When older Americans face a need for long term care, they face a crisis that is all but unresolvable. Long term care is specifically excluded under Medicare policy, and few insurance packages adequately protect the elderly from catastrophic long term care costs. Only Medicaid, the means-tested health care program for all ages, provides coverage of long term care. By default then, we have a poverty-based long term care system in the United States. / What are the effects of a poverty-based long term care system? Class-based theories of the welfare state suggest that targeted benefits stratify society along class lines. This study suggests that the effects of targeted benefits can be devastating to the elderly and their families, and that the negative side-effects fall disproportionately on women and nonwhites. Targeted benefits do create class cleavages, but they also divide society along dimensions that transcend class lines, namely race and gender. / This dissertation examines Medicare and Medicaid policy, as well as the National Nursing Home Survey of 1985 and the National Long Term Care Survey of 1982-1984. Specific topics analyzed include spenddown, Medicaid use in nursing homes and in the community, the uncovered poor, the Medicaid gap, Medicaid's revolving door, spousal impoverishment and informal caregiving. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 3096. / Major Professor: Jill Quadagno. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

This study examines the relationship between ethnic consumers' reactions to advertising appeals and their acculturation mode. A model of acculturation was tested that proposes the existence of four acculturation modes based on combinations of American and ethnic cultural identification levels. An experiment was conducted using a two (advertising appeals: American and ethnic) X four (acculturation modes: assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization) X two repeated measures (products: beverage and phone) design. Subjects' ad affect and ad cue recognition responses were analyzed. The hypotheses predicted that subjects' responses to the American and ethnic appeals would vary by acculturation orientation. / The sample consisted of 220 African-American college students. The sample's distribution of American and ethnic cultural identification scores represented two of the four possible acculturation modes--the Integration-oriented (HI-American, HI-Ethnic ID) and the Separation-oriented (LO-American, HI-Ethnic ID) modes. The MANCOVA and ANOVA results indicated significant product effects. Overall, the findings showed that both acculturation groups had higher ad affect and correctly recognized more cues for the ethnic ads than for the American ads. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3224. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

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No description available.

This research explores selected cultural traditions and histories associated with the Pomaks, a community inhabiting the Rhodope Mountains of southwestern Bulgaria. They speak Bulgarian as a mother tongue, but profess Islam as their religion unlike the country's Orthodox Christian majority. Based on this linguistic unity, the Pomaks have been subjected to recurring forced assimilation since Bulgaria's independence from Ottoman rule in 1878. Today, taking advantage of Bulgaria's democratic rule, they are beginning to assert a heritage of their own making. Still, remnants of entrenched totalitarian mentality in the official cultural domain prevent any formal undertaking to that effect. / With the Pomaks as my case study, this research links the concept of heritage to identity and the way dissenting voices negotiate a niche for themselves in public spaces already claimed by rigid master narratives. I advocate pluralistic interpretation of heritage in the public domain, where master and vernacular narratives exist and often collide. Insofar as cultural diversity serves to enrich the heritage discourse, heritage professionals ought to serve as educators in society, not as creators of exclusionary master narratives. Using fieldwork, archival research, and available literature to support a relevant theoretical framework, I strive for understanding of what constitutes (Pomak) heritage and what ways there are to promote and preserve alternative narratives. Five stories regarding Pomak identity serve as my analytical frame of reference and constitute a premeditated effort to identify, formulate, and preserve in writing fundamental aspects of a highly contested and threatened heritage. / A striking example of a Pomak tradition which merits preservation is the elaborate wedding of Ribnovo, a small village in the western Rhodope. The wedding's most visible manifestation today is the elaborate and colorful mask of the bride, a ritual long gone extinct outside of Ribnovo. Four other case studies examine prominent aspects of Pomak heritage, including forced assimilation, nationalism, and historical narratives.

This thesis explores how the standardization of language in China has been used, historically and contemporarily, as a means to unify the empire and restructure relations between citizens and the state through processes of identification. Looking in particular at the case of China's minzu (ethnic groups), I argue that the current trend instituted through policies at the top-level is to eliminate linguistic and cultural diversities through the promotion of Putonghua as the lingua franca and to eventually amalgamate all minzu of the multi-minzu state into a mono-minzu, Zhonghua Minzu (citizens of the Chinese nation). Beginning with an overview of the historical practices of language standardization, I show how the ideological nature of politically influenced terminologies in the Chinese language has contributed to this restructuring of identity. With identity tied closely to language, recently enacted laws in mainland China have brought the government a step closer to achieving its ultimate goal of creating a mono-minzu state.

As a project located in the academic field of the study of African American religion, this dissertation examines the black body in four critical moments of the Nation of Islam (NOI), represented by the ministries of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammed, and Louis Farrakhan. Defined as the material locus of the self and the site of the symbolization of a given collective culture and cosmology, the project argues that the body was the central concern in all four moments in their religious efforts to re-imagine, reform, and re-present bodies that they perceived had been distorted, disfigured, and devalued by racist violence, discourses, and oppression in America. The research contends that the NOI was only partially "successful" in its reformative efforts to reconstitute and valorize black bodies. Utilizing the hermeneutical frameworks of critical social theory, which includes psychoanalysis, philosophy of embodiment (phenomenology) and race, and a theory and method based approach to the study of religion in its analysis and interpretation, the project suggests that the NOI may have internalized many of the dynamics and values of white supremacy and, as a consequence, re-produced and re-deployed its own system of intra-"race" marginalization and hierarchical classification within the NOI and in the greater African American community. Such discrimination was predicated upon an ideal black bodily economy that ranked bodies based on indicators such as gender, sexuality, and skin complexion. As a result of having co-opted middle-class American and African American values and practices, the research concludes that the NOI converted problematic issues of "race" into an ambiguous and indeterminate class system in their response to the exigencies of the conditions of existence for African Americans. The research suggests both the need for greater attention to the body in African American religious studies, analyses of the co-constitutive elements of class, gender, race, and sexuality, and for reflexive consideration of the ways in which systems of domination may be socially reproduced and/or disrupted by marginalized collectivities.

From the unique perspective of the oath, this study investigates the entanglements of change in Kenya during the Mau Mau period, 1952-1960. Specifically, it challenges the prevailing Mau Mau narrative, revealing the oath as a complex, adaptive, and rational process ordered around symbols, gestures, and statements with long standing meaning and power. All Mau Mau initiates were required to take a secret oath of unity in order to join the struggle. Breaking the oath invoked an unstoppable curse on oathers and their families. As a result, the oath became a powerful mechanism in the formation of Mau Mau and served as a precursor to Kenyan Independence in 1963. Contrary to the long standing discourse of savagery, the Mau Mau oath was actually an elaborate, dynamic, and sophisticated ceremony based on ancient oathing traditions, symbolism, and beliefs. It was reconstituted from its former state to one that was much more offensive, secretive, dangerous, and inclusive of other groups such as women who were previously excluded. The oath was a product of the economic, political, cultural, and social unrest of the time. In addition to tracing historical developments and modeling the oath experience, this study explores the radicalization of the oath during the Mau Mau period forming new relationships to gender, crime, and purification that did not exist prior to the 1950s. This study centers the oath as the object for historical analysis through the investigation and documentation of African rituals, beliefs, and memories. The past is reconstructed from oral tradition, personal narratives, ceremonial reenactments, survey data, archived documents, ethnography, and myths. The sources reveal that Mau Mau oathers had their own imaginations, dreams, and objectives associated with the restoration of their stolen land and freedom. These varied perspectives demonstrate colonial contradictions juxtaposed with African oral accounts and memory. This study offers a fresh way to look at the contested Mau Mau past through the lens of the often misunderstood and misinterpreted oath. It intervenes with a new African Mau Mau story of reinvention, renewal, and power.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Antonia Darder. Includes supplementary digital materials. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-256) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Adviser: Mari Jo Buhle. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 228-241).