This dissertation explores multiple episodes of interaction between Ethiopians and Europeans throughout the early modern era. After overviewing the Ethiopian exploration of Europe in the 15th century and the first Catholic attempts to reconnect to the Ethiopian Church at the turn of the 16th century, it focuses on the Ethio-Lusophone encounter by considering the emergence of Ethiopian studies in early modern Lisbon, the Portuguese military intervention in the Ethiopian-Adal War (1529-1543) and the Jesuit mission to Ethiopia (1555-1632). This dissertation argues that in the context of the early-modern Ethio-European encounter, faith trumped skin color in the discourse on sameness and otherness: throughout the 15th and 16th centuries Europeans and Ethiopians perceived each other as belonging to the same Christian world and collaborated to defy the perceived Muslim threat. Starting in the late 16th century however, Counter-Reformation Catholicism and Jesuit proselytism transformed Ethiopians into others, and--in Ethiopian eyes--Europeans became a threat. The Jesuit mission engendered an era of turmoil that crippled both the Ethio-European encounter and the Ethiopian monarchy: in its aftermath, the Ethiopian elites maintained a policy of isolation from Europe, barred Europeans from entering their country and redirected their attention to the Muslim societies of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean basins. / History

This thesis explores We Two Together, the unique dual autobiography of the reformers Margaret and James Cousins. It places this rich text in the context of the first half of the twentieth century and demonstrates its value as a source for Irish, Indian, gender, and global history. It investigates how the Cousinses represent their efforts to create and maintain a companionate marriage over a lifetime, depict their work as activists for women’s suffrage, Indian nationalism, educational reform, and other causes, and recount the impact of cross-cultural encounters on their cosmopolitan lives. We Two Together provides insight into the lives of two extraordinary individuals as they witnessed and participated in several key social and political movements in Ireland and India. In bringing attention to this book, I hope that other historians will make use of it and that librarians will preserve the rare copies in their possession.

This study examines how experiences with art promote healthy cultural identities of self and others, and focuses on the potentially mutual benefits to Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) and youth living in developing countries. As a returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV) and current elementary art teacher, I combine personal insight with multicultural art education discourse to create a curriculum intended for PCVs to implement during their service. In order to gain relevant feedback on the curriculum's theoretical basis and potential usefulness, I conduct a focus group composed of six RPCVs whose primary or secondary Peace Corps project involved art education or youth development. While examining the critical relationship between the curriculum's meta-narrative, frame narrative, and task narrative, in addition to the unpredictable circumstances Peace Corps service inevitably entails, research findings expose the complex nature of cross-cultural pedagogy. In order to achieve the curriculum's intended goals, implications include emphasizing the PCV's dual role as the facilitator and participant.

Sabang used to be a small, marginalized Philippine fishing village that in the span of three decades became a well-known international sex tourism site. This thesis deals with the implications of tourism (including sex tourism) and how it has become embedded in the daily life in today’s Sabang. The thesis highlights the local populations’ diverse reactions to the various changes associated with tourism growth, in particular how various symbolic, moral, and spatial boundaries are constructed and maintained. The ethnographic material examined in this thesis builds on several periods of fieldwork, in total 18 months, that were carried out between 2003 and 2015. Analytical tools found in tourism anthropology and in particular the branch of postcolonial tourism studies has guided the discussion and analysis of the socio-cultural effects of becoming a tourism town. This thesis argues that complex networks of boundaries are significant in maintaining a sense of order and social cohesion in times of change. Notions of cultural differences are expressed through the narratives and behaviors of the various inhabitants, and contribute to the maintaining of boundaries within and between groups. From the beginning of tourism growth commercial sex has been central and has become a significant factor in the tourism economy. While residents acknowledge their dependency on the go-go bars, the business of the night is framed so as not to defeat the inhabitants’ struggles to maintain local community’s sense of morality, or at least to set up boundaries between the outsiders’ immorality and insiders’ morality. Tourism has also offered opportunities to challenge conventional social hierarchies and local seats of power, and there are also recurrent discussions about who has the right to control resources and who can claim entitlement to a place now shared by people from all over the world.

In order to explain some of the paradoxes and mysteries of the artist's cross cultural experience in Kiribati, he constructed an Artist's Book depicting through visuality, anecdote and reflection, his research process, engaging with current visual perceptions through negotiation with the past. In Kiribati previous encounters with Europeans and Islanders was dominated by English and I Kiribati with significant contributions by French missionaries. Each viewed the other through cultural filters of identity, which were informed by concepts of myth-historical, often heroic pasts, modified by contemporary purpose such as power, trade, evangelism or personal gain. The method of transmission of beliefs about the past differed fundamentally as the Europeans were predominately informed by writing and the I-Kiribati by orality and performance. The non-literary epistemology of the I Kiribati contributed to a cosmology of non-iconic symbols that defined belief systems and social structures. These symbols connected place and space with time, self and group identities. The research found that the all surrounding visual symbol system of sacred meeting house (maneaba), dwelling (bata) and canoe (waa and baurua)) could be partly understood as an ongoing struggle since Deep Time, between the forces of the Ocea n represented by Bakoa, The Shark, and that of the triumph of the coming onto the Land and its people (aba) represented by Tabakea, The Turtle. The performative outcome of this triumph and the spirit of identity (Te Katai ni Kiribati) it engenders is expressed primarily in the ubiquitous I Kiribati Dance. The Artists Book is inspired by the creative classic I Kiribati form of oratory known as Te Kuna, using a structure analogous to the symbolic forms of narrative of Oceanic Voyaging traditionally employed by the I Kiribati. Differences in visual perceptions across cultural interface are understood not only as having the potential for conflict but also as providing positive dynamic force by the interchange of understood differences. The project contributes specifically to the ethnography of English and I Kiribati, semiotic systems and visual epistemologies, indicating directions towards positive outcomes in cross-cultural encounters.