This dissertation offers a diachronic analysis of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. This study holds that, regardless of its sui generis nature, the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution became possible as a combined result of a sociopolitical transformation in the Egyptian society in roughly the last decade of Mubarak's rule and several contingent events that took place right before and during the January 25 events. Sociopolitical transformations in Egyptian society were conceptualized along two dimensions: 1) Gradual changes in Egyptian sociopolitical life that occurred particularly on the last decade of Mubarak regime, and 2) Paradigmatic changes that took place during the 18 days of protests. This ethnographic account of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution -with involved political processes and mechanisms; and human agency that transformed and was transformed by those mechanisms and processes- aspires to contribute to our understanding of 2011 Egyptian Revolution, and possibly revolutions in general, and the ensuing political crises that arise in transition periods after major political transformations.

This dissertation presents an ethnography of equine-assisted psychotherapy (EAP) based on nine months of fieldwork at "Equine Healers," a non-profit organization in central Colorado that specialized in various therapeutic modalities associated with EAP. In bridging scholarly work around animals, a literature suffused with the notion of "companion species," as well as scholarly work around psychotherapy, and most especially the idea of "psychotherapy as conversation," the connective conflict these two interests share, and from which this dissertation emerges, is over questions of language and communication. Specifically, the overarching problem that this dissertation addresses is: what counts as talking, in the context of "the talking cure," when beings that do not share human language are necessarily implicated in human conversations. Beginning with Das' (1997) encouragement to understand "pain as the beginning of a language game," most of this dissertation will therefore be about dropping the reader into the silences between the humans and the horses, and between the words the humans use to talk about their experiences with the horses, thereby raising fundamental questions about the communicational dialectics that can transform human experiences. I argue that anthropologists must re-arrange our analytical frames around humans and animals, beginning with how we understand language, in the context of communication, to be organized. Rather than privileging subjects and objects, I suggest returning to Bateson (1972) and attempting to privilege relationships. To explore these ideas, this dissertation will attend to a particular therapeutic modality employed at Equine Healers, a set of practices called a "group sculpture." To set up and make it possible to appreciate the complexity of this modality, this dissertation will first consider framing conversations among humans and horses as rhythmically ordered interactions. To do this, I generate a model of conversation based less on grammatical rules derived from the use of words, or the possibilities offered by subject-object "thing" relationships, and instead lean on musical relationships of rhythm. Initially emerging through conversation, I then trace out rhythms carried between horses and humans by particular physical, material pieces of their world. These brushes, clickers, and bridles ultimately bridge vocal and pneumatic rhythms; and it is movement along this connection, an ebb and flow of voice and breath that, in aligning, generate opportunities for iconic relationships with one's self.

This dissertation explores the challenges, especially those relating to education and to social marginalization, that are being faced every day by underprivileged migrant families residing in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. It also reveals the coping mechanisms they must devise in order to stay afloat financially in a nation that is rapidly urbanizing and thereby changing at a dizzying speed. Drawing primarily upon my interviews with and observations of migrant families and associated community members, and secondarily upon scholarly and governmental research, this study shows how these families' survival strategies reveal those patterns of resource mobilization that are intimately linked to their social relations to, and ties with, others in the destination area. In the wake of the economy's marketization that began in the mid-1980s, Vietnam has undergone massive social changes, including a vast upsurge in free migration, an increased bargaining power of cash, and rising levels of social segregation. On the one hand, the advent of the market-oriented economy and nominal relaxation of the state controls over population mobility have opened up new paths down which migrants can pursue economic opportunities in their urban destinations, and have given people on the move some room for negotiation with the state. On the other hand, their status as non-permanent residents of Hanoi has continued to hinder them from gaining access to public services and government-sponsored care, equal to that enjoyed by their permanent-resident counterparts. Perhaps the chief consequence of the latter adverse trend is that migrant children not meeting the financial and/or regulatory conditions that all students are expected to meet if they wish to enter mainstream, formal education are inclined to seek learning opportunities in the other sphere of alternative, informal education. Thus migrant families have essentially been trapped, socioeconomically, in the informal sector; they have little prospect of upward social mobility, and they are compelled to adopt a stance of self-reliance with respect to resource mobilization. Then too, the everyday and governmental discourses that too often portray migrants as being disorderly at best and criminal at worst, and thus as constituting a deleterious social presence, have served not only to vindicate the state's ongoing adherence to the preexisting household-registration system but to disguise its ineffectiveness at managing rural-urban migration and its failure to redress Vietnam's ever-widening social inequalities and increasingly inequitable resource distribution. The permeation of such discourse among the city residents, and its internalization by the migrants themselves, have only served to exacerbate the stigmatization and peripheralizing of migrants. Serving to at least somewhat counteract the latter negative trend is the migrants' resourcefulness in settling into the city and forming social safety-nets, mutual-aid arrangements often based on sharing the same village of origin. Unfortunately, the social solidarity of village-based relations often goes hand in hand with exclusivity and thus with discrimination against all those who fall outside the inner circles, thereby further distancing the migrants from the mainstream of city life. Ultimately the study points to the need for some structural transformations in the Vietnamese government, changes reflective of the fact that migrants are not mere "social evils" but to the contrary, part and parcel of the state's growth. Only when such steps have been taken will the discourse about migrants shift from vilification to praise or even concern, and will Vietnamese society no longer be "transitional" because it has become inclusive and cohesive.

This dissertation is about holes. It begins by analyzing the proverbial “hole in the fence” at late-Soviet enterprises: the way that workers pragmatically employed the planned economy's distribution rules by actions that were both morally commendable and questionably legal. It then analyzes the omission of this hole in perestroika economic analysis, which devoted surprisingly little attention to enterprises' central role in providing welfare and exerting social control, or to employees' pragmatic employment of the enterprises' rules. This analytic hole is compounded by a historiographic one: by the omission of the post-1956 omission of Stalin's name from public mention. Framing the perestroika reforms against “Stalinism,” perestroika-era texts typically trace the start of de-Stalinization to Khrushchev's “Cult of Personality” speech, after which Stalin's name disappeared from textbooks; rather than to the post-1953 reforms that fundamentally restructured labor, economic and punitive institutions to create characteristically late-Soviet methods of retaining and motivating labor: including the widespread disciplinary lenience that allowed workers to pragmatically employ enterprise rules. Precluded by this historiography from seeing how late-Soviet institutions had evolved in the post-Stalin absence of forced labor laws and how they practically functioned, popular and expert analysis instead tended to analyze citizens' relationships to the state in subjective terms: as a question of stagnant mindsets and loss of faith. Defined by its non-complicit denouncement of a retrospectively posited “Stalinist” state, the subject position taken by this analysis precluded speakers from seeing the presence behind all these holes: from seeing how they had practically constructed themselves and the late-Soviet system by pursuing their own economic, social and political goals through its institutions. The perestroika reform laws that were justified by this analysis intended to “speed up” society by intervening in workers' and citizens' feelings of ownership and responsibility. But, lacking a practical understanding of how late-Soviet institutions functioned, they instead quickly crashed the economy.

This dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Pushkar, India, a Hindu pilgrimage site that doubles as an international tourist destination with an influx of two million visitors each year. Here, I explore the massive enterprise on the part of Pushkar locals to build “heaven on earth,” paying particular attention to how the articulation of sacred space works alongside economic changes brought on by globalization and tourism. Central to my work is an investigation of how tourism and global thinking affect everyday life in this pilgrimage site, and how Hindu ideas—about religion, identity, and belonging—shape the contours of tourism; the goal, then, is to show how religion and tourism are in fact mutually constitutive. In examining the entanglements of making Pushkar paradise, I look to a number of different topics: beliefs about Hindu universalism and how its principles incorporate people from outside of the Hindu fold; ritual repertoires that brahmans perform on behalf of their clients in order to propitiate the gods; mythic tales that boast of Pushkar’s greatness, printed in 5-rupee pamphlets or narrated by priests at the lake; environmental action taken up by locals worried about lake pollution; and guided tours designed to promote the kind of atmosphere where people from around the world can feel as if they belong.

How is the future constituted as an object of knowledge, activity, and concern in the present? This dissertation poses this question in contemporary Greece, where long-unfolding processes of European integration and more recent experiences of acute crisis have made preoccupation with the future a central feature of everyday social life. To answer the question, the dissertation examines one prominent frame for thinking about and acting upon the future in Greece today—namely, practices and discourses oriented around the economy. The dissertation presents the findings of thirty months of ethnographic study of lay and expert activity ranging from economists running macroeconomic models and policy makers devising national taxation schemes to activists operating alternative distribution networks and pensioners visiting the bank. The account moves through three orders of inquiry. First, it traces how economic practices and discourses constitute the future as an object in the present and describes the contours of this future. Second, it demonstrates how the economy becomes a routine and legitimate frame for thinking about and acting on the future in the present. Third, it shows how the economy’s work on the future shapes everyday understandings and experiences of the economy and the nation. Ultimately, the dissertation not only addresses the initial question of how the future is constituted in the present, but also gives an account of how the future operates as a key site for establishing and contesting claims to knowledge, legitimacy, and belonging in this present.

This thesis examines the intersection between culture-based social structure and individual agency in all-girl Southern folk band The Krickets. By utilizing practice theory we are able to understand the relationship of the individual to their inherent social rules and then compensate for individual action opposing those rules. Through the action of musical performance The Krickets express their connection to a Southern culture and act against the cultural expectations of femininity therein. In studying The Krickets we can understand how notions of femininity, Southern culture, and folk music intersect to create their individual identities, which both adhere to and subvert their cultural structures. By utilizing video ethnography as a methodology and practicing ethical feminist approaches to anthropology we can understand how The Krickets grapple with concepts of cultural identity verses personal identity. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 5, 2019. / ethnographic film, ethnomusicology, female musicians, feminist anthropology, folk music, practice theory / Includes bibliographical references. / Vincent Joos, Professor Directing Thesis; Kristin Dowell, Committee Member; Jayur Mehta, Committee Member.

In this dissertation I explore performances of Algerian sha‘bī music in Paris as affectively powerful experiences for the Algerian migrant community. Literally meaning “popular,” sha‘bī developed as a modernized form of colloquial sung poetry among the working class of mid-twentieth century Algiers and has remained a significant mode of cultural expression in the twenty-first century. By comparing a range of formal and informal contexts of performance, I consider the interdependency of place and intimacy in the expression of authority, morality, ecstasy, tradition, and communal belonging in sha‘bī praxis. I eschew dyadic constructions of home and exile and instead explore the idea of place in multiple guises, both real and imagined, as it either constrains or enables shared ecstatic experience among listeners. During successful sha‘bī performances, participants transform physical spaces into places of intimacy by entraining with one another’s emotional states. This state of shared heightened emotion is vested in the role of the shaykh, who moves the audience through skillful execution of sha‘bī’s musical conventions and his demonstration of textual knowledge through a convincing interpretation of the musical poetry. Central to this experience is the voice of the shaykh, which imbues the text with affective power and establishes the singer as the embodiment of tradition. As evoked metaphorically in the sung refrain of a well-known song, “Come, ask my heart to share with you its news and you’ll see that you own it and you know what you’ve done to it,” the singer invites the audience into a shared ritual of ecstatic, musical interaction in which bodily co-presence and emotional entrainment bring listeners together in collective effervescence. Perhaps most importantly, singers are imbued with moral virtues by adoring devotees, which allows them to shape the emotional experiences of individual performances. Informed by interviews and participant observations, I examine how the sha‘bī singer comes to embody the weight of tradition and joins with musicians and audiences to facilitate intimacy across a range of Parisian environments. In the process, I seek to illuminate why sha‘bī continues to be such a dynamic, meaningful mode of cultural expression for France’s Algerian diasporic community. / A Dissertation submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2019. / March 29, 2019. / Algeria, Diaspora, France, Ritual, Sha‘bī, Voice / Includes bibliographical references. / Margaret Jackson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Adam Gaiser, University Representative; Frank Gunderson, Committee Member; Michael B. Bakan, Committee Member.

No description available.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p.561-575) Also available on the Internet.