This thesis examines the conditions for professional and aspiring professional male theatre dancers across two separate field sites in Stockholm, Sweden. By analysing these conditions I aim to discuss how hegemonic masculine social norms inform and affect the lives of these male dancers and the consequences of those norms for the wider male population. Through interview, unobtrusive observation and dance participation I will scrutinise the male experience of dance work and training in order to understand the lives of professional male dancers and their perception of themselves and their work, as part of a very small minority of men in Swedish society. Through a comparative analysis of dance and sport, I suggest that the stark gender imbalance in dance work and training is indicative of a larger pattern of hegemonic masculine social norms that stymie male social development and undermine wider societal efforts towards gender equality.

This thesis explores the lives of Maasai women today in general, and in particular as seen through the lens of one woman, and her social network in Kajiado County, southern Kenya. By using a storytelling approach, I let the women’s own vivid stories, thoughts and priorities stay in focus. While the women’s stories reveal personal details in their lives, I argue that their stories also broaden the perspective of what it is to be a Maasai woman today. Inspired by a framework of multispecies relations, especially the concept of relatedness, I look at the relationships – to both humans and non-humans – which shapes the women's lives, possibilities, decisions, and concerns. As I explore the women's more-than-human worlds, the agency of cows, goats, sheep, and even flies are acknowledged. In combination with inspiration from the framework of feminist political ecology – especially the concepts of resource access and displacement – I bridge understandings about how multispecies relations affect the women, with reflections on education and working situations, and matters of land. With this thesis, I wish to contribute to and broaden the literature and often stereotyped image of what it is to be a Maasai, especially a Maasai woman.

The concern that democracy in the largest country in Latin America could drive toward fascism has surfaced as a point of departure for the creation of forms of resistance among Brazilians in the diaspora. This thesis addresses this development by bringing to light the narratives of FIBRA, a transnational social movement created in 2016 to denounce the coup in Brazil. By combining militant, translocal and online ethnography, this thesis explores how FIBRA has constructed its narratives surrounding the erosion of democracy in Brazil. It looks at the experience of Brazilian migrants involved in campaigning against the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, the imprisonment of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the assassination of the activist Marielle Franco, and the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential election. Anthropological theories on social movement, democracy and narrative are revisited in order to investigate FIBRA’s role in shaping ideas and expectations towards democracy. This thesis also explores ways to bring the artistic practices in the field into the anthropological text. I use elements of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theater, Greek Tragedy and Carnival in my writing and employ these artistic languages as conceptual tools to develop a notion of democracy as a tragic carnivalesque hero. In the spirit of the Brazilian carnivalesque, this thesis celebrates the subversive dimension of the relation between the “playful”, the “political”, and the “academic”.

This study focuses on the relationship between the responses of Indian Muslim migrants to the Cape, (based in an Indian group area in Cape Town, called Rylands) and the responses of the environment to Indians. There has been remarkably little work of any nature undertaken concerning Indians in the Cape. The broad anthropological framework emphasises the centrality of the Indians' own perception of their lives, and the significance of the external constraints imposed on them through various means.

The dissertation examines how pregnant women seeking antenatal care at a state facility in the Southern Peninsula of Cape Town conceptualise and experience their pregnancies in relation to the biomedical model that informs state practices of care. I specifically explore the experiences that contribute to the state's definition of 'late' presentation at antenatal clinics (i.e. after the first trimester). The antenatal care model advises that pregnant women report "early", at 12 weeks, and have regular follow up visits up until 40 week period, yet recent public health research showed that women present "late" to the antenatal clinics, with only 40.2% of first antenatal visits occurring in the first trimester in South Africa. The women who were a part of the research were chosen in the clinic space, in waiting rooms, booking rooms and while waiting for ultrasounds. The women were selected based on age (17 upwards), and gestational age at first antenatal booking. I examine the ways biomedicine frames temporality, and the way that health policy enacts this through antenatal care. I contest the brackets of 'lateness' and biomedicalisation of pregnancy, and the state's version of the female reproductive body as I describe the unfolding experiences of a reproductive life, showing how pregnancy and health care seeking are enmeshed in social worlds. The discursive framings of antenatal attendance exhorts women to seek antennal care at 12 weeks gestation, to "be responsible" "good women" managing their sexual and reproductive lives with a mode surveillance that presumes a certain way of knowing and counting the body. I explore the other ways of experiencing, knowing, and counting, showing how pregnancy experiences and healthcare seeking behaviours are influenced by social, economic, political, and historical factors, and by the moral and religious values that shape daily life for women. My thesis is grounded in the growing literature on anthropology of reproduction and the biosocial. In doing so, I examine what it means to have and experience a reproductive body within the unfolding events of everyday life, where moments and 'quasievents' (such as structural inequalities, and the daily bouts of gang violence and domestic violence) become enmeshed, such that they influence temporality, differing perceptions of trust, distrust, risk and testing, and differing social values of testing. I further show how maternal kinship networks of support are valued, yet precarious as are intimate partnerships, which both influence experiences of care, neglect, abuse, punishment and shape antenatal attendance. In contesting temporal boundaries of biomedicine I show how women's bodily and relational experiences, their everyday lives and quasi-events within them are inseparable in shaping antenatal health seeking practices and how pregnancies are imagined.

Despite recurrent academic interest in the study of race in both South Africa and in Brazil, little work has been done in Anthropology about the two countries of the Global South in relation to each other. This thesis is situated in that gap and presents an ethnographic study about the racialised experiences of Brazilian migrants in South Africa, in order to explore the different processes of racialization that occur in South Africa and Brazil. The first part of the investigation focuses on the conflictual encounter between informants’ internalized racial habitus as learned in Brazil with the one they encounter in South Africa. The second part examines the impact that such racialization has on the racial identity of Brazilian individuals. Informants found themselves in situations of racial ambiguity in which they did not fit perfectly in any of the local racial categories, and were classified by South Africans in different (and sometimes multiple) racial categories from their previous one in Brazil. I use the theoretical lens of intersectionality to explore informants’ reflections on 'what they are’ as they socially adapted to South African racial categorisations and habitus.

In the globalized world, border regimes are ambiguous, withdrawn or reinforced based on who approaches them, where and how. Borders are equally the boundaries that permeate spaces of nation-states and cut across them through racialized, gendered, and classed divisions. Following the so called "migration crisis" in Europe of 2015, there has been a wave of research documenting how practices of bordering and othering dehumanize asylum seekers, violating their rights. In this thesis, I proceed from similar observations to see how such practices, together with experiences resulting from them, affect the possibilities of agency and imagination of a common space on behalf of people with migratory background. Employing the idea of hybridity, I maintain that while the responsibility for atrocities related to migration and bordering should always remain on violators, whether official institutions or individuals, their persistence should not be seen as foreclosing agency, imagination, or practices of building a future common space on behalf of people with migratory background. The hybrid position that these people occupy does not necessarily only sustain their disempowerment, but it also equips them with unique possibilities for agency. Neither seems there to be any predefined path from exposure to harsh violations of one's rights to disempowerment. The possibilities for common and welcoming places to which everyone has a right appear through an engaged and equal attention to migrants' own agency, imagination, and capabilities, rather than through an exclusive attention to their vulnerability or a neoliberal celebration of multiculturalism.

This thesis explores different ways of relating to forests, and thus also different types of forestry. Starting with the Swedish forest industry one which is characterized by the planting of forests at the expense of natural regeneration, thus making Sweden the fifth country in the world in terms of planted area the study then examines different forests. This study is conducted with qualitative methods and by “following the seed” looks at various actors’ interests and potential flaws in the venture of planting forests. Different possibilities of doing forestry are explored in the thesis through letting modern forestry meet local forest-owners as well as a seed-collecting practice in central Sweden.  These processes are explored by understanding the forest as an assemblage of historical decisions, species and human interests, tracing relations and powers within and beyond forestsfrom a more-than-human perspective. Forestry emerges as an attempt at domestication of the forest and the thesis explores how it goes wild, as well as the meeting of modern industrialism and science with other world views, values and practices. This allows for an alternative understanding of forests, forestry beyond industrialism and modernity, and what sort of futures we might have living together with forests.

Denna uppsats syftar till att utforska användningen av Hammarbys supporterbegrepp Hammarbyism. Genom att följa Supportrarnas Matchprogram som är en central knytpunkt i Hammarbys supporterkultur och genom djupintervjuer med individer inom Matchprogrammet går det att se mönster i vad som försöks förmedlas med hjälp av begreppet Hammarbyism. Med Hammarbyismens användning som utgångspunkt går det att utforska Hammarbys supportergemenskap och kultur.

This anthropological essay investigates the meaning for a recovering drug addictto be free from drugs. The paper includes three semi-structural interviews withrecovering addicts as well as material from one podcast, to investigate theconcept of being free from drugs from recovering addicts perspectives. To helpinvestigate the subject further, research regarding dominating Swedish politicalnorms is being presented in this paper. The essay consists of a theory- andliterature overview regarding addiction and recovery to help understand whatbeing clean from drugs means for a recovering addict. This essay ultimatelyargues that being free from drugs can mean being functional, living withouthighs and spirituality and meaning.