Purpose- The main purpose of this research is to develop and validate the innovation resistance model across Middle Eastern countries. Design/ Methodology/ Approach- The solar panel is used as an example of a disruptive innovation in the Middle East. Data is collected by distributing questionnaires from 810 houshold decision makers from residential areas across three countries in the Middle East: Iran, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The main method of analysis is Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Findings- The results show that fatalism and traditionalism are key cultural indicators of innovation resistance in the Middle East. In addition, the prominent role of consumer innovators in reducing resistance to innovation is approved. Research Implications- None of the previous studies have developed an empirical model of innovation resistance using a wide range of forces, i.e. culture, consumer characteristics, attributes of innovation and socio-demographics. Practical Implications- Fast diffusion of innovations can be challenging within fatalistic and traditional societies. Marketers should position solar panels as a continuous innovation that fits well within the context of past experience. In addition consumer innovators as opinion leaders can influence and advise other members of a society to make a purchase decision and should be targeted by marketers.

This project aims at illuminating that agents’ ideas/perceptions on their (social)surrounding affect their deliberative actions to improve their regional security. The engaging/networking agents’ main attempt is to enlarge the scope of traditional security to accommodate more comprehensive aspects by using regional economic concerns as a spearhead before extending to other fields. Familiarity and socialising process through conferences and workshops are both positive outcomes and structure for agents’ ideas/perceptions on engaging/networking activities. Yet, agents’(socially) collective identity has not commonly perceived as expected by a set-up framework. This project is conducted in a circular style which is open for revising a set-up framework employed here for narrating the results in a chronological fashion. The framework is constructed from related concepts and theories. Main concepts are ‘active agents’, ‘intellectuals’, and ‘networks’. Main sources of theories are drawn mainly from constructivism, epistemic community, advocacy coalition framework, and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action (TCA). The TCA provides a useful path to fill in the gap left by the earlier theories whose concerns are grounded on agents’ outward-looking aspects of cooperation. Trust is a presupposition from all theories. Although there is a trend towards it, the research result can not apparently express it.

This dissertation investigates how stories about the Marathi sant-poet Eknath of Paithan (1533-1599) interacting with untouchables changed over the course of three centuries of textual repetition and dramatic representation. In tracing memories of Eknath over such time and through various Marathi public spheres, the dissertation sheds light on why Eknath has come to be viewed in complicated and conflicted ways in the present. This examination of stories, particularly as they pertain to inter-caste relations and the expression of a bhakti social outlook, offers a chance to view how understandings of devotional religion and caste changed in Maharashtrian society between 1700 and the present. At the heart of these stories is a narrative tension between Eknath's boundary-transgressing actions that are presented in spiritually egalitarian terms, and societal expectations about ritual purity and brahman-ness. I show that although the details of the stories change through various repetitions and renditions, this tension endures and produces an ambiguity in the narrative that (perhaps intentionally) makes Eknath's social allegiance impossible to determine. My sources for this study include hagiographical texts (ca. 1650-1800), biographical books and essays (1880-1925), and six major dramas and films (1903-2005) -- all of which richly portray aspects of Eknath's life, and nearly all of which are in Marathi. In the course of preparing this historiographical analysis, I introduce many Marathi sources to the English scholarly world for the first time and call attention to several historical texts and plays that have been forgotten or overlooked by Marathi scholars as well.

This dissertation examines the formation of urban poverty and slums which have long stigmatized South Asian cities. It focuses on the emergence of markets in housing through the 19th and early 20th centuries in Bombay primarily, and Karachi and Aden secondarily. It is the first historical study of slums, or poor and stigmatized housing, in colonial Western India. It critically engages with the terms of global urban modernity and the historiography of colonialism in South Asia, challenging the broader nationalist frames in which scholars have understood South Asia's poverty. While this is not a comparative project, the dissertation interrogates many of the implicit and explicit comparative claims that have been made about colonial cities and their legibility in the discourse on global slums. Housing was a visible marker of inequality on the urban landscape and therefore a useful site through which to examine the changing relations between migrants and settlers, laborers and capitalists, and society and the state. The changing political economy of Western India resulted in a laboring and urban poor whose housing issues became productive of regional, colonial, and national difference. By following circular migrants across city and country, this study builds on the subcontinent's Early Modern history of a pervasive rural-urban continuum of human networks. Everyday workers used their mobility and habitation practices to negotiate a changing world, bringing cities like Bombay, Karachi, and Aden into their routes of mobility to earn a livelihood. Increased opportunities combined with the intensification of production, market crises, growing demographic pressures on the land, and the spread of indebtedness to produce and reproduce inequality. This dissertation also compares the subsequent management of the urban poverty problem in cities across Western India, which heightened concerns over public health and sanitation. Newly financed poor housing initiatives sought to correct these at the turn of the century, but their limitations made modern slums. By addressing the eventual obfuscation of the once-transitioned status of the modern slum-dweller, this study delineates the bases for the conceptualization of a distinctive third world poverty and urban form.

Sri Lanka's thirty-year civil war brought about tremendous suffering upon the lives of the Tamil civilian population in northern Sri Lanka. In May 2009, when the war ended, not a single civilian remained within the Vanni, the former rebel territory, as they had all been killed or displaced. More than one hundred thousand civilians were dead or disappeared and three hundred thousand survivors were held in so-called "transit camps" without freedom of movement. The data for this dissertation is based on extensive anthropological field research conducted in northern Sri Lanka during the last phase of the civil war and into its aftermath over a period of two and a half years between July 2007 and May 2010. It sets out to explain the experience of suffering among a Tamil Catholic fishing community, which, due to the war, had been displaced from its coastal home, Perunkalipattu in 1999, and has been relocated to the City of Santa Marta, an internal-refugee camp. Between July 2007 and May 2009, this community was part of the four hundred thousand Tamil civilians trapped in so-called "no-fire zones," where they suffered violence at the hands of the state as well as the rebels. This dissertation takes a unique approach to the exploration of the community's suffering by incorporating the effects of the war on the community's Catholic devotion and the possibility of healing of traumatic experiences of war through that devotion. The study thereby opens up a new field of anthropological investigation of displacement, social suffering, faith and healing. It contributes, among others, to the anthropology of violence, South Asia studies, and the anthropology of Christianity, and provides unique materials for anthropological reflection on ethnographic writing and the art of fieldwork.

The dissertation examines the cult of the goddess Haḍimbā that is located in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalaya (Himachal Pradesh). Massive transformations introduced in the region in recent years by means of better transportation systems, a developing capitalist economy, new technologies, and, most prominently, tourism have drastically affected life in the region and have destabilized traditional social and cultural patterns. These changes are engaged by the residents of the Kullu Valley in various ways that are informed and oriented by their traditional worldview and ritual system. The main chapters of the dissertation present and analyze three separate yet interrelated spaces that constitute a veritable theater of change. In these spaces, in which Haḍimbā figures prominently, the identity of the goddess, the rituals performed in her honor, and the powers she is believed to possess are constantly negotiated and refashioned: practitioners foreground Haḍimbā's identity as a Mahābhārata demoness instead of equating her solely with the Purāṇic Durgā (ch. 1); they justify, protect, and increasingly offer her bloody buffalo sacrifices despite criticisms leveled against this practice by outsiders (ch. 2); and they uphold their views concerning the ability of their goddess to control local weather patterns, even as the climate is changing and competing paradigms offer new theories in this regard (ch. 3). It is in this sense—in light of these massive renegotiations of Haḍimbā's character—that she is "becoming herself." Concurrently, it is not only the goddess' but her devotees' identity that is being negotiated and refashioned. Taken as a whole, the choices made by local people in these three spaces reveal their attempt to recast their marginality, the magnitude of which they have only recently begun to realize. They do so by pursuing new frameworks of reference that aim to challenge, if not subvert, the hegemonic narratives that are promoted in the region by outside forces. Thus, by highlighting Haḍimbā's Mahābhārata associations they offer a new kind of epic frame for national and religious identity; by insisting on the performance of animal sacrifice they invert and celebrate what is elsewhere considered a backward and illegitimate act; and by retaining their belief in the control of their goddess over her territory they defend their own agency and find a legitimate place for themselves and their way of life at the pan-Indian and global table. At the same time, the dissertation shows that local religious beliefs and practices do not remain untouched by these external pan-Indian and global paradigms and that in the interaction between them a new a hybrid worldview is being formed.

The village of Halebid, in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka, was once a city called Dorasamudra, capital of the Hoysala dynasty from the mid-11th to mid-14th centuries. Although the site is home to more than twenty temples and temple ruins, as well as the fragmentary remains of a fort wall and palace compound, the place name "Halebid" today is nearly synonymous with a single monument: the lavishly sculptural Hoysalesvara temple. This expansive, double-shrine temple would have been a dominant feature of the Hoysala capital from the time of its construction around 1120 C.E., but the near monopoly it has over the site in both popular and academic circles has caused other buildings to be overlooked. This focus on the Hoysalesvara temple has also isolated the building from its surroundings, obscuring its relationship to other features of the historical city. In this dissertation I develop a fuller understanding of the Hoysala capital and its temples by expanding the scope of inquiry to include the whole city. Taking the archaeological material and published inscriptions of the entire site into account, I consider the ways in which a selection of Dorasamudra's temples relate to one another and to other features of their surrounding landscape. This site-contextualized study provides insight into the relevance of the temples' spatial and sculptural forms, ritual purposes, and patrons' goals. Comparison with monuments at other sites reveals that many temples of Dorasamudra contributed to the city's prestige through their distinctive visual properties or their association with important deities or authoritative institutions. In addition to offering new perspectives on individual temples of the Hoysala capital, this study provides a greater understanding of the social and architectural characteristics of distinct neighborhoods, routes of access to specific temples and throughout the city, and a dynamic urban landscape that would have been visually and spatially altered with each new construction.

This thesis seek to provide a study of the evolutionary process of ancient civilizations stressing the complementarily between theoretical principles with the relevant historical evidence. For this reason, the study will focus on the origin, development and collapse of the first stage of the ‘Central Civilization’, which was the result of the merger of two primeval civilizations, such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, during the ‘Near Eastern phase’ of this Central Civilisation. This merger seems to have been the result of the political expansion of an imperial entity coming from Mesopotamia under the aegis of the so-called Neo-Assyrian Empire from 1000 BC to 600 BC – better known as the \(Pax\) \(Assyriaca\) – although the process of full integration with Egypt seems to have been concluded by the successor empires of Assyria circa 430 BC.

This thesis is to build bridges between the West and China for a better understanding of the recent history of Christianity in China. Regarding western Christians we have to take into account the two Opium Wars and the following historical events. Because they had a significant negative impact on Chinese conceptions of Christianity, and knowledge of these events is vital to a better understanding of why Christianity was and is closely linked to imperialism in Chinese thoughts. lt offers us insights into why Chinese people are not anti-religious but anti-Christian, and why the Chinese government is anti-religious but particularly anti-Christian. Regarding Chinese people, acknowledgement should be given to the contribution of missionaries and the positive impact of Christianity on Chinese society, especially regarding the anti-opium movement of the nineteenth century, which have remained until today overlooked, either intentionally or not. However, this thesis is only a step toward a more complete project, an additional work and further research are still required to develop a fuller and better understanding in order build bridges between the West and China; understandably, this is a complex task.

Despite the role played by the South East Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in the defence of Western interests in that region during the Cold War, there has to date been no scholarly attempt to examine the development and performance of the organisation as a military alliance. This thesis is thus the first attempt to do so and as such seeks to take advantage of the recent release of much SEATO-related official material into the public domain by Western governments. This material throws new light upon SEATO???s aims and achievements, particularly in regard to the first ten years of its existence. Because SEATO was eventually rendered irrelevant by the events of the Second Indochina War (1965-1975) a popular perception has arisen that it was always a ???Paper Tiger??? lacking in substance, and thus easily dismissed. This thesis challenges this assumption by examining SEATO???s development in the decade before that conflict. The thesis analyses SEATO???s place in the wider Cold War and finds that it was part of a rational and consistent response within the broader Western strategy of containment to deter, and if need be, defeat, the threat of communist aggression. That threat was a very real one for Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the First Indochina War and one that was initially perceived in terms of the conventional military balance of power. This focus dominated SEATO???s strategic concepts and early contingency planning and rightly so, as an examination of the strength and development of the PLA and PAVN during this period demonstrates. SEATO developed a dedicated military apparatus, principally the Military Planning Office (MPO), that proved itself to be perfectly capable of providing the level of co-ordination and planning needed to produce a credible SEATO deterrent in this regard. SEATO enjoyed less success with its attempts to respond to the emergence of a significant communist insurgent threat, first in Laos then in South Vietnam, but the alliance did nonetheless recognise this threat and the failure of SEATO in this regard was one of political will rather than military doctrine. Indeed this thesis confirms that it was the increasingly disparate political agendas of a number of SEATO???s members that ultimately paralysed its ability to act and thus ensured its failure to meet its aims, at least insofar as the so-called ???Protocol States??? were concerned. But this failure should not be allowed to completely overshadow SEATO???s earlier achievements in providing a modicum of Western-backed stability and security to the region from 1955-1965.