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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in Philosophy." Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-251).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Bern. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thèse--Paris.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, The Divinity School, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 361-380).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 435-462).

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Regent College, Vancouver, BC, 1998. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 149-154).

Founded in London in 1844, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) has spread across the world, becoming integrated into state programmes of social reform and driving a development discourse that links socially productive youth into economic moralities of transformation. I trace the circulation of these ideas through a multi-sited, cross-cultural ethnographic study of Young Men's Christian Associatin (YMCA) centres in the UK and The Gambia, focussing on YMCA programmes that operate transnationally, implementing global youth-oriented policy in local centres linked by bilateral partnerships. I follow these transnational linkages from Sussex Central YMCA (based in Brighton and Hove, England) where I have strong links as worker and volunteer, to a similarly sized centre in Banjul, Gambia, creating a cross-cultural analytical framework through which to explore the experiences of young men participating in their programmes. Using these contrasting contexts, I focus on the lives, narratives and practices of young men and YMCA staff in each location, analysing how YMCA programmes foster a version of transnational masculinity that combines economic rationality with the spiritual principles derived from Protestant Christianity. I explore this in reference to an often implicit, idealised form of YMCA masculinity based around strenght of 'mind, body and spirit', known as the 'Whole Man'. I suggest that the 'Whole Man' operates as an idealised motif of manhood within YMCA centres, fostering notions of self-sacrifice, empathy and embodied dynamism that is reproduced at the YMCA through 'secular rituals'. I trace how these masculine subjectivities interact with localised conceptions of manhood and youth in each location, focussing on the interplay of differing versions, conceptualisations and practices of masculine behaviour in each location. This thesis is generated by the friction between self-help models and actual lived realities, frictions which I hope to show represent the limitations of totalising models of coherent subjectivity based on moral principles.

This thesis is an anthropological study of Uzbek women's everyday life and religious rituals, focusing on the experience and transformation of women's religious and ritual lives in the capital Tashkent, after Soviet rule lasting seventy-three years ended in 1991. The research was conducted over four years, covering English, Russian, and Uzbek language literature, periodical press, archive materials, and oral histories of women who experienced the challenges of the Soviet system and the social changes of the period since independence in 1991. A large body of literature has been written about women's ritual life in Islam, but relatively little about Uzbek women's ritual life within Islam since independence. This thesis introduces an ethnographic contribution to the literature by investigating Uzbek women's everyday life since independence. This thesis will lay out the historical background to the changes in the government of Uzbekistan between 1991 and 2011, in particular the transition from Soviet to independent rule. It will then examine the particular impact this change in government had on women's religious and ritual life, by comparing data gathered before and after the transition. The existing body of literature on women's ritual life will be critically assessed in relation to the particular findings of women's experience in Tashkent, and differences and similarities will be discussed. The thesis argues that religious rituals and the everyday life of Uzbek women change continuously because of the influence of social forces and institutions. The ritual and everyday life of women has adapted to historical circumstance and political systems. Women's rituals are controlled and partly constructed by the state and religious institutions for the purpose of national identity-building, ideological legitimation, and controlling women's everyday lives. In the following study, I argue that women have incorporated change and transformation into their everyday (ritual and religious) lives, thus revealing their agency and self-expression as they navigate the social and gender realities of twenty-first century Uzbekistan.