This thesis explores high-end and bespoke menswear, tailoring and fashion, asking the question - why do some men choose to spend large sums of money to have clothes made for them? Using tailors and high-end menswear as a lens, this thesis unpacks how men construct their notion of self in the digital and terrestrial worlds through the clothes that they wear and the identities they perform. Based on twelve months' terrestrial fieldwork in London and twenty-four months' concurrent digital fieldwork with Instagram, this thesis examines notions of dress, performance and the individual across a multi-dimensional fieldsite set within a blended digital and terrestrial landscape. The fieldwork comprised visiting and interviewing tailors, and observing inside their workshops and at their fashion shows. In addition, the analyst-as-client built relationships with tailors, and constructed a digital self within Instagram through the publication of self-portraits and images of clothing. This thesis is presented in four chapters, flanked by an Introduction and Conclusion. These chapters move from an exploration of terrestrial research in the first two, to an analysis of digital research in the latter two. Five major motifs emerge in this thesis: the importance of the anthropology of clothing and adornment within western society; the nature of the individual in a digitised world; the difficulty in conducting western-centric fieldwork without an element of digital analysis; a methodological restructuring of digital anthropology; and the idea that a digital self can acquire agency. This thesis employs a pioneering blended methodology which brings together the fields of digital anthropology, visual anthropology and material culture to question how selves are constructed in a rapidly changing and increasingly digitised modernity. In conclusion, the thesis argues that individuals construct multiple digital selves and a sense of identity (around the notion of 'authentic individualism') that is illusory.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T14:56:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Yara Schreiber.pdf: 4047768 bytes, checksum: 42487c773e139847a61aaf98e9084a14 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-06-05 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Leisure and culture are subjects that have gained a growing relevance in contemporary society in light of the changes resulting from the restructuring of the productive process on a global scale, thus raising a series of questions and reflections regarding leisure practices, their meaning and their social significance. The present work is focused on leisure in São Paulo city, in an attempt to grasp the meanings which this concept and that of culture have come to take on in this metropolitan context during the last decades of the 20th century. This was the period when leisure was consolidated as a field of studies associated with the sphere of labor and new demands for entertainment in the city, thus reinforcing the need to understand the various meanings it came to acquire. The thesis is centered on an institution designed to provide leisure for workers - the São Paulo Commerce Social Service, SESC - and it analyses the guidelines that have oriented its course of action and the social practices it has been implementing since it was created in the 40's. The research was based on the iconographic collection of the SESC São Paulo and interviews with members and former workers of the institution, thus allowing for the analysis of the iconography to be set in proper context. This methodology unveiled the significance of the various practices of sport and culture developed by the institution along its 60 years of existence, thus permitting us the identify some aspects of the guiding lines followed by the SESC São Paulo, and to reflect upon the meanings taken on by leisure and culture within this universe, in the dialogue it has established with the metropolis / A temática do lazer e da cultura apresenta uma relevância crescente na sociedade atual, perante o quadro de mudanças gerado pela globalização e pelo reposicionamento do universo do trabalho, suscitando um amplo leque de questões e reflexões em relação às práticas do lazer, seus significados e seu alcance social. Este trabalho aborda o lazer na metrópole paulistana, buscando compreender os sentidos adquiridos por este conceito e pela problemática da cultura nas décadas finais do século XX em São Paulo. Nesta época, consolida-se o campo do lazer como área do conhecimento associada à esfera do trabalho e a novas demandas de entretenimento na metrópole, reforçando-se assim a necessidade de entender seus múltiplos significados. A tese focaliza a atuação de uma instituição voltada para o lazer dos trabalhadores - o SESC São Paulo - para analisar o seu direcionamento e as práticas sociais ali implementadas desde sua criação nos anos 40. A pesquisa realizada trabalhou com o acervo iconográfico do SESC São Paulo e depoimentos de membros e ex-funcionários da instituição que permitem contextualizar a análise da iconografia. Esta metodologia permitiu compreender a significação das diversas práticas esportivas e culturais desenvolvidas pela instituição no decorrer de sua trajetória de 60 anos, possibilitando identificar aspectos da orientação seguida por esta entidade e refletir sobre os significados de lazer e de cultura no interior deste universo, em diálogo com a metrópole

In this dissertation I investigate photographs not only as images of something, or as objects we can hold, but I also investigate how they are acts grounded in place. That is, I consider the photograph as event. The backbone of my research is a hybrid social science and visual art undertaking in which I produce both academic texts and art installations through visual inquiry into the intensely imagined places that are Canadian national parks. I examine how the myth of wilderness is made concrete in visual images of Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. I explore the situatedness of photography through ethnographic and archival research into the conditions that produced over four-hundred photographs of Waterton from the late 19th century to the present. This research advances understanding of how specific historical photographic events shape dominant systems of environmental knowledge in Canada. I explore the intertwined histories of place and representation in Waterton over the past 150 years and how they emerge in the present. To unravel the politics of representation in national parks in Canada I address three key questions: First, how do images that portray and represent wilderness in Canada affect not only our imagination about national parks, but our experiences in, and actions in, national parks? In particular, how are photographs not just representations of national parks but how do we form a relationship to space and place through them? Second, I carry out a visual investigation of Waterton Lakes National Park to study the photograph as event, and ask, how photographs, not just as images and objects, are acts grounded in place? Finally, I ask: What new approaches can be deployed to investigate existing visual collections and to bring them to bear on the history and present of the national park space? I describe how visual methods can generate new ways of thinking about photography and place.

Visual Reinterpretation of National Identity in the Public Space of Mexico Visual communication in public spaces of Mexico has been significantly shaping collective identity, from pre-Columbian times to nowadays. This PhD thesis analyzes the visual aspect of cultural and religious identity in pre-Columbian and colonial eras, later, the discussion is led through the development of the modern day national identity that followed while concurrently explaining how former structural characteristics were partially maintained. Those phenomena are explored from two vantage points: that of the cultural and political elites and that of the general population. However, these perspectives aren't presented in a sharp opposition, rather, as two conjugating cultural streams that have been continuously negotiating and shaping cultural and national identity in correlation with historical and cultural events, including influence from significant others. Accordingly, the thesis explores the official version of national identity, that is promoted by state power, but also how official identity is received into intimate spaces, the everydayness of the bearers of such identity, its reinterpretation and alternatively, the rejections. Since public art (mural art, popular graphics, graffiti, stencil art and other diverse means of...

"Thank You" Parts I and II is an experiment that attempts to break new ground in the field of anthropological cinema through the reflexive methodology and experience of myself. My establishment of a new theoretical film approach called meta-anthrochaomediacy and its evolution into radical autoethnographic mediation is explored throughout this thesis. I exercised my theory by producing and documenting a reflexive experience built on fostering emotional bonds and social relationships that provided interactivity and choice within an environment as a process of mediation for anthropological study. Part I features a physical installation I designed that exercised the transmission of memories shared with my familial table. Twelve individuals voluntarily experienced this process across 4 sessions in a single day where they interacted with the table, each other, and the memories of places that the table has lived in. The installation was primarily recorded with a 360 camera and subsequently established as qualitative data, as per my theoretical process, to be edited into a film object. Part II is a 58-minute multi-split-screen film that features my theoretical process in action as it expresses the crafting of emerging-in-real-time short term cultures through layers of reflexivity. I edited this film to test my theory towards exemplifying my film and process as anthropological cinema.

The cedar dugout canoe is iconically associated with First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, but the vital contribution it made to the economic and social development of British Columbia is historically unrecognized. This beautifully designed and crafted oceangoing vessel, besides being a prized necessity to the maritime First Nations peoples, was an essential transportation link for European colonists. In speed, maneuverability, and carrying capacity it vied with any other seagoing technology of the time. The dugout canoe became an important site of engagement between First Nations peoples and settlers. European produced textual and visual records of the colonial period are examined to analyze the dugout canoe as a site of intercultural interaction with a focus upon the European representation. This research asks: Was the First Nations' dugout canoe essential to colonial development in British Columbia and, if so, were the First Nations acknowledged for this vital contribution? Analysis of primary archival resources (letters and journals), images (photographs, sketches and paintings) and colonial publications, such as the colonial dispatches, memoirs and newspaper accounts, demonstrate that indeed the dugout canoe and First Nations canoeists were essential to the development of the colony of British Columbia. However, these contributions were differentially acknowledged as the colony shifted from a fur trade-oriented operation to a settler-centric development that emphasized the alienation of First Nations’ land for settler use. By focusing research on the dugout canoe and its use and depiction by Europeans, connections between European colonists and First Nations canoeists, navigators and manufacturers are foregrounded. This focus brings together these two key historical players demonstrating their “entangled” nature (Thomas 1991:139) and breaking down “silences” and “trivializations” in history (Trouillot 1995:96), working to build an inclusive and connected history of colonial British Columbia. / Graduate

At the Ottawa Hospital in Ontario, Canada, clinicians use full body immersion virtual reality to treat a variety of health conditions, including: traumatic brain injuries, post- traumatic stress disorder, acquired brain injuries, complex regional pain syndrome, spinal cord injuries, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and lower limb amputations. The system is shared between military and civilian patient populations. Viewed by clinicians and the system’s designers as a value neutral medical technology, clinical virtual reality’s sights, sounds, movements, and smells reveal cultural assumptions about universal patient experiences. In this dissertation I draw from reflexive feminist research methodologies, visual anthropology and sensory ethnography in a hospital to centre the body in current debates about digital accessibility in the 21st Century. 40 in-depth interviews with practitioners and patients, 210 clinical observations, and film and photography ground research participant experiences in day-to-day understandings of virtual reality at the hospital. In this dissertation I address an ongoing absence of the body as a site of analytical attention in anthropological studies of virtual reality. While much literature in the social sciences situates virtual reality as a ‘post-human’ technology, I argue that virtual reality treatments are always experienced, resisted and interpreted through diverse body schemata. Furthermore, virtual reality cannot be decoupled from the sensitivities, socialities and politics of particular bodies in particular places and times. The Ottawa Hospital’s Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment (CAREN) system features a digitally enhanced walk-in chamber, treadmills on hydraulic pistons, surround sound audio, advanced graphics and user feedback utilizing force plates and a dynamic infrared motion capture system. The CAREN system utilizes hardware and software reliant on specific assumptions about human bodies. For example, these assumptions are echoed in depictions of race, gender, class, and indigeneity. Patients using virtual reality technologies can experience more than one disability or health condition at a time, further disrupting the idea of universal user experiences. As clinicians and patients confront the limitations of body normativity in the CAREN system’s interface design, they improvise, resist, and experience virtual reality in ways that defy design agendas, ultimately shaping patient treatments and unique paths to healing and health. / Graduate