Skills, and particularly manual skills, are often seen as acquired through unquestioning practice and drill. This is an ethnographic account of a group of railway workers, called shunters, who are occupied with the manual task of assembling carriages into trains. It is here claimed that the acquisition of shunting skills is conditioned by the apprentices' preconceived ideas of 'male', manual, outdoor work and by the dynamics of master-apprentice relations. Two different types of learning strategies, adopted by female and male apprentices respectively, are identified. It is claimed that these strategies lead to differential success in advancement at work. In contrast to approaches which see skill as individual mastery of given tasks it is argued that conceptions of skilful work are subject to social construction. Since cooperation calls for communication, the communicative aspects of skill come into the fore in this type of high-risk work. Card-playing is studied as an arena for expression of skills related to handling risks at work. Team-work, marked by cooperation and uninterrupted fluency, here called 'flow', is ideally based on informal relations and an egalitarian ethos. It is simultaneously thought to presuppose a structured hierarchy of well defined work roles. Team-work is also seen to demand a collective spirit, although idiosyncratic work styles and individualistic behaviour are encouraged. The treatise demonstrates how such contradictory understandings are expressed and mediated in practice, and how they are reconceptualized during a period of uncertainty caused by reorganization and change. The work is based on participation as well as participant observation in one of the largest railway yards for passenger trains in Sweden.

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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The medicalisation of Western childbirth that was initiated in the seventeenth century has resulted in healthier women and infants, but it has also changed the cultural definition of birth as a restricted female experience. There is an increasing insistence among experts to define birth as a heterosexual couple's experience and to regard the woman and the foetus as two separate 'patients.' This development potentially implies a marginalisation of women from birthgiving and changed ways of experiencing pregnancy and childbirth. This thesis aims at analysing the transition to motherhood in contemporary Western societies as an asymmetrical discursive space in which first-time expectant mothers meet with professional experts. At hospitals, prenatal clinics, birth preparation courses, at the actual birth site and in paediatric clinics the women are socialised into an expert-defined cultural model of maternity care. However, they do not just accept the presented model passively: there is a continuing negotiation between the agents of the local birthing system over what is considered to be authoritative knowledge and practice in this area. The study is based on anthropological fieldwork in 1993/94 in a northern Italian town, Borgo. It focuses on how the experts provide models of and for important birthgiving issues such as what birth is and how pregnancy and birth should be managed, defining women's agency in birthing, and prescribing what is a proper experience of birth.

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No description available.

Mass media in various forms have during the last decades increased their presence in India. Among the printed media, the regional daily press has experienced a particularly strong growth through the 1980s and 1990s. This study is primarily concerned with Hindi newspapers and their journalists in the north Indian State of Uttar Pradesh.  The form and the content of the newspapers are dealt with, so are routines and organisation of newswork as well as the background and the careers of journalists. The study also elucidates how the Hindi-language journalists formulate their occupational role and understand their position in the public sphere – particularly in relation to the English-language press in India. A central aim of the research has been to describe local and culturally specific conditions of a profession that is working with similar methods and tasks all over the world. Simultaneously, the journalistic form of cultural production is discussed in relation to processes of cultural globalisation, modernity and political imagination.  The study is based on fieldwork conducted during two periods of totally 10 months, between 1995 and 1998, among journalists in the city of Lucknow.

The Isan farmers in Ubonratchatani province of Northeast Thailand employ Buddhist as well as modernist environmental arguments to resist the spread of commercial eucalyptus plantations carried out by the state. Villagers affected by the consequences of commercial forestry have made a metaphorical link between eucalyptus, destructive exploitation and coercive power. The central argument of the present study is that local environmentalism is a reaction against a government policy which in itself is formulated in conservationist terms. The focus is on the conflict between Thai foresters and Nong Wai Ngam farmers, and how the forest authorities justify their promotion of eucalyptus in conservationist terms, arguing that the species is useful for rehabilitating degraded tropical monsoon forest, while the local villagers protest by inverting the foresters' terms, combining them both with their own farming wisdom and with 'scientific' arguments. The study describes how the forestry debate has been revitalised by inserting political, cultural and religious issues into the eucalyptus question, turning it into an idiom of general resistance. The thesis discusses the forms of village resistance, at the levels of linguistic practice as well as of concrete action ranging from small-scale sabotage to violence. Fieldwork was carried out in 1989-91 and 1993, mainly by participant observation. Intensive interviews, situational analysis and life-history approaches were combined to reconstruct the large-scale processes whereby ideas are transmitted to the Nong Wai Ngam people as well as to give a picture of the environment within which these farmers are acting. The author argues that the practice of resistance engenders changes in the ways parties to the conflict behave and think. Trying to defend what they perceive as central to their culture people make ideational and practical innovations. In the process of the struggle these adaptations develop beyond the original concerns and transform the culture itself.