My study examines how religion operates as a form of social control in the politics of memory and memory making in the case of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys (1900-2011), a state reform school in Marianna, Florida. Collective memory making is a dynamic process that reflects the social, economic, and political tensions of the present. It is a process most evident during circumstances of reconciliation following conflict, violence, or cases of turmoil resulting in death and in conflicting memories of the experience. Emergence of a dominant narrative about the tragedy or traumatizing event and subjugation of conflicting stories and memories often follows. At this intersection, memory becomes a weapon or reflection of power. Religion has been defined as operating as means of social control, particularly in the face of uncertainty, fear, and conflict. This study explores dynamics of power with respect to memorialization and ways in which religion informs the present and the past through processes of collective memory making. I also explore ways in which Christianity is employed as a means of bringing about reconciliation through public memory making and memorialization efforts as in the case of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys located in Marianna, Florida. In 2013, a team of anthropologists from the University of South Florida (USF) received approval from the State of Florida to investigate the location of missing children buried at Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. This research, known as the Boot Hill Burial Ground Project, resulted in the excavation of 55 burials. The Boot Hill Burial Ground Project is integral to the memorialization efforts and processes at Dozier as multiple stakeholders utilize the findings of the project for the construction of collective and public memories. The purpose of this study is to analyze tensions involved in processes of memory making resulting from the discovery, excavation, and identification of bodies at the Boot Hill Burial Ground on the Dozier campus and ways power is expressed within this process.

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This research examines socio-cultural change and resilience resulting from holiday tourism and visiting friends and relatives (VFR) travel. The unique cultural attributes of the Pacific region differentiates it from many other generic sea, sand and sun travel destinations worldwide, providing the region with a competitive edge. This research recognises these essential socio-cultural attributes using Samoa as a case study offering various levels of tourist and VFR interactions. The thesis investigated four communities, their culture and the impacts from holiday tourists and VFR travellers. The research methodologies guiding this research offer an innovative and credible mechanism to assess the resilience of the socio-cultural fabric of a Pacific Island nation with growing holiday tourism and a thriving VFR travel sector. A social and cultural capital approach was used to understand communities and their networks in a dynamic and comprehensive way. A combination of participatory action research techniques and critical ethnographic methodologies were used to interact with respondents. Analysis of data used both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. Results of this research have significantly furthered discussion of the socio-cultural fabric of those communities studied in Samoa and how individual socio-cultural elements are influenced by holiday tourism and VFR travel. Based on the analysis of these holiday tourist and VFR traveller impacts, the results can guide planning and policy oriented benchmarks for improved socio-culturally sustainable tourism.

In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered a geographic concentration of Type 2 Diabetes patients in 11 Southeastern states in the United States. Since its acknowledgement by the public health community, little has been done to address the rising rates of diabetes onset and resulting mortality. This thesis provides a medical anthropology analysis to the 'Belt' by critiquing secondary sources in order to construct a productive discussion on socio-medical contributors to Type 2 Diabetes. My thesis documents the numerous social, economic, political, historical, and medical barriers to health equality in the Southern United States and their influence in determining individual, community and population health. Additionally my thesis provides policy recommendations that if enacted, would dramatically equalize the United States health care system. By addressing a current public health crisis in the United States, my thesis provides necessary scholarship on health inequality in the 21st century.

This thesis is about the Ohio State University and the fans of the OSU Buckeyes Football Team. In a study of the students that attend this university, I highlight the behavioral norms that dictate their identities and daily practices. I mean this report to serve as an example of the way in which college football, the marketing and rhetoric of the university, and larger cultural assumptions about college form individual identity. The perspective employed in this report is that of the anthropological process of participant observation, and therefore includes personal reflections throughout my research. This thesis focuses on the theoretical framework of Erving Goffman and discusses the intersection between college football and undergraduate education.

We carry objects from place to place in bags, all the while maintaining that they are trivial objects. If we categorize objects as mundane, then why do we carry them everywhere we go? I interviewed female students at the Claremont Colleges about what they carry in their bags. College women articulate many distinct reasons for carrying a bag and for carrying the items within that bag. My participants perceive the items they carry as mundane, and do not question the presence of those items in their lives. Yet they also claim to need the items they categorize as trivial. They perceive the need to carry items as natural, and so do not question that need. My project demonstrates the ways college women make objects seem trivial and make needs seem natural. Through ethnographic interviews, I highlight how things perceived as mundane have significance. Additionally, I show that carrying a bag and carrying objects enables college women to be prepared to care for the well-being of themselves and the people around them. Between perceptions of objects as inessential and perceptions of the functions of objects as superficial, college women find value in carrying items.

The objective of this research was to develop a holistic understanding of how risk, especially the risk of HIV transmission, is constructed and negotiated in the daily lives of a group of heterosexual, HIV-serodiscordant couples in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Couples serodiscordant for HIV are those in which one partner is infected and the other is not. Data were gathered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with serodiscordant couples, as well as key informants in HIV/AIDS-related civil society, government, and biomedical practitioners in Porto Alegre. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and relevant study materials were coded and subjected to thematic and ethnographic discourse analysis. Many studies of HIV/AIDS assume that risk is a natural fact, objectively verifiable and meaningfully quantitative, but this dissertation problematized such constructions, seeing risk for HIV and the condition of serodiscordance as contingent and polysemic. This research also examined participating couples' experiences with HIV for evidence of commodification or practices of biomedically-mediated citizenship. The main finding of this study indicates that the sociocultural management of seropositivity is much more challenging than its relatively unproblematic biomedical management might lead one to expect, primarily due to the pervasiveness of AIDS-related stigma. Participating serodiscordant couples evidenced attempts to manage this stigma through recourse to a suite of linguistic strategies I call the "semantic quarantine," which discursively isolates the relationship and its constituent members from lexical elements associated with stigmatized identities. The ultimate goal of the quarantine is to create a reality where these couples' intimate relationships are stripped of their threatening connotations, and constitute a "livable love."

This dissertation addresses gaps in anthropological knowledge about how reciprocity--and a specifically Andean form of reciprocity--works in disaster and resettlement settings. This study looks at the practices of reciprocity in a disaster-affected community (Manzano) and a disaster-induced resettlement (Pusuca) in the Andean highlands of Ecuador. Specifically, it examines two aspects of reciprocal exchange practices in these sites. It first looks at some of the factors that affect the continuity of reciprocal exchange practices, which other studies have found to play a vital role in recovery from disasters and resettlement. It then looks to the roles of unequal power relations in the practices of reciprocity and a particularly Andean form of reciprocity and cooperative labor, the minga. The study identifies power-laden dynamics in the practice of reciprocity that tend to be overlooked in studies of social support and mutual aid in disasters and resettlements. I argue that these dynamics are critical to an examination of reciprocity in these contexts because they have important implications for the distribution of relief and development resources. This study employed an iterative, mixed-method, 3-phase research strategy in the recursive discovery and corroboration of analytical domains and the evaluation of study hypotheses. In the first phase, exploratory observation, key informant interviews, and archival searches identified specific terms, practices, and events in order to design effective structured interview questions. In the second phase, I administered structured interviews to obtain quantitative indicators of reciprocal exchanges between group members, distribution of development benefits and collective resources, and occupational and socioeconomic data. In the third phase, I conducted focused observation and documentation of participation in decision-making, plus patterns of influence in public negotiations of development strategies and aid allocation. The expectation of hypothesis 1 was that wage employment and residential distance would be negatively associated with minga participation. The results were mixed between the two sites. In Manzano, wage employment was not significantly associated with records of minga participation, but there was a significant negative correlation with residential distance and minga participation. In Pusuca, there were significant negative correlations with wage employment and residential distance with records of minga participation. The expectation of hypothesis 2 was that household exchange participation would be positively associated with minga participation. Multiple tests of the association between household minga attendance and total household exchange participation found positive associations between these two variables in Manzano, but not in Pusuca. For hypothesis 3a, the expectation was that total household exchange participation would be positively associated with brokerage and decision-making power and statistical tests found a significant positive correlation between these variables in both sites. The implication is that one way that politically powerful individuals exercise and maintain their power is through forming reciprocal exchange ties. Those with more ties are more likely to act as brokers between their neighbors and scarce aid and development resources and more likely to have their views and agendas supported in local decision-making processes. Hypothesis 3b tests the assumption that households connected through reciprocal exchange relations to highly connected households access a greater share of relief and development resources than others. Statistical tests indicated a significant positive association between being connected to highly connected households and project benefit inclusion in both sites. This suggests that it is not only the powerful that access scarce extra-local resources, but also their less connected allies, which can be taken as evidence of privileged inclusion as a form of power in both sites. This study contributes to anthropological knowledge about the political economy of reciprocity in disaster-induced resettlements in two ways. First, it looks more broadly at the range of factors that could influence the continuity or disruption of practices of cooperation and reciprocal exchange in resettlement than other studies, which focuses on the narrow influence of policy practice. In this study, I draw on the economic anthropology of reciprocity and posit a possible role of wider political economic processes--growing integration into the capitalist wage labor economy--as an added explanatory factor for the dissolution of reciprocal exchange relations in post-disaster and resettlement contexts. The second way in which I seek to build upon these studies is by foregrounding the ways in which power relations are bound up in reciprocal exchange relations.

The furry subculture (also known as the anthropomorphic fandom) creates identity through anthropomorphism and therianthropy. Anthropomorphism is the giving of human traits to the non-human. Therianthropy is the giving of animal traits to the human. Through play and creating art, these individuals of the furry subculture take on an anthropomorphic identity (what furries call a fursona) while bridging local and global groups through communication technologies. For this folklore project I conducted ethnographic field works interviews with the Bowling Green, Kentucky fur group. I also build off of the interviews project with an online furry role-play group as well as a Manhattan, Kansas fur group. This thesis explores furry folklore: how members of the furry fandom create, relate to, and express their fursonas. This was done by looking at people’s narrative of joining the fandom and stories of their fursona creation, furry art, fursuits, and fursuit performance. At the same time it covers the complexities of furries as a network and how they mitigate stigma and identity.

(Agro)pastoralism in Sahelian Niger, as elsewhere, operates through household enterprises. Katsinen-ko’en (Fulбe) households, interconnected within kin and community networks, utilize a range of flexible strategies to manage a variety of ecological and economic risks. This dissertation argues that (agro)pastoralist households and communities maintain or improve viability in risky environments first by employing various mobility patterns, among other strategies, and relying on the tightly knit interdependence between household and herd. Secondly, households that most successfully sustain a cooperative integrity (i.e. partnerships between husband and wife, or wives, and parents and children) to negotiate decisions and strategies best withstand adversities such as droughts. The continuance of vital links between household and herd helps the household enterprise more easily weather difficult times and profit during advantageous times. Thirdly, the transfer of endowments from parents to children of ecological, economic and political knowledges and socio-economic networks ensures the continuity of family livelihoods. This dissertation analyzes a range of household/herd mobility patterns on a livelihood continuum from sedentary agropastoralism to exclusive pastoralism, and the household decisions that lead to those mobilities. In this way, it adds to a growing body of literature that examines household strategies employed in very uncertain natural environments, contributing to pastoral studies and environmental anthropology. By folding household economics and political ecology into household ecology, it analyses resource and asset transfers within and between households, all under the influence of the natural and political-economic environments. Contributing to development anthropology, I argue that the most important buffer against the risks of unpredictable environments is a stable, undivided household, migrating with and managing its own herd. I conclude by showing how development research and projects should support household/herd integrity to enhance livelihood security. When government or development agencies institute policies and projects that remove children from the household, or separate households and herds, they endanger the integrity of the household and the reproduction of livelihoods that make essential contributions to national economies. Rather than urging pastoralists to modify their livelihoods to fit images held by ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION administrators, these organizations and agencies should help pastoralists to build on adaptations that already facilitate their management of risky environments.