizatório no Ocidente que passa a atribuir reconhecimento a agressões de feitio moral. No Brasil, a acepção de bullying populariza-se apenas mais tardiamente, em meados da primeira década dos 2000. O espraiamento do conceito no país, inclusive para além dos muros das instituições de ensino, se dá num período sociopolítico específico: aquele de operação sem anterioridade na história nacional de um conjunto de políticas públicas nos campos da inclusão econômica e da diversidade social, alavancadas pelos governos presidenciais do Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). Essas iniciativas estatais colocam em primeiro plano tensões seculares presentes na sociedade brasileira perante alteridades e iniquidades de naturezas diversas. Tal quadro desencadeia uma série de disputas e confrontos que agência da noção de bullying trabalha por traduzir, comunicar e, concomitantemente, abastecer. Para problematizar isso, esta investigação apresenta-se como uma etnografia multissituada, a perseguir agenciamentos do bullying em diferentes domínios – científico, estatal, educacional, mercadológico e midiático – , em escalas sociológicas micro, intermediária e macro, a partir de acontecimentos ordinários e extraordinários. Os resultados apontam, de um lado, para um construto que, uma vez legitimado científica e politicamente, se revela potente em desencadear processos de subjetivação e estratégias de militância, capazes de denunciar uma gama de segregações e agir sobre elas. De outro lado, contudo, essas mobilizações encontram limites na exata medida que o conceito possui para subsidiar investidas neoliberais de gestão de populações, as quais demandam o autogoverno dos indivíduos em prol de uma pacificação ideal, mediante suspensão de contextos ético-políticos amplos e consequente perpetuação de desigualdades. A consideração dessa dupla faceta própria ao construto do bullying se coloca, assim, fundamental para pensar produções acadêmicas, políticas públicas, programas escolares de intervenção, produtos e serviços, bem como coberturas noticiosas, em ação no passado, ativos no presente ou, ainda, a serem planificados no futuro em favor dos direitos humanos e da justiça social. / The present dissertation offers an anthropological perspective on the agency of the notion of bullying as a category of social accusation in the Brazilian contemporary everyday life. Born as a scientific construct during the 1970’s in the Scandinavian region, the concept of bullying, within the Western civilization course that now recognizes moral character aggressions, gave a name to typically school-based conducts of systematic intimidation between peers. In Brazil, the notion of bullying is popularized only later, in the first decade of the 2000’s. The concept’s dissemination in the country, even beyond the walls of educational institutions, occurs in a specific sociopolitical period: an unprecedented moment in the national history for the operation of a set of economic inclusion and social diversity policies, leveraged by the presidential governments of the Workers’ Party (PT). These state initiatives bring to the fore secular tensions regarding alterities and inequalities of different natures that have always been present in the Brazilian society. Such framework unleashes a series of disputes and confrontations that the agency of the bullying notion works to translate, to communicate and, at the same time, to instigate. In order to problematize this scenario, this investigation presents itself as a multi-sited ethnography, pursuing bullying agencies in different domains – scientific, state-owned, educational, marketing and media – on micro, intermediate and macro sociological scales, by means of ordinary and extraordinary events. The results point, on the one hand, to a construct that, once legitimated scientifically and politically, proves itself potent in triggering processes of subjectivation and strategies of militancy, capable of denouncing a range of segregations and acting on them. On the other hand, however, these mobilizations find limits in the exact measure that the concept has been subsidizing neoliberal population management efforts, which demand the self-government of individuals for the ideal pacification, through suspending broad ethical and political contexts and consequently with the perpetuation of inequalities. Considering this double facet of the bullying construct is therefore essential for thinking about academic productions, public policies, school intervention programs, products and services, and also the news coverage which were in action in the past, active in the present, and to be planned in the future in favor of human rights and social justice.