No description available.

Thesis--Tübingen. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 162-167).

No description available.

Based on a long-term ethnography inside a block of flats in Piatra-Neamt, Romania, this thesis explores how individuals, through everyday creative engagements with their apartments, try to come to terms with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing society - one caught between the vulnerabilities of both socialism and capitalism. It examines the inhabitants' capacity for self-organization, with a focus on the daily life of a block administrator overseeing the maintenance and repair of his ageing building. By paying close attention to a range of infrastructural elements often taken for granted - from water taps and boilers, to balconies and windows - my research offers new insights into how people negotiate complex relationships of trust and suspicion in the light of degrading infrastructure. Within the context of increasingly decentralized resources, I also demonstrate various difficulties involved in sustaining day-to-day practices of energy-saving, and discuss the block inhabitants' multifaceted understanding of the 'common good'. Finally, I emphasize how apartment renovations are fuelled by motivations that are at once aesthetic and functional, and thus problematize the distinction between these two categories that has dominated anthropological studies of the built environment to this day. My thesis contrasts the well-established literature about the home - that pays attention to aesthetics and identity at the micro-scale of the domestic space - with recent studies about infrastructure that typically examine macro-scale, functional reasons for urban transformations. Overall, I argue for a more prominent role for the study of home infrastructures in anthropology, while also contributing to debates about housing and energy policies.

This dissertation utilizes the gay neighborhood of Chueca as the foci for understanding the rise of public gay identity in Madrid and Spain. By "reading" the urban space and coupling that reading with information gathered from ethnographic and historical methodologies, my work sheds light on the role of globalization in sexual identity, draws connections between changes in socio-political circumstances and the rise of public gay identity, and explores how gay men understand and use urban spaces in order to engage fluid and fixed sexual subjectivities. This dissertation, a product of over two years of living and researching in Chueca, Madrid, Spain, is informed by themes of: globalization of sexual identity; the relationships between sexual identity, consumption and popular culture; the use and sometimes abuse of urban space for the fomentation of sexual identity in personal lives, politics and public awareness; and, of course, the problems facing a 'native' and yet, foreign anthropologist in a globalized Western European city. Overall, the study addresses how the urban space of Chueca is understood, utilized, and taken advantage of by the gay community in Madrid; and the repercussions, and consequences evident from 1975, the time of Spain´s transition to democracy (La Transición) to one year after the 2005 legalization of gay marriage in Spain.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Anthropology, 2000. / Bibliography: leaves 381-418.

Jackson, Mississippi is currently undergoing a revitalization movement in an attempt to revive its blighted downtown core. While physical development is crucial to revival of the downtown landscape, the cultural landscape must also be considered. I hypothesized that developers, business owners, and residents working or living in and around downtown Jackson would report differing desires, positions, and values concerning four elements of sustainable development: cultural, economic, political, and environmental. Ultimately, the hypothesis was refuted according to the quantitative data analysis. However, there were different understandings within the qualitative data where the substance of this research project can be found. These data serve as a “Dialogue of Values” (Blewitt 2008) and an indicator of concerns on which Jacksonians can focus as revitalization continues. This foundation of concerns also establishes a benchmark to measure future inquiries into the inclusion of sustainable development in Jackson’s revitalization.

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This research explores the dynamic relationship between place, history and landscape in an urban food market, Catania, Sicily. This market informs a mythological image of the island and my main concern is what significance lies underneath this representation. I examine the ways in which this image has been constructed through ideas of history, space, landscape, modernity and tradition. Unpacking these notions in the light of my in-depth ethnography, I address how vendors and buyers frame and define their relationship with space and time. After placing the market in relation to its historical and geo-political context, I argue that the representation of passivity and the lack of agency have contributed to the maintaining of elitist local and national powers. The use of space within the market informs a distinctive cosmology, in which the landscape constitutes the main local organising principle. The landscape is looked at as a cultural process, constantly renegotiated and recontextualised. The principal categories of food classification ‘wild’, ‘local’,and ‘foreign’ are explanatory notions of a specific relationship between people, food and locality. The interaction between vendors and buyers cannot be understood as a purely economic transaction. Their relationship is articulated through a unique set of practices, which are analysed throughout this thesis. Senses, social interactions, culinary knowledge, and conviviality contribute to the ability to operate within the market. I look at my own ethnographic experience as a practical “apprenticeship”. I also address the local ideas of tradition and modernity, mainly through the analysis of the shared fears of being left behind and of losing control over the process of change. The idea of modernisation as an ongoing process carries with it a sense of loss, of nostalgia for an idealised past.

This thesis explores the experiences of an urban population who are considered to exist at the social margins of society, but who paradoxically spend much of their time in urban public space. Often referred to as ‘street people,’ the issues they face, such as homelessness and drug addiction, become public issues. In this thesis, I introduce and develop the concept of the marginal public to refer to this population, exploring their experience of the city not through the lens of their marginalization but through their relationship to the spatial and social realms of urban life. I explore the ways in which the marginal public, through their visibility and presence in the city, are not marginal to urban life but deeply embedded in it. Their marginality is lived simultaneously yet in contestation with dominant ways of being. This manifests in the marginal public’s relationship to others in the city, as well as through debates about the placing of facilities that serve them which I explore through the unsanctioned supervised consumption site of Overdose Prevention Ottawa (OPO). Finally, through the concept of heterotopia, I explore the margins as places of otherness as well as possibility.