This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of birthing practices among Raramuri women in Northern Mexico. The Raramuri practice of kin assisted birth is consonant with core cultural norms and social practices. Raramuri curers diagnose and treat illness, but they typically do not assist at birth, which is a deemed a normal part of the life course. Health is maintained by adhering to community norms of thinking well and acting well, through such behavioral ideals as non violence, generosity, reciprocity, and modesty. Pregnant women minimize risk at birth by conforming to these ideals. The Raramuri, an indigenous population of northern Mexico, number about 100,000. They live in remote canyon regions of the Western Sierra Madre, engaging in subsistence horticulture and pastoralism. In recent years, increasing numbers of Raramuri are migrating to urban areas, due to the effects of logging, drought, and drug growing, all of which contribute to loss of arable land. As a result, Raramuri are entering urban areas in unprecedented numbers. This dissertation draws upon reproductive histories, birth narratives, and participant observation in two sites: Chihuahua city and a remote rancho. The Mexican government provides health services to Raramuri in both localities, and Raramuri women have their most sustained and frequent interaction with mestizos when they seek health care. Reproductive health interactions are fraught with miscommunication, which Raramuri experience as a loss of autonomy and control, leading to their reluctance to utilize services. High infant and maternal mortality rates among the Raramuri are typically blamed on non utilization of existing services. I provide an in depth and nuanced analysis, which addresses poverty and malnutrition, mistrust of state health and family planning agendas, and forms of institutional racism. I argue that the structural violence the Raramuri experience is glossed over by reports which deflect responsibility and blame the victim. Raramuri birthing practices are an expression of women's sense of agency, a form of resistance to a state apparatus they do not trust, and an important site of social reproduction where key values are transmitted and reaffirmed within families, extended kin groups, and Raramuri society as a whole.

This dissertation explores from an historical and political perspective the rapid engagement and incorporation of the Yanomami of the Alto Orinoco as citizens into the Venezuelan national dynamics. It accounts for the Yanomami's multiple adaptive responses by which they reconcile cultural differences between their habitual ways of life and the new political structures of national society. Specifically, the major concern is to explore the influences on political organization, ethnic identities, and social relationships emerging from the linkage and interaction between the nation-state's structures and the Alto Orinoco Yanomami. The gradual participation of Yanomami men and women in national political institutions such as the Alto Orinoco Municipality, political parties, and electoral processes has led them to develop different strategies of accommodation to these novel governmental entities. This study examines how the Yanomami of the Alto Orinoco, Amazonas State, Venezuela, react to the expansion of the national political structures through diverse strategies of accommodation and negotiation. These strategies refer to the Yanomami's adaptive and selective responses to intercultural experiences undergone because of external agents. These indigenous responses have not just implied collective forms of organization or general consensus in decision-making among community members, but also random and individual actions asserted in order to meet their personal needs and desires within a wider context of the Venezuelan national society. By examining these actions, I analyze from an historical approach the cultural encounters and the cultural resilience displayed by those Yanomami who have lived under the influence of missionaries, criollo groups, and other indigenous peoples. The ultimate purpose is to reveal how Yanomami past and present behaviors challenge the assumptions that "relatively isolated" indigenous peoples are merely passive receivers of assimilation processes provoked by national expansion. On the contrary, they have been very active choosing their means of adaptation to coping with the national frontier expansion.

Relocation, the removal of over 110,000 "persons of Japanese ancestry" from their West Coast homes to relocation centers in the continental interior during World War II, was a culturally critical event in the history of Japanese Americans. While internment has been intensively studied, it has lacked a unifying theoretical approach to the disparate material, behavioral, and symbolic experiences of internment. When viewed through the lens of place, and a particular variety of cultural landscape called an eventscape, the relationships between different scales of experience of gender, age, or factional groups become apparent. An eventscape is a cultural landscape that results from people's participation in culturally critical events. The heuristic value of eventscape is its capacity to depict the multiple spatial, temporal, and social scales of Relocation and to represent the material patterns and social-symbolic relationships between people and places. A persistent theme in the history and anthropology of relocation is shikataganai, the idea that a cultural predisposition toward acceptance of unalterable circumstances precluded internee resistance. Japanese Americans' relationships with the places of relocation demonstrate that many did resist, especially through strategies of everyday resistance. Internees manipulated their built environments in order to create "home places" that defied the imposed identity of "prisoner." Ceramic tablewares from the Manzanar War Relocation Center landfill indicate that some female internees may have attempted to serve traditional meals in their barracks in order to mitigate the effects of the mess hall. Oral history data reveal the ongoing relationships that some Japanese Americans have with the locations associated with the events of Relocation. The "Tucsonians" were young internees who refused to be drafted and served prison terms in the Catalina Federal Honor Camp near Tuscon, Arizona. These resisters use the sites of their incarceration as memorials that instruct Japanese Americans and other visitors, in the suppressed history of resistance to internment. Through storytelling and place commemoration, they challenge the master narrative of relocation that claims that Japanese Americans complied with relocation without protest.

This is a study of an event, the twiza, a form of co-operative work regulated by codified practice ('rf), with the focus being on the way the event is managed (or even created) by talk, especially the talk of the leader or cix. Various kinds of indirection, especially the genre of "teasing" (tqcab), are seen to be crucial to understanding how the cix orchestrates talk in pursuit of his goals, alternating between persuasion and coercion, and how group members at times subvert, at times reinforce, the hegemony of the cix.

In the late 1990s, a 30-year-old decision by computer programmers was translated into "Y2K," a problem that threatened the technological and social infrastructure of contemporary Western society. This work examines that translation from the dominant perspective and juxtaposes it to the experiences of people who believed Y2K was real. In contrast to "mainstream" views that ultimately saw Y2K as a "non-event," these individuals constructed and experienced Y2K as an event with significant impact on their lives. In the dominant view, Y2K was understood through the lens of technology; when the technological failure markers that came to define Y2K in this construction did not materialize, Y2K became a non-event. For believers, who used a different set of markers, Y2K retained significance. This work demonstrates the importance of examining alternate perspectives on events, by showing that Y2K was only a non-event in its dominant construction.

Native commentators on Taiwan's recent industrialization consider culture a key factor of the nation's modernization drive. Indigenous writers present Chinese culture as not only economically fit, but also morally superior. Such presentations, I argue, have unspoken ideological goals. Legitimation of the government, paternalistic claims on citizens and workers by the state and employers, and the rhetorical war against communism are some of the tacit agendas I discuss.

The community mediation movement has arisen in response to criticisms of the American judicial system. Advocates claim it can counter the role of law in reproducing ideologies that disadvantage subordinate groups, such as women. But this potential relies in part on the ideological positions of the mediators themselves. This study evaluates the counter-hegemonic potential of community mediation in regard to a gendered social power structure through an ideological analysis of sixteen male volunteer community mediators in Tucson, Arizona. Arguing against a narrow economic or gender reductionist analytical approach, this study relies on a neo-Gramscian perspective to uncover the multiple factors that determine this ideology. What emerges is a gender ideology that at once contains a "feminist" critique of social power structures yet is filled with contradictions. This implies that the community mediation movement must continue to struggle if it is to become a genuinely counter-hegemonic movement.

The concept of 'race' is examined from its earliest uses in European languages through the era of 'racial' sciences in the nineteenth century. The meanings acquired by the word 'race' are shown to be related to scientific thinking which has since been discredited. The history of efforts to discredit or eliminate the concept in science by twentieth-century anthropologists and others is shown to be complete, but the persistence of the word in public discourse is noted. Ethnographic examples of the problematic nature of the concept are introduced. Results of a study of American college students' understandings of the word are examined, and implication and recommendations for future efforts to discredit its use are presented.

This paper reconsiders the relation between what is studied, here homelessness, and the way of study, here anthropology. We will arrive at the notion of moral regulation which is useful in thoughts of the complex implications of otherwise seemingly disparate phenomena: homelessness and anthropology. Along the way we touch on order and morality. It is suggested that the professionalization of anthropology might be an active detriment to cogent anthropological analysis.

This thesis challenges the notion that China was a dowry society. The majority of the population before 1949 practiced indirect dowry, which is the goods originated from the groom's family as brideprice and terminated in the new conjugal household as dowry, after a possible deduction by the bride's father. In post-revolutionary China the brideprice component of indirect dowry was elaborated as a result of change in social and economic structures. In post-revolutionary China, brideprice prevails in rural areas and "thoussaou" dominates in urban areas. Household structure, unit of production, patrilocality in addition to women's labor value contribute to the different practices. Household structure may determine the form of marriage transaction in spite of the existence of other factors. The strong correlation between women's high labor value and brideprice does not hold true every time. Neolocal residence and nuclear family should be advocated if brideprice is to be eliminated.