<p>“IN MY HEART I AM PORTUGUESE”: PERSPECTIVES ON PORTUGUESE MIGRATION, IDENTITY AND RELIGION IN HAMILTON, ONTARIO</p> <p>Stephanie Da Silva Advisor:</p> <p>McMaster University, 2013 Dr. Ellen Badone</p> <p>This thesis is an investigation into migration, identity and religion among Portuguese migrants to Hamilton, Ontario. It is an ethnographic exploration of how Portuguese migrants identify themselves within the migrant setting and how migration has impacted their religious beliefs and practices. I focus on the Portuguese religious patron saint festivals, known as <em>festas </em>and the significance of these cultural performances for the future of a distinct Portuguese identity in Canada. This inquiry has implications for the study of migration, transnationalism and Portuguese religious traditions, and expands our understanding of the struggles and successes of Portuguese immigrants within the particular historical and cultural contexts they have lived their lives.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>I argue in this dissertation that aestheticizing urban landscapes represents an effort to create humane public environments in disenfranchised inner-city spaces, and turns these environments into culturally valued sites of pilgrimage. Specifically, I focus on James Street North, a neighbourhood undergoing artistic renewal in the post-industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the arts scene on James Street North, my thesis claims that artistic activities serve as an ordinary, everyday material response to the perceived and real challenges of poverty, crime and decay in downtown Hamilton. Aesthetic elaboration is a generative and tangible expression by arts stakeholders of their intangible hopes, desires, and dreams for the city. People’s hope, desires and dreams, however, are not all the same. Debates about the space use on James Street North generally take the form of pro-city revitalization versus anti-gentrification. These responses, I argue, are ultimately tied to, and concerned with, larger questions about the authenticity of place. Further, the authenticity of place is tied to a nostalgic yearning for a past that is symbolically associated with ‘country’ ideals of a close-knit community and a place of respite and renewal away from the ‘city.’ The aestheticization of this particular urban landscape, that was repeatedly imagined, reinforced, and performed during my fieldwork, is an attempt to humanize and democratize the street and the city rather than dehumanize and colonize it. Further, the street itself, in becoming tied to the hopes and desires of people, has taken on an almost sacred quality. As such, James Street North, as a destination to which people journey, and as a place in which both personal and social transformation occurs, is likened to a site of secular pilgrimage.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Page 114 with a diagram is actually page 116.</p> <p>Page 216 with a diagram is actually page 219.</p> <p>Page 224 with a diagram is actually page 227.</p> <p>Page 273 with a diagram is actually page 276.</p> <p>Page 295 is blank in the hard copy. </p> / <p>The aim of this dissertation is the examination of theoretlcal concepts and assumptions which have informed the study of time in cultural anthropology. In the anthropological literature, the notion of time is recognized as being a uniquely human phenomenon, having a dualistic if not paradoxical nature, that ls, it is simultaneously cyclical and lineal. These two characteristics have been viewed as being separate and opposed to each other. In this dissertation, however, I argue that they are not opposed and separate but are closely intertwined. A multidimensional helical model is employed to illustrates this interconnectedness.</p> <p>I present the view that one key to understanding cyclical and linear characteristics of time can be found in examining the element of contingency. My examination of the role that contingency plays with respect to temporal organization is situated within the context of the culture of southern Labrador where contingency commands a prominent position in the lives of fishers, trappers and hunters and their families. From the ethnographic context, I address some of the important anthropological ideas that have informed the study of time and contingency in anthropology. A framework of key notions or understandings emerge from this examination, namely: (1) that time is dynamic, (2) that cyclical and lineal iii iv aspects of time are interrelated rather than opposed, (3) that time has multidimensionality and finally (4) that contingency in its various environmental and cultural expressions can effect the way in which time is conceptualized and organized. The dissertation is based on fourteen months of field research conducted in the summer of 1976, 1979-1980 and in the fall of 1988.</p> <p>It begins with an examination of anthropological perspectives on the study of time and contingency. I move on 1..0 an exploration of historical and social events which provide a baseline for interpreting the relationship between contingency and time. Next, the contingencies based in the environmental cycle, particularly breakup and freezeup are explored along with adjustive responses employed by Labradorians to accommodate them.</p> <p>The relationship between contingency and predictability are examined in light of work and leisure patterns of women and of men respectively. Family commensal routines provide a venue in which contingency is modulated and predictability is introduced in the daily cycle. While women and men experience different levels of contingency and predictability in their daily lives, a complementary relationship exists between male and female temporal domains. Examination of the daily cycle also reveals that the daily schedule is ordered into domains of public and private time. During ritual time, distinctions between public and private v time, between male and female, and between stranger and friend undergo symbolic inversion. Here contingencies of both the environmental and social sort are celebrated. Disguise, in the form of janneying (masking) and social drinking, provide the vehicle for such inversion. In light of t.his data, questions concerning the effect of contingent events on temporal organization are explored.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Framed through the standardizations of food and generalizations of people, this research explores the shifting ingredients of migrant identities and the ethnic foodways carried with them as they cross the border into the United States. Using ethnographic observational fieldwork, content analysis of menus, and semi-structured interviews with restaurant staff and migrant workers, this study examines the transnational narratives of the day laborer population and their deterritorialized food culture in post-Katrina New Orleans. Further, this research explores this flow of people and culture through a globalization lens in order to achieve a more holistic understanding of the “migrant experience” and how Latinos are both defined and self-defined within an increasingly global context.

Thesis advisor: Audrey Friedman / Evidence suggests that college preparation programs successfully support students through college preparation and application process. However, most research into college preparation programs does not attend to students' collegiate experiences once they leave college preparation programs. This dissertation explored the long-term influence of Small College's College Preparation Program (CPP) on students' collegiate academic, cultural, and social experiences, following college preparation program graduation. This research is a multiple-case study that used phenomenologically oriented interviews. The source of participants was students who completed CPP in 2006 and 2007 and who were enrolled in a university. Using purposeful sampling to achieve maximum variation among CPP graduates, I conducted three tape-recorded interviews of seven participants. Interactive interviews followed Seidman's (1998) recommendations for interview content. Positioning theory was used, in conjunction with social and cultural capital, to analyze data throughout data collection. Positioning theory served as a useful lens for examining the first year college experiences of CPP graduates because it allowed the researcher to explore participant experiences with their agency in mind. Much of the literature on university outreach college preparation programs places students at the center of the research. Often, though, within the research, students are positioned as passive recipients of college preparation services. Viewing the college admissions process as a discourse, participants reflexively self-positioned, but they were also engaged in interactive positioning. In either role, participants assumed an active role, rather than the passive role that most research positions assigns to students. This dissertation finds that participants actively self-positioned as they applied both dominant and non-dominant social and cultural capital during their college preparation and after matriculation. The ability to navigate complex and exclusionary contexts speaks to participants' strengths, perseverance, and motivation. Supportive relationships mitigated the impact of stereotype threat, interpersonal and institutional microaggressions. Moreover, participants self-positioned in ways that built on participants' wealth of insights, experiences, relationships, and capital, leading to academic success. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis explores the practices of Muslim businessmen and entrepreneurs in Birmingham in relation to their beliefs in a variety of Islamic reformisms, ideals of piety and responses towards charity and philanthropy. The thesis problematizes various streams of Islamic reformisms among different groups of reformist Muslims and elaborates how these groups engage with Muslim businessmen and entrepreneurs in order to establish and assert their identity as ‘authentic and good Muslims' in public spheres. The thesis discusses how reformist Muslim businessmen and entrepreneurs give public performances of their pious lives and how their ideals of piety and living a moral life are reshaped and negotiated among Birmingham Muslims while they search for role models in social and economic spheres of life. Finally, this thesis explores and establishes the links between charity and donation related practices of Birmingham Muslims with their beliefs in any particular reformist interpretation of practicing Islam in everyday life; and how doing charity and philanthropy becomes a site for the public performance of piety. This thesis further explores charity practices of Birmingham Muslims in order to understand the context, motivations and background of Muslim charitable organisations and Muslim philanthropists. One year ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods of Birmingham, UK as part of this anthropological research. This thesis claims its originality by filling the gap of lack of anthropological research on Birmingham Muslims in the context of ongoing anthropological debate on Islamic reformism, piety and charity that has emerged as a result of anthropological researches conducted in other Muslim societies. My argument, in this thesis is that there is an element of Islamic reforms in all forms of different Islamic streams or sects of Muslims. The charity practices of Muslim businessmen and entrepreneurs are highly influenced by their adherence to any interpretation of reformist Islam that too, is greatly influenced by local realities and global trends.

This dissertation is based on eighteen months of field work in Amazonian Bolivia, and situated in the discourse around the construction of indigenous identity in a neoliberal state. It focusses on a lowland people and their historical and contemporary relationship to the state which is aligned to the contemporary indigenous movement. It does this through an ethnographic and historical study of Tacana people, members of an indigenous group who originate in the tropical piedmont of the Bolivian Andes. A central focus of the work is on the relationships which Tacana people have built with different ethnic, social and political groups in their territory. This focus helps to elucidate the overarching issue at the centre of the thesis: the tensions between the Tacana and other indigenous groups, namely highland Aymara and Quechua who have migrated into the region (colonos). The relationship between Tacana and colonos has become increasingly conflictive since the advent of Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, which emphasizes its origins in Bolivia's strong highland-lowland regionalism. This thesis therefore also examines the strong regionalist sentiments found in Bolivia, as expressed in the contrasting concepts of camba (lowland) and colla (highland) which are themselves further tied to more recent efforts to forge local identities, such as an Amazonian identity. The thesis shows how these efforts, which transgress local, historical and racial boundaries, entail an implicit criticism by lowland populations of the government in the Andes. A related point is that constructions of race and mestizaje have developed differently in the highlands and lowlands. Through a close analysis of such racial relationships the thesis shows how lowland groups such as the Tacana more readily align with lowland mestizo people than with other indigenous groups, especially those who originate in the highlands. Democratization processes and neoliberal policy changes have created spaces for tensions to take shape here and become clearer by discussions around identity, heritage and belonging, brought up by the indigenous movement and heavily informed by NGOs.

This thesis investigates how families in northern Senegal negotiate between state and Islamic schools. Studies of education strategies within anthropology of education predominantly employ Bourdieu's concept of capital. These studies are useful for illuminating the role of education within people's strategies of social mobility, but tend to render invisible preferences based on non-material considerations like spiritual benefits. To overcome this challenge, this thesis uses economic theory which acknowledges both intrinsic and material factors informing school choice. It draws on fifteen months' ethnographic fieldwork comprising life histories, informal interviews and participant observation. The thesis contributes to several debates in anthropology of development and education. Findings reveal the importance of a caste-like social hierarchy in shaping education strategies, and challenge simplistic predictions common in development discourse about how gender or being Muslim influence educational trajectories. Results also show how education preferences reflect context-specific routes to social mobility. In northern Senegal, lack of formal sector employment makes the secular state school's promises of economic advancement largely inaccessible. Qur'anic schools present a more certain investment for men of privileged social groups who monopolise access to this education, for the prestige of Islamic knowledge and insertion into trade and migration networks. Intrinsic benefits of Qur'anic schooling, like blessing and moral education, also inform school preference. These factors are neglected in development discourse and state education provision - including recent reforms to engage Islamic knowledge to meet Education For All and the Millennium Development Goal – due to secularist and rationalist biases. This undermines families' access to affordable schooling that combines the intrinsic and material benefits which they prioritise, and privileges those who can afford private alternatives. Inspired by applied anthropology committed to social justice, this thesis draws on people's strategies to overcome these challenges to recommend non-formal alternatives to enable education provision compatible with popular worldviews.