This thesis is an ethnographic study of the informal realm in a North London comprehensive school. Although situated within, and formed by, an institutional context, this network of peer relations is largely unmanaged by adults. Pupils are in charge. They exert influence, manifest social definitions, create their own hierarchies and negotiate their differences. My focus of study is a cohort of 15 to 16 year-olds in Year 11. They come from a diversity of backgrounds, in terms of religion, parental occupation, academic attainments and ethnicity. Through close attention to the pupils’ words and actions in the day-to-day workings of the informal realm in this school, I explore the constitution and consequences of this impressive phenomenon. Anthropological studies of the informal realm are few and far between, and ones in British schools even rarer. Yet, the informal realm offers valuable contributions to three areas in anthropology: the emerging anthropology of youth; the little-studied everyday realities of Western personhood; and an application of Munn’s theory of value production (1986). Munn’s model has not yet been applied to the informal realm. However I argue her theory of value production serves to illuminate the entire realm. It is intrinsically relational and involves subjective transformation. Centrally, action is the primary unit of analysis, as it is for my analysis. There are no structures or formal roles in the informal realm, so pupils must continuously maintain their arena with a constant flow of transactions. I argue that in the process of creating and maintaining this realm, pupils come to value themselves as particular kinds of people (Evans 2006). Different groups engage in different modes of value production. Through these actions, their subsequent evaluations, and the daily debate over what constitutes positive and negative value, pupils collaboratively establish a constellation of differences. They organise their world, enabling them to share the same social space yet define themselves as very different kinds of people. In this constellation of differences, ethnicity, gender and sexuality are particularly salient categories of distinction, subject to pupils’ collaboratively set conventions. In order to ‘fit in’ pupils have to conform to these conventions. Thus this ethnography delineates what is involved in becoming an appropriately ethnic, sexual and gendered person in school. The application of an intrinsically relational model of subjective formation challenging Western ideals of the autonomous individual. These processes of differentiation occur at the same time as processes of unification. Throughout their time as a community, Year 11 pupils are producing communal value through which they can define themselves worthwhile as a group. They end their time of compulsory schooling with a celebration of this communal value.

In the estate sale, actors (shoppers and estate sale workers) form notions ofpersonhood and pollution through objects such as half-used bottles of perfume, floral dishes, and family photographs. Actors use these objects to create the gender, personality, religion, hobbies, and occupation of the objects' former owners. The context of the estate sale contributes to these notions of personhood. Estate sales usually occur after a death, almost everything this person has owned is priced for sale, and the estate sale is held within the house of the deceased.This study draws on Mary Douglas' work on pollution as "matter out of place." In the estate sale, pollution takes on various forms (in association with death and illness, the body, the identity of their previous owner, and physical dirt) and degrees, which affect how "out of place" an object is, as well as how actors react to this object. These four forms of pollution are then linked back to the objects' previous owner due to actors' perceived lack of anonymity of this person. Suggestions are made as to how these forms of pollution extend and refine Douglas' continuum of purity and pollution, and how they link to notions of gendered personhood.

This thesis is an organisational ethnography that seeks to make an original contribution to anthropological knowledge through an iterative interrogation of neoliberalism and personhood.Endeavour (a pseudonym) is a gap year organisation based in the UK that runs trips abroad to Central America, India and Borneo for young people. A gap year is any period of between three months to two years outside formal education or employment, but often refers to a year-off preceding university. Endeavour is a registered charity committed to what it describes as “personal development”. It attempts this by organising young people into small groups to participate in adventurous challenges and work on charitable projects in community development and environmental conservation.Using multi-sited ethnography, the thesis moves from the marketing, fundraising and recruitment in Endeavour’s Head Office to the implementation and management of expeditions in Central America. The thesis explores the daily workings, processes and practices of Endeavour and how these are influenced by and connected to the current political-economic climate in the UK as it works to produce a particular type of gap year experience and through this a particular kind of person.In exploring the process by which neoliberal persons are shaped at a gap year organisation, the thesis considers different aspects of the organisation and how it interacts with and is shaped by its context. It argues that the demands of neoliberalism have shaped the organisational structure of Endeavour and its employees. The trips also prepare young people to cope with the conditions in a neoliberal labour market. The thesis investigates Endeavour’s relationship to the state and argues non-governmental bodies are increasingly taking on state-like roles. Equally, as Endeavour has had to professionalise and become “business-like” to compete in the gap year market, it must patrol its charitable ethos to ensure the organisation carries the moral weight that attracts its patrons. The thesis also considers the techniques used during the trips abroad to discipline and organise young people as well as how these encourage friendships and social harmony in line with Endeavour’s charitable goals. It explores the personal development techniques that form the basis of Endeavour’s model of personhood and how these are used to develop individuals who are good at making transitory social relations and can thrive in neoliberal circumstances.

This ethnographic exploration tackles meanings of childhood in Qondwa village, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, by illustrating how childhood is constantly shifted, negotiated and contested. These attempted definitions of childhood defy the Western constructs of childhood, regarding the ethnography here is undertaken in African context. I dedicated six months carrying out qualitative research on these meanings. For purposes of my research, I adopt the local term, rather than recorded Western definition of a 'child' in Qondwa which is expressed as any boy or girl who is financially dependent on parents or guardians, regardless of age. Furthermore, a boy only transitions into a man, as a girl into a woman, when financially independent of their parents/guardians, regardless of age. I hereby argue that there is no universal meaning of childhood and provide comparative ethnographies of childhood to cement this argument. I adopt Karp's theory of personhood to further argue that personhood of children determines how children experience realities. I go further to discuss childhood in the context of parents/guardians, childhood in the context of defined socio-geographic spaces, childhood in the context of traditional cultural events which show that there is no universal meaning of childhood, even within a culture displaying the complexities of such definitions. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Anthropology and Archaeology / MSocSci / Unrestricted

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This ethnography explores the meanings ofpersonhood and agency in Manen¢berg, a township located on the Cape Flats, in Cape Town South Africa. The township was a site of relocation for people who were classified coloured during the apartheid era and who were forcibly removed from newly declared white areas in the city in the 1960s. I argue that despite the old apartheid state's attempts to reify the meaning of colouredness through racial legislation, the residents ofManenberg created their own meanings of personhood, agency and community within the bureaucratic, social and economic interstices of the apartheid system. Yet at the same time they also reinstated the very structural processes at the heart of their racial and gendered subjugation. I indicate how the cohesiveness of the Rio Street community in Manenberg, the survival of its residents and their validation as respectable mothers, tough men and good daughters hinged on and effioresced from a moral economy that articulated with the structural location of coloured women in the apartheid economy and racial bureaucracy.

Both intensional and extensional explanations of linguistic meaning involve notions -- linguistic roles and referential relations, respectively -- which are not perspicuous and seem to evade satisfactory explanations themselves. Following Sellars, I make a move away from semantic explanation of the designation relation and of linguistic roles toward an explanation which relates to the use of linguistic and perceptual signs (i.e., pragmatics). In doing so, concerns are raised that seem to be more closely associated with epistemology and phenomenology than with the philosophy of language or logic. In particular, experience is taken to be intentional, i.e., to have a propositional content which is irreducible to the causal order. Along with intentionality, certain essentially autobiographical conditions of experience are neglected in typical conceptions of the problem of meaning. They are reintroduced here. Further, I take as a presupposition the pragmatist notion that each of our conceptual schemes emerges from a community of persons, rather than from individuals. What follows from the preceding starting points is a picture of incomplete personhood in which persons are seen as being inclined both toward experiential wholes which have conceptual content and toward establishing and unifying beliefs which resolve doubts. Because of the conditions of experience constitutive of, and peculiar to, personhood and the necessity of the community for individual inquiry, the notion of incomplete personhood has a central position in my pragmatist conception of the problem of meaning. By emphasizing the pragmatistic conditions of experience and the active role of persons in finding objects and in continually reaching toward a final complete picture, the problems related to objectivity are found to be peripheral to a conception of meaning which captures the practice(s) of persons' living object-directed lives. The result is a new way of conceiving of the problem of meaning. / Master of Arts

This project focusses on the idea of how the person as developed by Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) is a departure from a common understanding of the person. Mounier's concept of the person is simultaneously singular and relational. Furthermore, the person is a spiritual being who represents the highest form of humanity that one can become. The idea of the person contains liberal and communitarian elements: the person understands herself as a unique subject whilst ontologically requiring the other to fully flourish as a person. It is incoherent for the person to conceive of herself as fundamentally separate of the other, which is why the person joins with the other to form a nous. This draws a stark line between Mounier and liberal individualist thought that conceives of the person as an isolated subject. The liberal element of Mounier's thought is that the state protects the person and her communities against actions that impinge upon the person's fundamental rights so that the person can maximise her freedom to flourish. Moreover, the institutions that form the personalist state are inspired by liberal thought. This means that Mounier's project begins from a communitarian standpoint and finishes by offering a liberal communitarianism. -- Ce projet se concentre sur l'idée de la personne qu'a développée Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) et comment elle dévie d'une compréhension courante de la personne. Le concept de la personne de Mounier est simultanément singulier et relationnel. De plus, la personne est un être spirituel qui représente la plus honte forme de l'humanité que l'on pourrait devenir. Cette idée de la personne comprend des éléments libéraux et communautaires : la personne se perçoit comme un sujet unique alors qu'elle requiert ontologiquement autrui, afin de s'épanouir en tant que personne. Il est incohérent que la personne se conçoive comme être fondamentalement séparé d'autrui, ce qui est pourquoi la personne se joint à autrui pour qu'ils forment un nous. Cela établit une distinction nette entre Mounier et la pensée individualiste libérale qui conçoit de la personne comme un sujet isolé. L'élément libéral de la pensée de Mounier est que l'État protège la personne et ses communautés contre des infractions contre ses droits fondamentaux, afin que la personne puisse maximiser sa liberté de s'épanouir. En outre, les institutions qui forment l'État personnaliste s'inspirent de la pensée libérale. Cela veut dire que le projet de Mounier commence d'une perspective communautaire et se termine en proposant un communautarisme libéral.

Post-abortion support groups are a new sub-movement or strategy of the broader anti-abortion movement that provide support to women who understand their prior abortions as problematic. These groups construct abortion as a form of trauma that causes post-abortion syndrome (PAS), a broad array of negative mental health and behavioral problems similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. Although these claims are not substantiated by empirical evidence, claims that abortion causes PAS are increasingly featured in the public domain to bolster national anti-abortion claims that abortion represents a public health issue. A majority of PAS support groups are offered by crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) affiliated with one of two national pregnancy resource centers whose approach to healing from abortion reflects the increased presence and influence of evangelical women in the CPC movement. The increased presence of evangelical women in the CPC movement is reflected in the growing influence of conservative Christian beliefs in the support services offered by CPCs in general and PAS groups specifically. This research examined a PAS group in Mississippi sponsored by an evangelical CPC affiliated with Care Net, a national pregnancy resource center, to understand the motivations of women who participate in a PAS group, how PAS group participation shapes participants’ understandings of abortion to conform to broader anti-abortion claims that abortion is a public health issue, and how PAS claims are diffused into the public domain. To discern the relationship between PAS groups and broader anti-abortion claims, I analyze state and national media coverage of the 2011 Mississippi political campaign in which voters overwhelmingly defeated a constitutional amendment to pass a personhood amendment to confer legal status to the fetus. Together these analyses show how evangelical groups are working through legislative and individual-level processes to shape the abortion debate and climate in contemporary American society.

No

This thesis is about the legal and moral status of abortion. It is primarily concerned with the metaphysical status of the foetus, with particular attention to the question whether the foetus is properly characterised as a person in the philosophical sense. The argument of the thesis proceeds in two parts. The first part surveys certain lines of argument to the effect that the question of prenatal personhood is immaterial to the moral and legal permissibility of abortion. Against these claims, it argues that the personhood status of the foetus is indeed central to the moral and legal appraisal of abortion practice. The second part focuses on the metaphysical question in its own right. The thesis proposes a theoretical underpinning for the ‘gradualist’ view of human life before birth, according to which the human foetus is a fuller instantiation of a person the more biologically developed it is. It sets out to defend the kernel of the gradualist thesis against a cluster of criticisms, commonly advanced by those who endorse the belief that the personhood of human beings begins at conception. One notable challenge of this sort, which the thesis aims to address, asserts that any graduated account of personhood before birth is logically inconsistent with basic human equality. Finally, the thesis considers a few practical implications for the legal regulation of abortion stemming from the gradualist thesis, and the rule of law standards by which a regulatory framework must abide.