This thesis is concerned with local concepts of kinship and personhood in a small Miskitu village named Kakabila in eastern Nicaragua, and examines how gender identities are organised around a culturally specific variant of the set of practices which anthropologists have glossed as 'brideservice'. Personhood in Kakabila is focussed on the establishment of a stable conjugal partnership. Men usually attach themselves to the households of their conjugal partners, and attempt to legitimate their claims to their wives by uxorilocal postnuptial residence and the practice of long term brideservice. The central concern of many Kakabila men therefore is with demonstrating that they conduct themselves with their affines harmoniously in accordance with village ideals. For many men, however, the eventual objective is to detach their wives from the influence of consanguineal kin, and this produces a tension between the need to project affinal harmony and the concern that actions may be construed in terms of elopement. Kakabila women, however, tend to be much more concerned with constructing networks of symbolic exchange and mutual assistance among themselves, particularly with their consanguineal kinswomen. In many cases, therefore, women resist the attempts of husbands and sons-in-law to disrupt these networks, and organise their actions around ensuring that errant husbands and junior male affines adequately supply them with sufficient symbolic capital to adequately maintain and cultivate these networks. This thesis, therefore, suggests a very specific formulation of the logic of gender identities in Kakabila, where brideservice is as much a style of distribution as it is a 'style of consumption' (Collier and Rosaldo 1981: 275), based on a particular disjunction between men's and women's motivations. This thesis also considers the changes in Miskitu kinship in terms of changes which have taken place among the Miskitu during the last three hundred years, particularly the marked trading and political imbalances brought about by long term contact with the English speaking Caribbean countries. The disappearance of the historically attested distinction between cross and parallel cousins and the serial exchange of offspring and siblings, and the emergence of uxorilocal postnuptial residence, are analysed in terms of a gradual historical reformulation of Miskitu notions of affinity which owes a great deal to these regional contacts. An ethnographically and historically informed analysis for these transformations is considered, which in turn is used to shed light on gender identities and the practice of brideservice in present day Kakabila.

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This thesis looks at the empirical implementation of human capital theory in the form of the estimation of earnings functions for married males and females. Its main purpose is to investigate how any biases in estimation may affect males and females to different extents and thus lead to an inaccurate comparison between the two groups. It concentrates on the two productivity traits of education and experience. As such, it does not intend to provide a comprehensive account of male-female wage differentials, but looks instead at how any asymmetry of bias may feed through to measures of discrimination. This asymmetry in bias will, if uncorrected, give a false comparison of the two different groups' relative returns to schooling and experience. It is, as such, a cautionary tale which argues for the careful implementation of econometric techniques to earnings functions. A failure to correct for any asymmetry is likely to lead to inappropriate policy recommendations and may lead to inefficiency of policy in three potential and mutually exclusive ways. First, biases may artificially create differences between males and females where there are none, thus leading to the introduction of policy where inaction may be preferable. Second, biases may mask underlying differences, causing inappropriate inaction by government where action would indeed be merited. Third, biases may cause inaccurate measures of the relative returns to both education and experience and thus indicate falsely where it would be the most effective to target policy to reduce discrimination. This thesis has shown that, in order to suggest appropriate policy measures, so as to correctly introduce, implement and target policy, there is a need to apply appropriate econometric techniques and correct for biases.

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This thesis examines how young children experience games and how that question is relatedto gender. The examination of this question is conducted through interviews with a group of24 Swedish fifth-grade pupils. The paper also draws from theories and concepts found inestablished literature on gender and games. The results of this thesis informs the theory ofviolence as a masculine preference as well as the separation of gender identities from biologicalsexes.