'Home' in a country with a notorious history of division becomes both a material and symbolic handle for belonging. The thesis looks at the nature of home making and home building as it is subjected to conflicts of tradition and domestic design organisation. The material objects together with the physical as well as the psychological spaces of home in South Africa exemplify the struggle with the ironies of a nascent modern era. / The thesis addresses the combination of home and modernity in a place and at a time when the one seemed to cancel the other. The role of authorities and missionaries in determining what home was to particularly categorised people and also what modernity should represent contributes to the subtle formulations of meaning in the narrative of this thesis. South African design and material culture precedes a discussion of land as home and visual culture's expression of this. This expression is seen in the monumentalising of struggles for a home country and more specifically a homeland. Some of these visual expressions are in the form of architecture and some as sculpture, painting or drawing. The visual art of the time informs and comments upon the notion of home as a place of belonging, longing or a place that is lost. A subtle reading of this ostensibly modern art is that it is strangely disengaged from its subject matter. Notions of white supremacy in line with a romantic nationalism based on theocratic beliefs in the 'promised land' are addressed in relation to these and other visual documents of the time. / Domestic design advice and advertising for the home provides insight into the home as an ideal as well as the home as an example of ostensible modernity. Issues such as fashion, taste, relevant theories of consumption together with the constant denial of African consumption form the background to the chapter's arguments on white South African middle class consumer reticence. The printed face of South Africa's supposed domestic modernity in the advertisements and decorating columns is balanced by a discussion of deeper psychological and emotional interiorities, these are evidenced in biographies, letters, oral family histories and historical novels. The possible meaning of home is also viewed through the lens of historical documentation, which shows the role of authorities and missionaries as partial players in the construction of modern domesticities. The notion of domesticity and its association with western progress or civilisation is shown to be filled with anxieties relating to hygiene and order. / Thesis (PhDArchitectureandDesign)--University of South Australia, 2005.

Thesis (Ph.D.) in History--University of Maine, 2007. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-173).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / "Spring 2010." Title from title screen (viewed on April 20, 2010) A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Sociology. At head of title: University of Alberta.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / "Spring 2010." Title from title screen (viewed on April 20, 2010). A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Sociology. At head of title: University of Alberta.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Adviser: Elayne Zorn. Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-113).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 267-275).

Thesis (M.A. in anthropology)--Washington State University, December 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-135).

No description available.

Many ethnographic accounts within the annals of anthropological literature describe the religious beliefs and magical rituals of peoples throughout the world. Fewer scholars have focused on the relatively young Neo-Pagan religious movement. "Neo-Pagan," explains Helen Berger in Voices from the Pagan Census (2003), "is an umbrella term covering sects of a new religious movement, the largest and most important form of which is…Wicca" (Berger et al. 2003: 1). This thesis examines the relationship between practice and ideology by analyzing the material culture of Wiccan altars as used by Wiccans in Central Florida, USA. Particular attention is paid to beliefs concerning concepts of gender associated with ritual objects, and concepts of gender and sexuality as understood by practitioners. Many Wiccans see divinity as manifested in two complementary beings: the Goddess and the God. The fertility that these divine beings achieve through sexual union is the subject of an elaborate ritual called the Great Rite. A pair of Wiccans, often a masculine High Priest and a feminine High Priestess, conduct this ritual by manipulating specific objects, which are believed to be strongly gendered. I argue that Wiccan rituals reflect, construct, and reinforce the Wiccan precept of a gender-balanced cosmos through the interaction of these primary ritual actors and the gendered objects they manipulate. As a practicing Wiccan, my theoretical approach is aligned with that of the native scholar. The native scholar faces challenges distancing her or himself from research, but gains opportunities from insider knowledge. Wiccan ideology stands in contrast to heteronormative conventions of gender and sexuality. However, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Wiccans may need to actively negotiate for representation in this movement, where fertility is stressed. Wiccans continuously reinvent established practices in an attempt to create a more satisfying religious community.

This thesis brings a focus to food and its cultural geographies by examining the ways that diasporic communities forge networks of distribution and the role of homesickness in shaping tastes in consumer societies. It also adds food (as material and immaterial culture) to diasporic geographies by highlighting the importance of food practices for migrant identities and sense of belonging. Through an investigation of food practices among Brazilians in London this research also contributes to an understanding of how this recent, numerous but under researched South American group experience migration in an everyday basis in London. The investigation undertaken includes desk research on food provision systems, semi-structured interviews and documentary field research with Brazilian food providers across London, focus group discussions with Brazilian migrants, periods of observational research in case study shop and restaurant outlets, and ethnographic domestic research with case study Brazilian households in Harlesden, Brent (an area of London with marked Brazilian immigration over the last decade). My analysis considers ‘Brazilianess' as a category and cultural-culinary form being made and contested in London. An overview of the dynamics of Brazilian food provision in London shows that this making and contesting operates through both the material culture of food provision and the social lives of public spaces such as restaurants, cafes and grocery shops. Brazilian food consumption thus operates in a number of different registers linked to practicality, emotion and ethnic identification. A closer look at public Brazilian food consumption spaces reveals how such places create collective migrant spaces of belonging by translocalizing Brazilian life. In the domestic settings, food narratives and observation reveal the materialities and practices of migrant home making in mixed households and the processes through which consumption practices are negotiated and contested by different household members.