Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study sought to investigate if there are common cultural elements for preventing and transforming violent conflict in selected patrilineal and matrilineal tribes in Malawi, as well as selected societies from other parts of Africa. The researcher argues that in both patrilineal and matrilineal tribes in Malawi, violent conflict prevention and transformation methods are inherently rooted in elaborate socio-political governance structures. This also applies to other societies in Africa, such as the pre-colonial traditional societies of Rwanda, the Pokot pastoral community in the North Rift of Kenya, the ubuntu societies in South Africa and the Acholi of Northern Uganda. The basic framework for these structures comprise the individuals (men, women and older children), as the primary building blocks, the family component comprising of the nucleus and extended families as secondary building block and traditional leadership component. Within these socio-political governance structures, individuals coexist and are inextricably bound in multi-layered social relationships and networks with others. In these governance structures, a certain level of conflict between individuals or groups is considered normal and desirable, as it brings about vital progressive changes as well as creates the necessary diversity, which makes the community interesting. However, violent conflicts are regarded as undesirable and require intervention. Consequently, the multi-layered social networks have several intrinsic features, which enable the communities to prevent the occurrence of violent conflicts or transform them when they occur, in order to maintain social harmony. The first findings show that each level of the social networks has appropriate mechanisms for dissipating violent conflicts, which go beyond tolerable levels. Secondly, individuals have an obligation to intervene in violent conflicts as part of social and moral roles, duties and commitments, which they have to fulfil. Thirdly, the networks have forums in which selected competent elders from the society facilitate open discussions of violent conflicts and decisions are made by consensus involving as many men and women as possible. In these forums, each individual is valued and dignified. Fourthly, there are deliberate efforts to advance transparency and accountability in the forums where violent conflicts are discussed. However, in general terms, women occupy a subordinate status in both leadership and decision-making processes, though they actively participate in violent conflict interventions and some of them hold leadership positions. In addition, the findings show that the tribes researched have an elaborate process for transforming violent conflicts. This process includes the creation of an environment conducive for discussing violent conflicts, listening to each of the disputants, establishing the truth, exhausting all issues, reconciling the disputants and in case one disputant is not satisfied with the outcomes of the discussions, referring the violent conflict for discussion to another forum. Furthermore, individuals in both patrilineal and matrilineal tribes are governed by moral values including respect, relations, relationships, interdependence, unity, kindness, friendliness, sharing, love, transparency, tolerance, self-restraint, humility, trustworthiness and obedience. These moral values enhance self-restraint, prevent aggressive behaviour, as well as promote and enhance good relationships between individuals in the family and the society as a whole. The researcher argues that the positive cultural factors for prevention and transformation of violent conflict, outlined above, which are inherent in the traditional African socio-political governance system should be deliberately promoted for incorporation into the modern state socio-political governance systems through peace-building and development initiatives as well as democratisation processes. This could be one of the interventions for dealing with violent conflict devastating Africa today.

The subaltern is a recurrent literary figure in Mexican narrative. The objective of this thesis is to investigate three ethnic groups – indeed, subalterns – in Mexico which include: Afro-Mexicans, indigenous groups, and Filipino colonial subjects from the perspectives of the Mexican Revolution, post-revolutionary Mexico, and the conquest of the Philippines in the sixteenth century. The principal characters play crucial roles in events shaping the history and culture of Mexico and thus demonstrate their importance to the country's development while also revealing the reality of subalterns. The literary research shows that trying circumstances or a lack of self-identity were the main causes for a character to be or become a subaltern in addition to their inherent ethnic disadvantages. However, the characters who overcame their subaltern state often changed personality traits or adapted to their surroundings in order to be assimilated into the majority culture.

Soňa Bendíková:Soňa Bendíková:Soňa Bendíková:Soňa Bendíková: Kotas of Blue Mountains: Myths and LegendsKotas of Blue Mountains: Myths and LegendsKotas of Blue Mountains: Myths and LegendsKotas of Blue Mountains: Myths and Legends AbstractAbstractAbstractAbstract The dissertation The Kotas from the Blue Mountains: Myths and Legends deals with the tradition of the Kota tribe living in the Nilgiri mountain range in southern India. The work discusses the oral tradition of the tribe on the background of the regional development in the last two centuries. The Kotas used to live symbiotically with a few other local tribes with whom they developed a unique system of barter trade and services. The microregion remained isolated until new settlers started to arrive from the valley (in the beginning of 19th century). The arrival of the people from the valley and of the English people in the course of the last two hundred years caused a significant change of all aspects of life in the Blue Mountains: economic, social, cultural and ecological. This work has two aims: (i) to interpret the results of my fieldwork and to analyze the recordings of the remnants of the oral heritage of the tribe with approximately 2,000 members, and to do it on the background of the changes in the area; and (ii) to determine whether and how...

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The first part of the thesis is concerned with questions arising from the dual society of "tribesmen and townsmen", as the distinction is often briefly but inaccurately described. Nearly two thirds of the rural population and more than half of the total population may be regarded as having their social centre of gravity still in some form or other of tribal organisation. 1. British policy towards the tribes, as it shaped at first after the occupation of the country during the last war, stood in contradiction to the axiom which had been common to all the changing patterns of Turkish tribal policy. Far from being intent on destroying tribalism, it favoured its preservation. But the experiment in indirect administration of tribal areas came to an end in 1920. In some districts conditions forbade its introduction, in others its introduction courted failure. With the establishment of the provisional Arab Government the emphasis shifted back towards the bureaucratic administration of tribal areas. With the assistance of the British Royal Air Force, the establishment of direct administration in the outlying districts proceeded steadily. After the release from the Mandate, the Iraqi army proved its ability to act efficiently in face of serious tribal opposition. The ascendancy of the central Government faces tribalism with difficult problems of re-adjustment.

xvii, 413 p. : ill., maps. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / In 1954, one hundred years after the western Oregon Indians were removed to the Grand Ronde Reservation; the antecedent peoples were subjected to the final effort by the United States to colonize the remainder of their lands through Federal termination policy. The permanent Grand Ronde Reservation, settled in 1855 and established by presidential executive order in 1857, was terminated by Congress, and the tribal people lost their Federal recognition. The seven ratified treaties that ceded to the United States millions of acres of land, most of western Oregon, which was occupied by over 60 tribal nations, were nullified. These 60 tribes were declared by Congress to be assimilated, and termination was enacted to free them from continued government management and oppression. In western Oregon, native people appeared to cease to exist, and for 29 years the Grand Ronde descendants suffered disenfranchisement and a multitude of social problems. The reservation's tribal cultures, languages, and community were severely fractured and much was lost. Terminated tribal members were rejected by other tribes as having willingly sold out to the Federal government. During the post-termination era, despite all of the problems the tribal members faced, they found ways to survive and worked to restore the tribe. In 1983, the Grand Ronde Tribe was restored. This research gathers disparate information from political, anthropological, historical, and tribal sources to analyze and understand the termination of the Grand Ronde Reservation. Revealed are the many political issues of the 1940s and 1950s that contributed to termination. Oral histories and government correspondence and reports from the era are referenced to illuminate the reality of tribal life in the post-termination era. The research connects to historic strategies of the Federal government to colonize all aboriginal lands and to assimilate Indians. Finally, this study seeks to unveil the history of the Grand Ronde Reservation and its peoples so that the tribal people may understand and recover from the effects of the termination of the tribe. The continued effects of termination are explored, discussed, and connected to issues of tribal identity and indigenous decolonization. / Adviser: Lynn Stephen

Dans le cadre de l'optimisation multiobjectif, les métaheuristiques sont reconnues pour être des méthodes performantes mais elles ne rencontrent qu'un succès modéré dans le monde de l'industrie. Dans un milieu où seule la performance compte, l'aspect stochastique des métaheuristiques semble encore être un obstacle difficile à franchir pour les décisionnaires. Il est donc important que les chercheurs de la communauté portent un effort tout particulier sur la facilité de prise en main des algorithmes. Plus les algorithmes seront faciles d'accès pour les utilisateurs novices, plus l'utilisation de ceux-ci pourra se répandre. Parmi les améliorations possibles, la réduction du nombre de paramètres des algorithmes apparaît comme un enjeu majeur. En effet, les métaheuristiques sont fortement dépendantes de leur jeu de paramètres. Dans ce cadre se situe l'apport majeur de TRIBES, un algorithme mono-objectif d'Optimisation par Essaim Particulaire (OEP) qui fonctionne automatiquement,sans paramètres. Il a été mis au point par Maurice Clerc. En fait, le fonctionnement de l'OEP nécessite la manipulation de plusieurs paramètres. De ce fait, TRIBES évite l'effort de les régler (taille de l'essaim, vitesse maximale, facteur d'inertie, etc.).Nous proposons dans cette thèse une adaptation de TRIBES à l'optimisation multiobjectif. L'objectif est d'obtenir un algorithme d'optimisation par essaim particulaire multiobjectif sans paramètres de contrôle. Nous reprenons les principaux mécanismes de TRIBES auxquels sont ajoutés de nouveaux mécanismes destinés à traiter des problèmes multiobjectif. Après les expérimentations, nous avons constaté, que TRIBES-Multiobjectif est moins compétitif par rapport aux algorithmes de référence dans la littérature. Ceci peut être expliqué par la stagnation prématurée de l'essaim. Pour remédier à ces problèmes, nous avons proposé l'hybridation entre TRIBES-Multiobjectif et un algorithme de recherche locale, à savoir le recuit simulé et la recherche tabou. L'idée était d'améliorer la capacité d'exploitation deTRIBES-Multiobjectif. Nos algorithmes ont été finalement appliqués sur des problèmes de dimensionnement des transistors dans les circuits analogiques / Meta-heuristics are recognized to be successful to deal with multiobjective optimization problems but still with limited success in engineering fields. In an environment where only the performance counts, the stochastic aspect of meta-heuristics again seems to be a difficult obstacle to cross for the decision-makers. It is, thus, important that the researchers of the community concern a quite particular effort to ease the handling of those algorithms. The more the algorithms will be easily accessible for the novices, the more the use of these algorithms can spread. Among the possible improvements, reducing the number of parameters is considered as the most challenging one. In fact, the performance of meta-heuristics is strongly dependent on their parameters values. TRIBES presents an attempt to remedy this problem. In fact, it is a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm that works in an autonomous way. It was proposed by Maurice Clerc. Indeed, like every other meta-heuristic, PSO requires many parameters to be fitted every time a new problem is considered. The major contribution of TRIBES is to avoid the effort of fitting them. We propose, in this thesis, an adaptation of TRIBES to the multiobjective optimization. Our aim is to conceive a competitive PSO algorithm free of parameters. We consider the main mechanisms of TRIBES to which are added new mechanisms intended to handle multiobjective problems. After the experimentations, we noticed that Multiobjective-TRIBESis not competitive compared to other multiobjective algorithms representative of the state of art. It can be explained by the premature stagnation of the swarm. To remedy these problems, we proposed the hybridization between Multiobjective-TRIBES and local search algorithms such as simulated annealing and tabu search. The idea behind the hybridization was to improve the capacity of exploitation of Multiobjective-TRIBES. Our algorithms were finally applied to sizing analogical circuits' problems

The study examines the socio-religious role of women in traditional African societies using the Hlubi of Qumbu, Transkei as a case study. Qualitative methodology was used to look at Hlubi women holistically in their past and the situations in which they find themselves today. Primary sources of African traditional religion such as myths, proverbs and taboos were also used in assessing the socio-religious role of Hlubi women. The following observations were made about Hlubi women: 1. They do not constitute an homogenous group. 2. Sexual division of labour allocates to women the responsibility of sustaining the household. 3. They have multiple workloads: namely, survival, household and income generating tasks. 4. They experience ambivalence regarding their roles - responsibility without proper authority. 5. Hlubi women share with their male counterparts the role of traditional healers. 6. In spite of increased involvement of women in church activities they are still denied leadership positions. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Religious Studies)

The Tohono O'odham Nation of southern Arizona and northern Sonora Mexico has two distinct and distinctive cultural, social, political and federal histories. The American government politically acknowledges one group while the other is entrenched in Mexican social policy that regards Indigenous peoples as equals to the Mestizo population known as campesinos or peasants. The Sonoran Tohono O'odham community of Al Pi'ichkin or Pitiquito, Sonora, Mexico, has managed to persist and survive into the twenty first century despite the presence of an international boundary and the assimilative efforts of Mexican socio-federal Indian policy.This is an exploration of the issue of cultural continuity within the community of Pitiquito, Sonora Mexico via the following eight themes which emerged from my field work: the oral tradition; kinship; tradition and modernity in 2007; the Feast of St. Francis at Magdalena de Kino; nationalism; importance of photography; identity; and cultural persistence. The final ceramic mural along with the accompanying essay will constitute my Ph.D. dissertation project.

<p>This thesis makes an ethnographic contribution to the anthropological debates about the contested nature of &lsquo / culture&rsquo / as a central term in the discipline. It examines discourses as tools that create, recreate, modify and transmit culture. The research was done in the town of Rundu in Kavango region, northeastern Namibia. In attempting to understand the local notions of culture this study focused on two main events: the Independence Day celebration on 21 March 2006 and a funeral that was held earlier in the month of January. During the study two particular media through which cultural ideas are negotiated, language and clothing were observed.</p>