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<p>An examination of diet in Central Africa, showing that malnutrition is not only a function of nutritional needs and food supplies, but also depends on culturally learned behaviour and values.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

This project explores domestic violence advocacy in California by tracing historical, social, and cultural influences; examining the limit of the law and bias of those who uphold it; and analyzing a local domestic violence agency that provides services to survivors. Through the frameworks of anti-essentialization, and intersectionality I analyze gender roles and stereotypes ingrained in our culture. The essentialization of what it is to be a women renders women’s differences invisible, making it difficult for law and policy to address. By looking at domestic violence through an intersectional lens, the multi-layered nature women’s experiences can be revealed. However, not all laws and policies reflect this intersectional viewpoint which limits their effectiveness. The law can also be limited by those who enforce and interpret it. Those within law enforcement and the justice system are not immune to the stereotypes, and assumptions of the culture we live in. I use several women’s stories as well as advocate interviews to demonstrate the bias or attitude of indifference that can be held by law enforcement and the court system. The advocates who work closely with survivors of domestic violence use a client-centered approach to advocacy. This affirms the client’s ability and right to make her own decisions. The advocates partner the use of boundaries and self-care with this client-centered approach in order to best serve their clients.

The practice of gathering water from community springs in Kentucky constitutes a rich and complex research setting for the study of folklore beliefs and practices. Local knowledge construction, nostalgia as an evaluative process, contested views about purity and impurity, the protection and retention of a “public commons,” and the crisis which ensues when infrastructure maintenance and the delivery of safe drinking water are no longer guaranteed to communities, are all relevant to this vernacular practice. My thesis explores these topics, informed by fieldwork I conducted in nine Kentucky counties, which included formal and informal interviews with individuals who have used springs, as well as participant observation of spring sites. Roadside water sources are used by the public for drinking water, and are vestiges of the public commons. In addition to gathering water, these sites allow us to gather and study folkloric practice and knowledge. Historically, community springs were utilized before public water systems were implemented, providing a critical source of water for travelers, or for those who did not have private access to a reliable water source. Yet today, even with the presence of municipal water systems, many people still gather water from springs. My thesis integrates archival/historical library research, participant observation, and oral history narratives collected in 2016 as part of a Kentucky Oral History Commission Project Grant, in order to illuminate two fundamental research questions: Why do people prefer to get water from springs today? And what cultural meanings are constructed through the continued engagement with this tradition? I examine the historical use of these resources, their relationship to the implementation of municipal water systems, and how localized knowledge about water purity is formed and put into practice in this region. I also explore the use of nostalgia, collective memory, and narrative for constructing place and landscape, as well as theorize on how springs function as public commons resources today. I also use photographs to convey ethnographic knowledge distinct from the written word, providing an opportunity to convey sensory information about the spaces I describe in my research.

My ethnography begins providing its bibliographical, historical and geographic frameworks along the methodological issues in Chapter I. There, I outline the most explicit phenomena of postsocialism in Gjirokastër city, the introduction of private vehicles and private immobile property and their relationship with the radical transformations of the urban topography. This city today gradually centralises the road infrastructure, reflecting and facilitating the respective postsocialist social centralisation of spatial mobility and the increasing impact of the cross-border network on the social life of the city. The thesis continues in Chapter II with the history of motor-roads in Albania, with particular focus on the relationship between highways and modernisation during socialism and the paradox relationship between society and these infrastructures. During socialism Albanians had to build roads, but they were not able to use them, a process that paved in fact the way for the postsocialist social perceptions of roads and automobility. The main ethnographic and synchronic part begins in Chapter III and continues in Chapters IV and V where I study how the particular cross-border road network is perceived in postsocialist Gjirokastër, while I discuss its social agency after 1990. In Chapter III I focus on the contemporary road mythology in the city and I discuss it in reference other motifs of road mythology that are available in the bibliography. Chapters IV and V are the most important for the argument of the thesis as I emphasise the two most comprehensive road myths of the contemporary socio-cultural condition in Albania and I talk about their relationship with the actual materiality of that infrastructure in reference to the material dimensions of globalisation and transnationalism. In Chapter IV I present the politico-economic asymmetries of postsocialist capitalism in Albania as they are formed dialectically in the material and social constructions of Kakavije-Gjirokastër. In Chapter V, I continue with the dialectical scheme focusing on the social and material articulations of this transnationalism and fluidity from below, with focus on the ontological and material extension of the road: the houses built by migrants. There I show how the super-fluid and asymmetrical global relationships of the postsocialist transition are being familiarised and to a certain degree absorbed within the intimate material entity of the house, via the same road which incorporates and facilitates the international dependency of the society to the migratory process. The last chapter (VI) presents my conclusions emphasising the relationship between anthropology and roads, locating the current ethnography on the wider theoretical discussions on automobility infrastructures, space, time and scale.

This practice-based research investigates floor-based living, focusing upon the realm of Korean everyday life. My particular concern is with the relation of the body to domestic space through memorised rituals, such as cleaning, polishing and removing shoes. The thesis asks the question: how does space determine and respond to such repetitive activity? It traces how the spatial typology of the floor, so important for Korean architecture, has been transformed by changes in such domestic activities. I present a series of design responses that draw upon everyday domestic performance, addressing a number of issues such as ritual, trace and materiality. By developing a spatial practice focusing on the ondol (traditional Korean floor heating) and the dot-jari (floor mat), this research explores territory that is un-theorised and underdeveloped as a subject in a Korean contemporary design context. The floor is a way to explore the wider role of ritual and trace in the construction of symbolic space, and is central to the Korean cultural and spatial identity. My research therefore explores floor-based living as a manifestation of a social practice: one that has spatial consequences. The Korean expression of ilsang ei eisik (everyday ritual) is defined here as a bodily-embedded activity that is inherent within the culture. A series of my spatial installations, such as Trace of Ritual Ceremony (2014), Beyond the Boundary (2015), Invisible Space (2015) and Spatial Extension (2016), deal with issues of transience, warmth, comfort and tactility, locating my everyday performance in architecture or public space. The gathering of dispersed visual research materials is a significant part of my methodology, and the research has involved compiling and editing images into the thesis in order for it to be conceived as a visual archive.

This thesis draws on over eighteen months of multi-sited fieldwork carried out in London and Dhaka, among geologists, lawyers, fund managers, engineers, and private sector development consultants intent on securing profitable extractive opportunities in new ‘frontier' markets, and among public intellectuals and politicians in Dhaka who oppose the development of Bangladesh's energy resources by foreign corporations. The thesis contributes to a recently revitalized anthropological political economy and engages critically with the actor–network theory-inspired ‘social studies of finance'. By tracing ethnographically the production of extractive industry capitalism, I show that capital is not merely free–flowing or reproduced by its own inevitable logic. Rather, the movement and accumulation of capital is facilitated by distinct forms of knowledge production, such as political risk analysis and the emergent field of Corporate Diplomacy, and by historically constituted legal norms, most notably those of investor–state arbitration. Equally, I show that the calculative capacities exercised by financial analysts and fund managers have material consequences far beyond those normally considered by scholars in the social studies of finance, who tend to confine their analyses to the ‘bounded fieldsites' provided by bank dealing rooms or stock exchange trading floors. Methodologically, this thesis defends the notion that ethnographically tracing the generation of extractive industry capitalism demands a rejection of the recent ‘post–critical' turn in the ethnography of experts and elite groups. Ultimately, I argue that what allows extractive industry capitalism to be generated is the subordination of the sovereignty of ‘frontier' states to the sovereignty of transnational extractive corporations. This subordination is supported by the norms of international arbitration, and is the source of the perceived ‘investment climate' stability that ultimately allows extractive industry capitalists to attract speculative investment for resource exploration in new ‘frontiers'.

This thesis investigates the link between the precarious lives of underemployed young Korean women in the post IMF crisis and their use of digital media. It draws on precarity and immaterial labour, key concepts in studies on new forms of labour and life in neoliberal, post industrial society. The thesis contributes to this field of research in two main aspects. Firstly, moving away from an ahistorical, Eurocentric, and androcentric tendency, through ethnographic fieldwork, it reveals the particular gendered nature of precarity historically formed in a particular geographical site, South Korea. Secondly, it links the two concepts, which are closely related theoretically but located in different fields. It demonstrates how precarity is a condition leading to individuals taking up forms of immaterial labour in an attempt to manage their precariousness. The research underpinning this argument consisted of a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul, investigating young women's life stories, work trajectories and, following media anthropologists, use of digital media as part of their communicative ecology. The thesis shows how fifteen underemployed young women with different education levels and social backgrounds negotiated precarity, producing various ways of living: lives encircled to an extreme level of social withdrawal; lives juggling with various part-time jobs; lives stuck in permanent training; lives protesting on the street. Their respective modes of underemployment meant that they experienced personal isolation, frustration, and fear of people, forming a strong desire to be ‘normal' in society. Their digital media use was deeply integral to attempts to become normal in everyday life. In this respect, I argue that precarity is a condition to form a vast amount of ‘free labour' workforce for the digital economy.