Access to abstract permanently restricted to Ball State community only. / Review of literature -- Research context and methodology -- Voseo -- Phonological variable -- Morphosyntactic variables. / Department of English

Tobacco smoking in Canada has decreased over the last 20 years but remains persistent in lower socioeconomic status (SES) groups. The current study is an examination of tobacco smoking among lower SES Canadians that seeks to explore the social context of tobacco smoking from the perspective of those individuals who participate in it. This study utilized in-depth interviews with nine working class males from the Greater Vancouver and the Capital Regional Districts. It followed the phenomenological method in attempting to understand the experience of a working class smoker, reading that analysis through a Bourdieusian conceptual framework. This framework served to define the social context in terms of multiple symbolic economies bounded by symbolic boundaries, providing a coherent geography within which to locate the experiences. The study finds that within the working class symbolic economy, tobacco smoking is seen as legitimate and is enmeshed within conceptions of leisure, of self and intimately tied to other culturally-mediated commodities such as alcohol and other drugs. The findings further indicate that tobacco smoking in and of itself is not a cultural capital, but becomes culturally relevant when it is performed correctly. Correct performance requires adherence to certain rules, however, the best performance of smoking is done when it is presented as natural. Tobacco smoking, the findings indicate, is so “taken-for-granted” that unless one is a committed, ‘real’ smoker all others, social smokers included, are considered non-smokers. Through sharing and semi-ritualized consumption, tobacco smoking helps to reinforce reciprocal relationships that strengthen potentially insecure social bonds. Finally, working class males present themselves as self-reliant individuals that find cessation aids and therapies to be an embarrassment to their conception of self, thus to use cessation aids is to admit failure. The implication of these findings is that tobacco persistence exists within a classed symbolic economy that is simply not reached by current tobacco cessation programs and health research. To be effective then, such programs need to take into account the value and role tobacco smoking plays within this economy. / Graduate

Following Bourdieu (1977) and alluding to the work of Toren (1990,1993a, 1999) and Lave (1991) this thesis supports the argument that learning, understood as a participative, historical and generative process, is intrinsic to all social practice and furthermore that all social practice substantiates human mind. It follows therefore that mind is a learning phenomenon and that it makes no sense, for example, to isolate didactic practice from the wider social situations in which children learn. The thesis argues that the form participative learning takes is that of an increasingly differentiated competence with respect to complex relations of exchange in objects, bodily actions and language. It is shown how, through particular exchange relations, the value of persons, practices and things is created and transformed as an ongoing and mutually specifying material process. Taking both childhood and the practice of ethnography as examples of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave 1991) the thesis aims towards a phenomenological description of what it means to become working class in Bermondsey, South East London. Responding to a multicultural political climate in which claims are made that the working class no longer exists, the thesis addresses the popular backlash in which white working class people demand that their social values are recognised and protected. What matters in Bermondsey, for example, is that class relations are to be understood ethnographically as the difference between common and posh people and that this distinction is articulated with whether or not a person was born and bred in Bermondsey. This means that specific ideas about kinship relations and place, understood as particular forms of materiality, mediate the development in Bermondsey of the kind of persons people can become. The chapters that follow will describe the social processes through which Bermondsey people reproduce (Narotzky 1997) the idea of themselves as a distinctive community.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the reasons for the growth of large scale labour migration from Ratnagiri district during the nineteenth century. It is argued firstly that for an understanding of the origins of migration from Ratnagiri it is necessary to investigate the socio-economic structure of the district, since exogenous demand for labour cannot explain many aspects of the pattern of migration from Ratnagiri, nor can it explain the high rate of migration compared to other areas with similar access to labour markets. It is argued that regional and gender patterns of migration from Ratnagiri can be partly explained by the structure of demand for labour within the district; but that the scale of migration can most convincingly be explained in terms of the acute poverty of sections of the rural population. It is argued that this poverty cannot be ascribed to demographic pressure in the early nineteenth century, since population in the district did not rise rapidly until migration was already underway. It is instead suggested that the poverty of many cultivators in the earlier nineteenth century was an outcome of the spread of a village zamindari system in Ratnagiri during the late eighteenth century, the impact of which was intensified by legal changes introduced under British rule; the consequent concentration of landholding in the hands of the village zamindars led to higher exactions on the lower caste cultivators, which stimulated emigration in the mid nineteenth century. Furthermore, it is suggested that the land tenure system was at the root of the problems of agricultural development which the district faced later in the nineteenth century. When population rose In the mid nineteenth century, the extension of cultivation put pressure on the fragile ecology of the district, which led to rapid deforestation and falling yields per acre. it is argued that though cultivation intensified In Ratnagiri during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the output per head nonetheless probably fell, and the system of land tenure discouraged the adoption of many strategies which might have raised output per head, thus perpetuating the poverty which, it is argued, lay at the root of out-migration from Ratnagiri.

This dissertation provides an analytical framework for understanding the left-indigenous cycle of extra-parliamentary insurrection in Bolivia between 2000 and 2005. It draws from Marxist and indigenous-liberationist theory to challenge the central presuppositions of liberal-institutionalist understandings of contemporary indigenous politics in Latin America, as well as the core tenets of mainstream social movement studies. The central argument is that a specific combination of elaborate infrastructures of class struggle and social-movement unionism, historical traditions of indigenous and working-class radicalism, combined oppositional consciousness, and fierce but insufficient state repression, explain the depth, breadth, and radical character of recent left-indigenous mobilizations in Bolivia. The coalition of insurrectionary social forces in the Gas Wars of 2003 and 2005 was led by indigenous informal workers, acting in concert with formal workers, peasants, and to a smaller degree, middle-class actors. The indigenous informal working classes of the city of El Alto, in particular, utilized an elaborate infrastructure of class struggle in order to overcome structural barriers to collective action and to take up their leading role. The supportive part played by the formal working class was made possible by the political orientation toward social-movement unionism adopted by leading trade-union federations. Radicalized peasants mobilized within the broader alliance through their own rural infrastructure of class struggle. The whole array of worker and peasant social forces drew on longstanding popular cultures of indigenous liberation and revolutionary Marxism which they adapted to the novel context of the twenty-first century. These popular cultures ultimately congealed in a new combined oppositional consciousness, rooted simultaneously in the politics of indigenous resistance and class struggle. This collective consciousness, in turn, strengthened the mobilizing capacities of the popular classes and reinforced the radical character of protest. At key junctures, social movement leaders were able to synthesize oppositional consciousness into a focused collective action frame of nationalizing the natural gas industry. Finally, throughout the left-indigenous cycle, ruthless state repression was nonetheless insufficiently powerful to wipe out opposition altogether and therefore acted only to intensify the scale of protests and radicalize demands still further. The legitimacy of the neoliberal social order and the coercive power required to reproduce it were increasingly called into question as violence against civilians increased.

The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the public music-making by locals in Holmsund 1850—1980, and to explain the great variety of musical forms in hope to thereby illuminate the importance of local music-making for the workers' musical taste, but also how workers' musical aesthetics were affected by a more general working-class culture. The variety of musical forms is explained according to John Blacking's distinction between change of musical system, and variation and innovation within a musical system. There are two major changes of the musical system. The first generations of workers in Holmsund were recruited from the surrounding countryside, and the main structure of their music-making seems to have remained unchanged. During the 1880s and 1890s there is an introduction of new elements which dominate the whole industrial epoch: brass instruments become the most highly valued instruments, and the thoroughly organized group playing. The new ideals of instrument sound are related to the new soundscape of the industrial society. Organized group playing is seen as homological with the social organization of industrial production, where the work of individuals in different departments is coordinated by a conductor/executive in power. During the decade of the 1960s the musical system is once more changed. Electronic technology changes the concepts of sounds and distribution forms, the influence of local music-making on public musical taste became marginal. Local music-making cannot therefore be said to reflect a workers' aesthetic, but should rather be interpreted as tendencies counteracting the professionalism and mediafication of modern society. These epochal models outline the basic structural frame of the musical system of each period and the role assigned to local music-making. At the same time there is a great variety of musical forms within each period. These variations are systematized as temporarily-used ways fo managing certain pairs of concepts, which are seen as oppositional or complementary. These pairs are: individual/collective, ideals of equality/professionalization, education/entertainment, continuity/innovation, culture/subculture, and male/female. Finally, the ways in which values and attitudes of the general working-class culture influence the local music scene are analyzed. Instead of the abstract ideals of composition, the usefulness of the music is stressed in popular aesthetics. The genius cult of art musics does not fit into popular music situations, where the will to work hard for the audience is valued instead. Ways of relating to the body form another distinction between bourgeois and worker culture. Popular music is much centred around dance music, which is also used in concert situations. What these values and attitudes have in common is that they are part of a popular aesthetic which the educated aesthetic uses as a negative reference point. / digitalisering@umu

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This thesis highlights the significance of social reproduction of labour in analysing poverty through historical materialist perspective and explores two related sets of arguments. First, poverty is the &#039 / absolute general law&#039 / of the process of pauperization of labour under global accumulation movements of capital. Second, the question of poverty is subjected to the class struggle between historical tendency of labour, which is to collectivize its own reproduction conditions, and that of capital, which is to make it commodity produced and consumed in the parameters of market production. The concept of class struggle thus carries an analytical priority to explore the dynamic nature and the structure of poverty. The findings, based on the critical ethnographic research carried out in the squatter settlement district named &Ccedil / &ouml / pl&uuml / k in Ankara, indicate that the main tendency of the degradation process of labour is to constitute the conditions of common class experience in the labour market, even though it advocates the fractionation in the sphere of production. Moreover, in terms of the perpetual struggle for collectivising their social reproduction, squatter settlements, gecekondus, also seem to be a sphere of common class experience rather than a heterogeneous sociality. The overall findings, therefore, indicate that the current dynamics of poverty rise as a situation in which the whole working-class is in a defensive position to capital.

This thesis is a social history of workplace Australian football between the years 1860 and 1939, charting in detail the evolution of this form of the game as a popular phenomenon, as well as the beginning of its eventual demise with changes in the nature and composition of the workforce. Though it is presented in a largely chronological format, the thesis utilises an approach to history best epitomised in the work of the progenitors of social history, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, and their successors. It embraces and contributes to both labour and sport history-two sub-groups of social history that are not often considered together. A number of themes, such as social control and the links between class and culture, are employed to throw light on this form of football; in turn, the analysis of the game presented here illuminates patterns of development in the culture of working people in Victoria and beyond. The thesis also provides new insights into under-re searched fields such as industrial recreation and the role of sport in shaping employer-employee relations. In enhancing knowledge of the history of grass roots Australian football and demonstrating the workplace game's links with the growth of unionism and expansion of industry, the thesis therefore highlights the complexity and interconnectedness of economic development, class relations and popular culture in constructing social history.

This study focuses on the experiences of working-class women spanning the years from 1888 to 1914 - a period of significant economic growth and socio-political change in Victoria. The drift of population into the urban centres after the goldrush marked the beginning of a rapid and continual urban expansion in Melbourne as the city’s industrial and commercial sectors grew and diversified. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the increasing population provided a larger workforce which also represented a growing consumer market. The rise of the Victorian manufacturing industries in this period also saw the introduction of the modern factory system. With the increasing demand for unskilled labour in factories, it was not only men who entered this new factory workforce. Young women and older children were, for the first time, drawn in appreciable numbers into the industrial workforce as employers keenly sought their services as unskilled and cheap workers. Women were concentrated in specific areas of the labour market, such as the clothing, boot, food and drink industries, which became strictly areas of “women’s work”. In the early twentieth century, the rigid sexual demarcation of work was represented by gender-differentiated wages and employment provisions within industrial awards.