The goal of this dissertation is to discuss relationships between the sociocultural environment and nutritional status outcomes in an urban industrialized city with high rates of poverty. The purpose is to highlight the complex web of factors shaping nutritional status outcomes and move beyond cause and effect approaches to nutrition in an environment where obesity is a central nutritional concern. To accomplish this goal, I examine a range of factors that relate to adolescent nutritional practices and nutritional status outcomes in a sample population of adolescents living in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I discuss connections between social locations such as age, gender, geographic area, and socioeconomic status. I also highlight the range of nutritional status outcomes observed in the sample population, while examining broader social, political, and economic aspects of the lives of adolescents that differentially shape nutrition-related experiences in the city. Finally, I demonstrate that adolescents occupy a complex social location in which autonomy, advice, and influence from sociocultural and political-economic factors shape their diet and exercise practices and nutritional status outcomes in multi-faceted, and at times unexpected, ways. In doing so, I emphasize the benefits of a localized, rather than a globalized approach to nutritional concerns such as obesity.

This dissertation focuses on the lived, material realities of rural women, men, girls, and boys struggling to make a living in the context of changing national development priorities and changing environmental conditions in Southern Province, Zambia. Over the last 20 years, Gwembe Tonga migrants living in the frontier farming area of Kulaale have witnessed significant declines in non-cultivated “bush” resources due to the conversion of forest and grassland to agricultural uses. This dissertation seeks to understand how women, men, boys, and girls differently experience these declines according to local gender- and age-based divisions of subsistence labor. Drawing on a variety of theoretical lenses—including Feminist Geography, Feminist Political Ecology, African Feminisms, the Anthropology of Childhood, and the Anthropology of the State—and utilizing a unique blend of qualitative/ethnographic and quantitative/geospatial research methods, this study finds that the “extractive workloads” (the average annual distance traveled for the collection of key bush resources) associated with women, men, girls, and boys are both unequal and contrary to recent speculations about the distinctive vulnerability of adult women to environmental change. The unequal labor burdens associated with the extraction of bush resources in this changing frontier landscape are but one of several missing “links” that this dissertation identifies within current theorizing about the gendered dimensions of environmental change. Other “links” include the social organization and religious life of Gwembe Tonga migrants, the demographic structure of Kulaale homesteads (their organization on the landscape and their demographic composition), the interplay between agency and vulnerability in children’s daily lives, and the role of the state in shaping Kulaale residents’ perceptions of and interactions with the surrounding environment. This story of Gwembe Tonga migrants’ gendered and aged experiences of environmental change unfolds in the context of competing national economic strategies—frontier development wildlife conservation. This dissertation concludes that women, men, girls, and boys are all physically and economically vulnerable to the changes associated with frontier development, conservation policy, and environmental change, with social, political, and economic factors prompting them to experience vulnerability in aged and gendered ways.

In this ethnography (anthropology thesis) I explored the binary gender division in modern sports culture through the analysis of stereotypes shaped by the history of women's sport, iconography of female athletes portrayed by mainstream media, and the reinforcement of stigma and pressure to conform to social norms by the normalized everyday discourse of college men and women at Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Colleges. Even though Title IX brought significant gender equality to sport in terms of women's access to athletic participation and facilities, I argue that there is still much work to do to modify social attitudes toward women's sports. While CMS female student-athletes have a keen awareness of the existing gender disparity of athleticism and make criticisms of the male-dominated hegemony, they sometimes reproduce the very same disparity they are subjected to by reinforcing internalized stereotypes through articulations of female homosocial spaces, feminine ideals, and the worthy emulation of men's sports. Thus, I argue that women hold a great deal of agency to promote gender equality in sports culture through a reevaluation of the way they think and talk about traditional masculinity and femininity, athletic performance, body image, and sexuality.

It has long been argued that the organization of the U.S. health care system is shaped by the struggles between capital and labor, and this relationship is of increasing significance today. Transformations from an industrial to a service economy, rising insurance costs, neoliberal social policies, and decreased labor union power have increased the number of Americans with reduced access to health care, especially for service workers and women. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of how workers in two leading unions in the “new” unionism movement, the Retail, Wholesale, and Distribution Service Union (RWDSU) and the United Steelworkers (USW) in urban Central Appalachia, characterize union membership and economic (and benefit) transformations that threaten security for working and middle class families. Using health care as a case study, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which economic transformations are making health care less affordable for working and middle class families. Through a discussion of the importance of union membership that highlights job protection in the face of the expansion and increasing feminization of service work and the decline in work sponsored benefits, this dissertation details how these processes reduce access to and affordability of health care. In so doing, this research highlights individual pragmatic action and broader union activism in seeking economic and health security for their families. More broadly, new unionism tactics are described in the actions of a Central Labor Council as it seeks to renew community alliances and link rank-and-file concerns of job security to current labor issues, including the Employee Free Choice Act and Right-to-Work legislation, on local, state, and national levels. This dissertation links access to health care problems in this community to broader national issues (e.g. job protection, service work, and outsourcing) and highlights how union members, individually and collectively, are participating in “new” unionism tactics to maintain job security and secure resources, including health care, for their families.

Wellness dialogues in the United States consistently promote "mindfulness" and "meditation" in relation to self-care, but what do these terms really mean? This research project explores perceptions of mindfulness and meditation in the Claremont community, investigating how understandings of these terms are socially exchanged and reproduced. It also illuminates how these understandings have transformed from concepts influenced by a perceived "eastern-ness" to concepts whose cultural roots remain often undiscussed. Through this research, readers will better understand how Claremont community members conceptualize "mindfulness" and "meditation" and hopefully better access these practices with their perceived related health benefits.

This thesis examines current practices of music and prayers in the context of Jam ritual among the Ahl-e Haqq, a vernacular religion group in Iranian Kurdistan. I examine the construction and sacralization of the sacred instrument of the Ahl-e Haqq, tanbūr. I also explore the sacred prayer, kalām, and the association of prayer and music. Through the ethnographic method, participant observations, and interviewing religious figures and master musicians during the fieldwork in Sahneh, Iran, I investigate the relation of the Ahl-e Haqq prayers and music, and their effect on healing during their sacred ritual performance. Drawing primarily on scholarship from David Hufford and Bonnie Blair O’Connor, I theorize to show the distinction between healing and cure. Also using Leonard Primiano’s concept of vernacular religion, my aim is to show how the Ahl-e Haqq define their vernacular health belief system. This thesis examines the effect of music and prayers on healing in particular contexts and how it influences the daily wellbeing.

This thesis draws on ethnographic research carried out with a group of returned Sri Lankan migrant women who migrated for employment to the Middle East. This retrospective ethnography, based on their time working abroad, brings forth ideas of silent resistance and hidden weapons of women from developing countries, and intends to work against dominant discourses like the human trafficking framework which deems migrant women ‘victims’ of the system of migration, largely ignoring the agency that they exercise throughout the process. The ethnography argues that resistance and resilience are better frameworks with which to characterise the experiences of migrant women. The women in this study showed that through resilience, resistance and agency, they were able to navigate through an immensely oppressive system. They used resourceful and courageous modes of resistance within constrained social situations. The thesis looks at their experiences in the three chronological stages of their migration: pre-departure, life in the host country, and the return to Sri Lanka.

This thesis explores personal experience narratives about making mistakes in the preparation and serving of food. In order to understand when these narratives, referred to in the text as “kitchen nightmares,” are told, to whom, in what form, and why, one-onone and group ethnographic interviews were conducted. In total, 13 interviews were conducted with 25 individuals (men and women) ranging in age from 19 to 70. Six major themes of kitchen nightmare narratives are identified in Chapter One. Chapter Two explores one of these themes, resistance, in the context of the kitchen nightmare stories of heterosexual married women. Chapter Three illustrates how individuals use kitchen nightmare stories to perform aspects of their identity for one another in group interviews, as well as how group members collaborate to tell these stories and negotiate what matters most about them during their telling.

The practice of secondary world building, the creation of a fantasy realm with its own unique laws and systems has long been a tradition within the genre of fantasy writing. In many notable cases, such as those publications by J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft, folklore exhibited in the world of the reader has been specifically used not only to construct these fantasy realms, but to add depth and believability to their presentation. The universe of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series demonstrates this same practice of folklore-as-world-building, yet her construction does much more than just create a fantasy realm. By using both folklore which predates her writing as well as created elements which while unique to her secondary world specifically reflect the world of the reader, Rowling is able to create a fantasy realm which is highly political, complex and multivocal, yet still accessible to young readers through its familiarity. Specifically through her use of cryptids, belief representation, and folk narratives both invented and recontextualized, Rowling is able to juxtapose her fantasy universe to the real-world of the reader, in effect inventing a believable secondary world but also demonstrating to young readers the ways in which her writing should be interpreted.

Selected forms of three Isle Royale fishermen’s folklife expressions – material folk culture, social folk custom and narrative folklore – were documented and analyzed. The informants are representative of the group of Scandinavian fishermen who operated commercial fisheries on Isle Royale from the 1880s to date. Documentary and analytical emphasis centered on occupational aspects of their folklife expressions and the fishermen’s perception of the island archipelago. Accordingly, special interest was focused on the fishermen’s interplay with the Lake Superior and Isle Royale environs. Selected folklife expressions were analyzed to uncover fishermen’s cognitive and affective responses to their insular environment. Analysis of their folklife expressions revealed the depth of fishermen’s knowledge, interest and acceptance of “the island” environment. Complicating the documentary and analytical goals of this study were two major influences that have disrupted the fishermen’s livelihood: namely, Isle Royale became a national park and the depletion of lake trout numbers in Lake Superior. The continued existence of commercial fishing on Isle Royale is threatened, as is the fishermen’s folklife expressions. Consequently, the change brought about by outside influences has changed fishermen’s perception of Isle Royale.