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abstract: Religions, following Max Müller, have often been seen by scholars in religious studies as uniform collections of beliefs and practices encoded in stable “sacred books” that direct the conduct of religious actors. These texts were the chief focus of academic students of religion through much of the 20th century, and this approach remains strong in the 21st. However, a growing chorus of dissidents has begun to focus on the lived experience of practitioners and the material objects that structure that experience, and some textual scholars have begun extending this materialist framework to the study of texts. This dissertation is a contribution in that vein from the field of Daoist studies. Now split between two separate texts, the Most High Scripture of the Rectifying Methods of the Three Heavens began as a 4th-century collection of apocalyptic predictions and apotropaic devices designed to deliver a select group of Chinese literati to the heavens of Highest Clarity. Later editors during the early medieval period (ca. 220-589 CE) took one of two paths: for their own reasons, they altered the Rectifying Methods to emphasize either the world’s end or its continuation. Detailed study of these alterations and their contexts shows how individuals and groups used and modified the Rectifying Methods in in ways that challenge the conventional relationship between religious text and religious actor. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 2019

This dissertation tracks the creation and implementation of India's 2006 Forest Rights Act or FRA, a landmark law that for the first time grants land rights to the millions who live without them in the country's forests. I follow the law in relation to the forest rights movement that has been central in lobbying for, drafting, and implementing it in order to examine both how the movement has shaped the law's meaning as well as how contests and alliances over the law's text and meaning have transformed the many movements citing and using the law. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I track the law from contests over its drafting in New Delhi to contests over its meaning in Ramnagar, a North Indian village. Ramnagar was settled by landless forest dwellers organized by forest rights activists, and its continued but still precarious existence is premised on a claim to land through the Act. I show that the meaning of the FRA was contested at every stage through collective action oriented around what Bakhtin (1982) terms `chronotopes,' the joint depiction of time, place, and characters in language. By diagnosing contemporary injustice through a depiction of the past and pointing to a just future to be brought about through the action of a collective, political movements and identifications form around and act through chronotopes. The movements enacting the Forest Rights Act have critically seized upon what one bureaucrat involved in its drafting called its `word traps,' words or phrases in the text with apparently uncontroversial literal meanings that in fact allow the law to be read through the political chronotopes of political parties or movements. By attending to the relationship between the legal text, its chronotopic deployment, and collective action, my project provides new ways to understand laws in political practice and language in political practice. / Anthropology

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This thesis attempts to explore within what historical context and with what documented content, A Bite of China: Season I, a Chinese documentary television series that explores the history of food, eating and cooking garners widespread popularity. By theoretical analyses, Chapter 1 concludes the relationship between documentary and the "reality" is built upon representation and there is "something beyond reality" in documentary. Moreover, in documentary representation, affect helps the "reality" to transform into "documentary reality," and affect is the key to understand "something beyond reality." In order to analyze documentary in historical context, Chapter 2 reviews and analyzes western documentary film history, Chinese television documentary history and The New Documentary Movement in China. As conclusion shows, this movement changes Chinese documentary history and provides historical context for A Bite of China. In particular, it makes common Chinese people's lives and general Chinese society become main documented content, which constitutes a non-governmental power discourse. Chapter 3 turn the case study of A Bite of China. As it concludes, historical context is the integration between governmental discourse and non-governmental discourse. As for documented content, the intertwined representation between the representation of Chinese gourmet food and affective resonance among director, documented people and spectators makes A Bite of China popular. This thesis advances "affect" as an approach to further understand "documentary reality" and provides a new viewpoint on how A Bite of China becomes a popular Chinese television documentary.

<p> The democratic decentralization of government administration in Indonesia from 1999 represents the most dramatic shift in governance in that country for decades. In this dissertation I explore how health managers in one kabupaten (regency) are responding to the new political environment. Kabupaten health managers experience decentralization as incomplete, pointing to the tendency of central government to retain control of certain health programs and budgets. At the same time they face competing demands for autonomy from puskesmas (health center) heads. Building on Scott&rsquo;s (1985) idea of a &ldquo;moral economy&rdquo; I delve beneath the political tensions of competing autonomies to describe a moral landscape of underlying beliefs about how government ought to behave in the health sector. Through this analysis certain failures and contradictions in the decentralization process emerge, complicating the literature that presents decentralization as a move in the direction of &ldquo;good governance&rdquo; (Mitchell and Bossert 2010, Rondinelli and Cheema 2007, Manor 1999). </p><p> Decentralization brings to the fore the internal divisions within government, yet health workers present a united front in their engagements with the public. Under increasing pressure to achieve global public health goals such as the Millennium Development Goals, health managers engage in multiple translations in converting global health discourses into national and local health policies and in framing these policies in ways that are comprehensible and compelling to the general public. Using the lens of a &ldquo;cultural theory of state&rdquo; (Corrigan and Sayer 1985) I describe how health professionals and volunteers draw on local cultural forms in order to render global frameworks compatible with local moralities. I introduce the term &ldquo;moral pluralism&rdquo; to describe how individual health workers interrelate several moral frameworks in their health promotion work, including Islam, evidence based medicine and right to health. My conclusion is that kabupaten health managers are engaging in two balancing acts. The first is between decentralization and (re)centralization and deals with the proper way to manage health programming. The second is between global health discourses and local cultural forms and concerns the most effective way to convey public health messages in order to bring about behavior change in line with national and global public health goals. This is the first anthropological study of how government officials at different levels negotiate the process of health decentralization in the face of increasing international pressure to achieve global public health goals.</p>

The following thesis examines South Korean history, traditional values and the effects of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis in order to understand the political, economic, and social causes of the increase in adolescent suicides since the turn of the millennium.