The growing Thai community in Eastern Massachusetts has an unofficial ethnic enclave that surrounds the neighborhood of Allston/Brighton. Studies of Thai communities in the United States indicate that Thai-Americans have limited access to quality health care in the United States due to factors that contribute to health disparities such as language barriers and cultural beliefs. As a result, Thai people have different approaches to how they treat illnesses through traditional Thai medicine (TTM), Western medicine (also called biomedicine), or a mixture of both medical systems. This study examines healthways Thai/Thai Americans in Eastern Massachusetts draw on in response to different illnesses. In-depth stories of how this community engages in illness prevention and responses to the experiences of illness illuminated by Thai people’s approaches to different medical systems helps us understand how they present their values when seeking medical care. I argue that responses to various illness episodes experienced by members of the Thai community in Eastern Massachusetts influence perceived health and health-seeking behaviors. Factors that contribute to Thai-American health practices include: religion, sociocultural elements (cultural identity, generational differences, cross-cultural differences, structural violence), and Thai constructs of illness and well-being.

Hmong Americans' postsecondary completion rates remain low when compared to other Asian ethnic groups. As the Hmong population continues to grow, so does the need for intervention to increase the total number of postsecondary graduates. Many Hmong Americans are first-generation college students and continue to face challenges and barriers that prevent them from being successful in higher education. “Forty-seven and a half percent of Hmong adults (25 years or older) reported having attended college, but not earning a degree” (National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education, 2011). Without a college degree, Hmong Americans face limited resources and opportunities to advance in their careers, resulting in limited earning potential (Research Summary, n.d.). Without a college degree, career options are limited, and may result in low-wage jobs that perpetuate the poverty level of SEAAs. (“Overview of the Educational Challenges of SEAA - 2013,” n.d.) Asian Americans continue to be successful in degree completion rates, masking the struggles of sub-ethnic groups that immigrated to America in the late 1970s to early 1980s as they assimilate into America. To address the issue of low completion rates of Hmong Americans, targeted services will aid and support them through their academic journey. Many Hmong Americans begin their journey in higher education at a community college. Community colleges have been providing education and skills training helping to fill the needs of high-demand industries. Community colleges have transformed millions of American lives paving the way to the middle class through middle-class careers (Holliefield-Hoyle & Hammons, 2015, pg. 29). Attrition rates of Hmong Americans remain a primary concern in postsecondary institutions. Primary causes of attrition include inadequate financial support, unsolidified academic decisions, and life interruptions (Bowers et al., 2019, pg. 2). As colleges strive to provide resources to alleviate some of these barriers, many students do not utilize these services (Bowers et al., 2019, pg.2). The purpose of this study was to identify success strategies of Hmong Americans that completed their undergraduate degrees and beyond to provide information to current and future Hmong Americans as they pursue their degree. These strategies helped the participants as they discover new things while learning to balance school, work, children, and cultural obligations. Through a basic general qualitative study, the research identified the following themes: 1) First-Generation College Students; 2) Counseling; 3); Connection with Professors 4) Connection with colleagues; 5) Library; 6) Tutoring; 7) Personal growth. Much research is needed to continue the research into other successful measures Hmong Americans have used to complete their undergraduate degrees and beyond. This research contributes toward the growing research into successful strategies used by Hmong Americans and other students in America as the information gathered from this research will aid all postsecondary students.

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Although the majority of Filipinos are Christian, recent developments reflect an upsurge in conversion to Islam, particularly in the northern Philippines. This dissertation examines one of the fastest growing religious phenomena in Southeast Asia, Balik-Islam, which means “reverts to Islam,” or the process of “returning to Islam.” The Balik-Islam movement has become popular since the 1970s, and its religious narratives on Muslim reversion challenge and complicate what we already know generally about conversion to new religions, including the impact of the external “non-religious” factors associated with it. This dissertation shows how a discourse of “reversion” among Balik-Islam members reveals complex realities about the appeal of Islam to Filipinos. While other scholars have used paradigms concerning “othering” and underlying “symbolic” forces to understanding the reasons why conflict and crisis might appear in conversion narratives, this characterization also tends to reify religion and position Christianity and Islam as polar opposites operating within a hostile environment. My approach is to understand how Balik-Islam members negotiate their transition to Islam by virtue of social and cultural settings that are both fluid and multifaceted. By critically assessing their “reversion” narratives, this dissertation reveals how their transition to Islam reflects a “symbolic negotiation,” or an act of reimagining the process of religious conversion itself, substituting it for a discourse of reversion that reflects a diverse set of spiritual and social needs. / Religion

This paper examines Free World articles covering anticommunism, modernization, decolonization, intra-regionalism, US foreign affairs, US foreign aid, and neocolonialism because the task of popularizing specific iterations of these ideas illustrated the implementation of the ideas formulated in NSC 48/5. Moreover, NSC 48/5 called non-communist Asia the location of “the most immediate threats to American National Security.” My paper seeks to answer the question of how American propaganda in Asia, seen through a case study of Free World, tried to accomplish this popularization objective. I argue that the United States Information Agency (USIA) masked America’s neocolonialist intentions and activities in East and Southeast Asia through a rhetoric of anticommunism, intra-regionalism, and modernization. / History

For centuries, the Bajau people sailed the seas between what we now refer to as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines on houseboats of their own construction. Adept sustenance divers, they forage the sea floor for sea cucumber, fish, black coral and more, often spending over 60% of their working day underwater. On a single breath, the best of them can reach depths of 70 feet, stay submerged for five minutes, and see twice as well as we can. These activities, learned and transferred over generations, have prompted genetic adaptations that allow the Bajau to survive and thrive amphibiously. The Bajau are now being targeted by States and NGOs to receive education aid. Indonesia, as a signatory of the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child, has sought to provide primary education to all children. Although well-intended, such efforts presuppose the Bajau are not capable of adequately educating their own children, and have prompted their mass sedentarization. Such attempts to help are predicated on the notion that education must occur in land-based schools, which has potentially devastating consequences for sea-centric people such as the Bajau, for which mandating attendance in land-based schools constitutes a threat of epistemicide. Such solutions threaten geographically mobile people because their lifestyle is taken up as a problem to be solved, molded to fit with education developers’ conceptions of education. This preoccupation with movement as a problem detracts from serious consideration of the unique learning needs, livelihoods, and values of mobile aid recipients. Instead of learning from Bajau ways of knowing and being, we’ve sought to assimilate them. Instead of helping them become self-sufficient, education is rendering them reliant on the State. Moving people into dependence is not what the State intended or the Bajau desire. Human movement is complicated the politics of nations now more than ever before. Governments use education specifically to gain control over people living in movement via spatial, social, and cultural manipulation. Nomads and refugees – among the most marginalized social groups in this globalized era – expose tension between two otherwise-agreeable maxims: that all cultures are valuable and deserving of respect, and that all children have a right to a quality education. Because common conceptions of education involve sedentary schools, the education provided to moving people is often hegemonic or neocolonial. What’s done is done – the Bajau who have sedentarized cannot return to a nomadic lifestyle. They did so to access education that can help them transition their intellective competencies to life on land and survive in new social and environmental contexts. The education they have been provided has fallen short, in large part because Bajau leaders and teachers have been excluded from planning processes or involvement otherwise. This study seeks to make legible the wisdom and ways of life of communities of once-nomadic Bajau people who have sedentarized in Southeastern Sulawesi, as well as the role ethnopedagogies play in sustaining and revitalizing their epistemo-ontologies. What perspectives and practices belong to their epistemes and ontologies? How are their epistemes being sustained, revitalized, and reduplicated cross-generationally? How are Bajau people sedentarized in Southeastern Sulawesi making use of schools, teachers, and curricula provided by the Indonesian State, and how have Bajau people and wisdom been incorporated into them? To contribute to the understandings of theorists, ethnographers, government policymakers, non-governmental development workers, inter/national education development practitioners, nomads and other displaced people, Bajau leaders, and interested others about how the provision of sedentary schooling has impacted and could better respond to the expression and transmission of culturally situated wisdom and ways of life of Bajau people, this ethnographical study provides thick description in the form of vignettes that offer insight into the experiences of people in Bajau communities in Southeast Sulawesi. In so doing, the vignettes also support calls for rethinking teacher recruitment, preparation, placement, and retention, school design and use, academic calendars, and more. The vignettes enable this study to explore pedagogical models that have the potential to sustain and perhaps even revitalize culturally situated wisdom.

Firstly, while the Yao people inhabit in wide geographic regions stretching across Southern China and South East Asia, even overseas, the Paiyao, a branch of the Yao who inhabits only in the Liannan district of the Guangdong province, is unique not only in their geographical inhabitancy but also cultural characteristics. / Secondly, while Yao people's Getang ritual is a wide spread ritual practice with local variations, there has not been any in-depth study on the Getang ritual of the Paiyao people. / The significance of this study are Three-fold. / The thesis aims to study the soundscape of Paiyao ethnic nationality's "Getang Ritual" in Guangdong Province. / Thirdly, with a musicological concern, this thesis approaches its subject from the perspective of "soundscape of the ritual enactment", (Tsao Penyeh 2006: 81) and aspires to reach an understanding of the wider meaning of the Getang ritual among the Paiyao people and their society. / This study consists of the following three processes: (1) Fieldwork to investigate and compile ethnographic texts from both the researcher's observation and insiders' oral narrations and relating to actions in the makings of the ritual soundscape. (2) Analysis of the ritual "sounds", in terms of themselves and their extra-musical factors. (3) Interpretation of the meaning of ritual sounds and their soundscape of Paiyao's Getang ritual within the framework of the belief system that consists of a trinity of sounds and soundscape, ritual enactment and belief. / This thesis has seven chapters, with its theoretical and methodological reverences indebted to ritual studies by Tsao Penyeh (his research of ritual and ritual soundscape of China's belief systems) and Clifford Geertz (his many writings on anthropological theory and methodology, as well as his study of "reinterpretation to other's interpretation"). / 周凱模. / Adviser: Pen-Yeh (Poon-Yee) Tsao. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: A, page: 2945. / Thesis (doctoral)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-317) and indexes. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / School code: 1307. / Zhou Kaimo.

<p>This dissertation investigates the traumatic legacies of colonialism, imperialism and authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, the diasporic conditions of Southeast Asian refugees in North America after 1975, and the relationship among literature, ethics, and reconciliation more broadly. Focusing primarily on contemporary novels that intervene in the cultural memory of the Cambodian genocide, the War in Viet Nam, and the World War II Japanese Occupation of Malaysia, my dissertation conceptualizes an intimate politics of reconciliation that routes the study of justice foremost through questions of affect, epistemology and ethics. An intimate politics of reconciliation, I argue, encapsulates a constellation of intimate memorial acts—ritual, testimony, collaboration, gifting, and narrative reconstruction—that operate within and against macro-political and juridical modalities of justice. My research highlights productive scenes of convergence between discourses of post-genocide reconciliation and alternative spiritual cosmologies, between refugee collaborative writing and theories of gifting, and between theories of forgetting and social and psychic reparation. In arguing that Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies paradoxically foreground the necessity of both remembering and forgetting in the collective work of reconciliation, this dissertation engages with and challenges two key theoretical paradigms in Asian American Studies—a politics of social justice premised upon a discourse of “subjectlessness” and a psychoanalytic paradigm of productive melancholia theory.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)