In the late 1990's, three interrelated spheres of activities and practices emerged in Poland which either had not existed previously or had only at that moment taken on a qualitatively new status as key players or capital in the political environment: anti-corruption NGO's, expertise, and policy; the Law about Access to Public Information; and investigative journalism. These three spheres appeared simultaneously with a greater public consciousness of a widespread corruption problem in Poland. The main question of this dissertation is: Why did these three interrelated spheres come about when they did and not earlier (or even later)? The dissertation answers this question by ethnographically describing the assemblage of anti-corruption practices in Poland and internationally: anti-corruption NGOs, Freedom of Information laws, and investigative journalism. The problematic of corruption represents the key symbol of an ethos, a system of mood and motivation, emergent in Poland's aftermath following its transition, whether incomplete or not, from communism to democracy and capitalism. This dissertation asks: why has corruption become a common obsession of concerted epistemological concern? Why the rather peculiar obsession with this lingering topic? Further, this dissertation queries why a skeptical reason, paranoid style and hyperbolic tropology is stimulated by corruption and how this subject invokes specters of Polish history. First, this dissertation maps out the key organizations, actors, and discourses that comprise the international anti-corruption arena. In the second section, it follows a coalition of anti-corruption NGO's who came together in the late 1990's to introduce and eventually a pass a Freedom of Information (FOI) law in Poland in 2001. The law embodies the analytic belief that more transparency will lessen corruption, as well as representing an emergent norm for democracy in the late 20th century. The third section ties together a number of seemingly disparate elements in an ethnographic description of investigative journalism in Poland. It demonstrates how journalists triangulate their elusive objects of knowledge while these objects simultaneously deny any such involvement. It asks: what are the conditions, styles, forms, and institutions by which they can assert their stories as true?

From twenty-six months of fieldwork conducted in Athens, Greece from May 2001 through July 2004, this dissertation documents the social and cultural contexts that shape the practices of activists working for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in Greece. Those practices connect to conceptions of friendship, relations of patronage, informal democratic processes, the routinized suspicion of economic profit, and beliefs about the relationships between sexual identities and social identities. The practices in which the activists engage both restrict the kinds of successes they are able to enjoy, and enable those successes they do achieve. These practices are brought to bear by the activists both consciously and not. Furthermore, these practices draw on and are drawn from a diversity of places, times and realms of meaning beyond particular moments of activist practice---a diversity of locations termed elsewheres. Accounting for these elsewheres, which need not be non-Greek, not only provides insights into how Greek LGBT activists imagine the movement, but serves as an allegory of democratic values and processes at a micro-scalar level, an index of reactions to processes of Europeanization, and a study of the localized responses to globally circulating activist forms, sexual and gender identities, and modes of collectivity.

In recent years, there has been an enormous surge in the level of public awareness in the United States regarding female circumcision/female genital mutilation (FC/FGM). These practices, historically portrayed by anthropologists as predominately African cultural rituals known most commonly as female circumcision, have been reconstructed in various discursive sites more frequently as violence and torture against girls and women. In the latter sites, the practices are referred to as female genital mutilation. This reconceptualization has been conducted in large part beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology and at times in opposition to relativistic scholarship in the field, creating a dichotomous ideology that has pitted cultural relativists against political activists aimed at eradicating FC/FGM. These polarized perspectives are played out in the exponential growth of multi-sited representations of FC/FGM within academic, applied and popular culture arenas. Within popular culture, representations of these practices have become ubiquitous and are the subject matter of innumerable print, television and radio "documentary" stories. The production of everyday knowledge has become so mainstreamed that FGM has surpassed being featured on Oprah as a measure of it cultural embeddedness by additionally appearing as the subject matter of television dramas, stage productions, and adult and juvenile literary fiction. This dissertation traces representations of FC/FGM in various Western discursive sites and analyzes the "ideological work" which the debates have produced in arenas of anthropology, law, advocacy and popular culture. Cultural relativists are often charged with condoning the practices, while the "outraged" are portrayed as neocolonial, moral imperialists. I will argue that anthropology has not responded to the "rage" by discarding its relativistic roots, but rater channels its relativistic scholarship to inform "appropriate" change efforts aimed at reducing FC/FGM practices. Laws within the U.S., on the other hand, effectively invalidate cultural relativism by negating "culture" as a reason for FC/FGM and by criminalizing FC/FGM entirely. Finally, popular culture functions to situate immigrants as the "exotic Other" among us, while becoming part of the global discourse to eradicate FC/FGM. Both our laws and popular culture show that we critique others in ways we cannot critique ourselves.

The marked absence of the concept of qi in the academic literature concerning Chinese medicine is highlighted by (1) delineating its importance in the contemporary North American context, and (2) exploring the possible methodological reasons for this shortcoming. The mapping of contexts within which Chinese medicine is received in the U.S. is accomplished by tracking how the concept of qi is translated, understood, and appropriated. Part I explores the North American instantiations of Chinese medicine and situates them within the biomedical context of Complementary and Alternative Medicines (CAMs) and a broader cultural discourse of East-West integrative thought. Part II explores the possible methodological reasons for the neglect of qi in academic discourse. The embodied and tacit nature of qi---as more than an intellectual concept but rather a practical ability---is explored through the concepts of tacit knowledge and orthopraxis. The anthropological literature on embodiment and phenomenology is also reviewed.

Archaeological ruins in Mexico, although juridically mandated as national property, are, in practice, sites of multiple, coexisting claims on ownership, custodianship, and inheritance. Focusing on more than a century of interventions by US/Mexican cultural agencies, foreign archaeologists, and private sector interests, I demonstrate how de jure policies and de facto practices of privatization have affected patrimonial claims to and understandings of "ruins" vis-a-vis (1) state policy regarding cultural materials, (2) jurisdiction and access within archaeological zones, and (3) scientific investigation and international cultural tourism. While the neoliberal state contemplates the relinquishment of territorial control over national properties through privatization, my ethnographic and archival evidence clearly supports the claim that for at least a century, the state has merely assumed---through it laws, policies, and institutional management---that sites of monumental cultural patrimony were within its firm grasp all along. In order to demonstrate this claim, I create micro-level spatial genealogies of two archaeological sites Chichen Itza and Chunchucmil) and their several associated living communities (Piste, Chunchucmil, and Kochol). The results of this study show how, at the local level, the overarching concepts of "national cultural patrimony" or "World Heritage" signal only two forms of patrimonial significance, both based on archaeological heritage's privileging of the "ancient" over and above the modern or contemporary. At Chichen Itza, federally employed site custodians understand the site as an inheritable family patrimony. At Chunchucmil, local residents consider the land coterminous with the archaeological heritage site as their patrimonio ejidal, or ejido land-grant heritage. In both cases, Maya people have been historically constructed, by archaeology, the state, as well as the private sector, as docile descendents and illegitimate heirs. The cultivation of Mexican nationalism required Maya people to be "docile descendents" playing a political and cultural role in the appropriate role in the Nation's articulation ancient ruins to Mexican modernity. Under emergent conditions of neoliberalism, they are joined by private sector entrepreneurs in becoming "illegitimate heirs" in their attempts to reterritorialize the nation's patrimony.

Notions of race, ethnicity, and gender are so frequently essentialized precisely because they are such complex, messy, contingent, contradictory, and fragmentary concepts. As a result, representations of race, gender, and ethnicity tend to mistake the wholeness of the representations for the wholeness of the racial, ethnic, or gendered subject. Just as race, gender, and ethnicity are lived and experienced by comic book creators, so too are they imagined and constructed within the constraints of industry practices. This dissertation examines the representation of race, gender, and ethnicity in comic books through the eyes of comic book producers; a relatively small segment of the U.S. entertainment industry consisting of men, women, and corporate entities that make their living imagining identities and telling tales of adventure and heroism. This dissertation is an intentional and, I will argue, necessary break from more traditional models of media and cultural studies that emphasize consumption, textual analysis, audience reception, and reading practices.

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