Theses - Social Anthropology
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Item Open Access The Social Life of Teen Attention: Navigating Citizenship, Schooling and the World Wide Web in Cochabamba, Bolivia and Warsaw, PolandBuzanska, KatarzynaThis thesis is an anthropological treatise on teenage attention based on ethnographic fieldwork at two urban schools in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Warsaw, Poland. It proposes a socio-cognitive framework for an analysis of attention as a nexus comprised of ideological, bureaucratic, somatic, and affective elements as well as a form of practice that acts upon the world. I argue that youth are attentional agents capable of modifying their environment through attentional practice, which is, nevertheless structured by factors within the attentional nexus. I further argue that attentional practice has an intrinsically political character. The first section of this thesis considers the historical and institutional setting of my fieldsites and the import of combining psychological and anthropological perspectives on cognition towards an understanding of social phenomena at the collective level. In Chapter 1, I introduce the concept of the social attentionscape to speak of elements within a delineated society that come to the centre of collective attention and are likely to become part of political agendas, including educational policies. The social attentionscape is grounded in historically shaped value systems and world imaginaries endorsed by governments and civil society. In Bolivia, imaginaries of Western modernity and development have a strained coexistence with ideologies of decolonisation. In Poland, a nationalist and Catholic ideal of Polishness clashes with the urban ideal of liberal European citizenship. In Chapter 2, I consider how those imaginaries relate to quotidian practices at the school, guiding pedagogic orientations through the (re)production of teachers’ normative attention and interacting with on-the-stop attentional needs of exam bureaucracy in Warsaw and the local community in Cochabamba. The second section of the thesis examines three areas of alleged youth ‘disconnection’: political participation (Chapter 3), social media (Chapter 4), and the classroom (Chapter 5). Social media and digital marketing technologies are often considered root causes of bottomless distraction and youth disinterest. Without negating their attention-grabbing qualities, I flip the focus to the broader ecology of youth’s attention. I show how youth disenchantment in electoral politics is not tantamount to political disinterest. Political participation is contingent on attention-grabbing moral sentiments such as “the right to decide” (for Warsaw youth) or “the right to work” (for my interlocutors in Cochabamba). I analyse the sphere of teenage digital sociality in terms of the phatic attention mechanisms it engages but also recognise social media as an integral constituent of other spheres of attentional practice, influencing political decision-making and youth’s attention at school. Attention in the classroom is shaped by a nexus of institutional and social factors. Those affect the development of joint attention and mutual correspondence between students and teachers. The thesis contributes to long-established anthropological debates on the relationship between agency and structure and between global and local influences, considering their interaction in attentional management. It also speaks to the rather novel concern in anthropology of the politics of cognition by exploring how directions in collective and individual attention work to assemble, strengthen, and reshape local cultural landscapes and power relations, contributing to the reproduction and contestation of the discursive and institutional status quo.Item Open Access Searching for Healing Amidst the Genocidal Logic: Fragmentary Exiled Bosnian (Im)PossibilitiesTabaković, JasminThis PhD Dissertation is situated within the domains of political and psychological anthropology, guided by a decolonial perspective partially inspired by the psychiatric-political works of Frantz Fanon. I engage with Bosnians in their fifties and sixties living in Belgium and the Netherlands who were forcedly exiled from Eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina during the genocidal violence in the early 1990s. Examining how the enduring and morphing impacts of this mass violence manifest as suturing knots of health disruptions, I foreground how there is an undergirding genocidal logic extending far beyond singular spatiotemporal events. People were searching for healing from the ongoing disruptions in their health and well-being through various healing modalities of which I highlight the practice of *struna* (stomach ailment realignment) and psychotherapeutic encounters. In challenging the prevailing trauma frameworks, I critically examine how ‘trauma’ is approached, disseminated, reconfigured, experienced, and reconceptualised within broader discourses and lived experiences. Both a ‘trauma-literalist’ (as literal neurological imprints or delayed and solidified representation) and a ‘trauma-constructivist’ (as a product of professional technologies and disciplining practices) perspective imply a binary either/or understanding. There has been an ongoing movement towards depoliticising mass violence into personal trauma, which through different healing modalities but predominantly through therapeutic encounters, people were made to understand as implying a personal responsibility for wanting to get better. Thus, a ‘failure to heal’, however partial, became an individual failure which erased the political interstitiality of exiled Bosnians and a minimally threefold impossibility that they lived within—the impossibility of being Bosnian, the impossibility of Bosnia as a legitimate country, and the impossibility of full healing. Stemming from intertwining diachronic personal, familial, and more formal research experiences, I argue that such either/or thinking is ruinous and that searching for healing is better understood through a both/and perspective that foregrounds the knotting personal and political dimensions. I use the partially analytical mind-body-duša (soul) composition to highlight lived realities and to approach ongoing reconfigurations of subjectivity and affect. I term the type of research and writing endeavored here, ‘Intimate Fragmentary Ethnography’. This points to lived experiences of attempted annihilation and the gaps, aporias, and ruptures through which people try to make (historical) sense and to heal, how anthropologists can approach silenced lived histories, how we all co-construct knowledge herein, how writing can be done otherwise, and the trust and care work that this implies. This approach also highlights the intimate households that I was allowed to co-inhabit where the mind-body-duša health disruptions and reconfigurations were experienced most strongly.Item Embargo Knowing and Caring for the Mangrove Ecosystem: The epistemic life of a sustainable development NGO in the Saloum Delta (Senegal)Gouin-Bonenfant, MathildeThis thesis examines the epistemic life of a sustainable development NGO, based in the Saloum Delta, in Senegal. This coastal region, composed of rivers, islands, wetlands, and mangrove forests, is facing increasing environmental precarity. In response, a plethora of actors (state conservation agencies, international organisations, local associations, and non-governmental organisations) are undertaking multitudinous conservation and development projects. With them, different ways of knowing and caring for the ecosystem co-exist and sometimes conflict. This thesis – while building on insights from environmental and development anthropology, which have classically been more associated with such topics – is also firmly grounded in the anthropology and philosophy of science. It is an ethnography of the work of one group of NGO agents, focusing on their day-to-day epistemic activities, as they are entangled with the NGO’s different relationships, and the broader politics of climate change mitigation. It focuses on four different epistemic activities: the production of project management data (chapter 1), the production of mangrove monitoring data (chapter 2), the production of “endogenous knowledge” (chapter 4), and the communication of scientific knowledge about the mangrove forest (chapter 3). It also examines the ethical components of the NGO’s epistemic life, through the notion of “care” (Chapter 5). Through these chapters, the thesis explores the distinctive “epistemic culture” of the NGO; the impact of Results-Based Management on the NGO’s knowledge production; the linguistic and semiotic components of knowledge authorisation; the systemic nature of the circulation of misinformation about the mangrove forest; the ethnographic challenges to the “traditional” versus “scientific” knowledge binary division; the relationship between epistemic practices and practices of care; and the enactment of competing environmental projects. Finally, a series of ethical concerns also runs throughout the thesis. The overarching concern is the desire, first communicated to me by the director of the NGO, to remain a “Field NGO” rather than becoming a “Paper NGO.” I mobilise these ethnographic archetypes, throughout the thesis, to shine a light on the NGO agent’s ethical ideals regarding what constitutes good knowledge, good relationships, and good care; as well as the disconnections between their epistemic practices and their ethical ideals.Item Embargo Vocations to the Secular: An Ethnography of the Men's Branch of Opus Dei BritainNgo, Hoa FranciscoOpus Dei is a Roman Catholic organisation founded by Josemaría Escrivá in Spain, 1928. The group preaches the “sanctification of ordinary life,” which means members practice their faith within the milieus and roles they inherit and inhabit in social life. Their ordinary lives are a calling – a vocation – from God, and they understand living, working, and praying intentionally and virtuously as forms of religious praise. The group is split between a men’s and a women’s branch, though they teach the same doctrines in both, and consider each other as equals within what they call the “family” of Opus Dei. Opus Dei arrived in the UK in 1947 and slowly established a small footing in the world of English Catholicism. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork primarily in London, my thesis illustrates male members’ experiences within the organisation’s local and global structure. I document how a vocation to Opus Dei entails the dedication of one’s life to the sanctification of one’s ordinary life through self-disciplinary regimes of piety and the structures of a spiritual family, which demand commitment to specific social relations within the group. In this thesis, I argue the struggle of sanctifying ordinary life expresses itself in various unresolved tensions – those between work and prayer, the religious and secular, and freedom and hierarchy – and that these tensions are inherent to the ideologies and practices of Opus Dei. The thesis covers the structural components that compose a vocation to Opus Dei in three broad arcs. The first arc chronicles an expansion in the Roman Catholic Church’s understanding of *opus Dei* as monastic liturgy, into the concept of Opus Dei as a liturgical ethos in ordinary life. The next arc details the necessary hierarchical relationships established in Opus Dei and how they relate to members’ vocations. Lastly, the final arc describes how Opus Dei institutionally reproduces itself through the mobilisation of its members’ life forces.Item Embargo La Sociale: Welfare and Emergence in Twenty-first century SenegalWood, AnnaIn 2013, newly elected President Macky Sall introduced the *bourse familiale* (family grant) cash transfer and *Couverture Maladie Universelle* (CMU), the Senegalese version of universal health coverage, as two *grands projets* at the heart of Senegal’s new development plan, the *Plan Sénégal Émergent*. While social security linked to formal employment dates back to the post-war years, these projects sit among recent efforts across the global south to extend social protection, or welfare, to those who had previously not had access to it. In Senegal, it is an agenda that sits within a broader politics of emergence that has arisen across Africa during the same period, one that is marked by a strong discourse which seeks to break with structural adjustment and neoliberal minimalism with a return to state planning and investment. This thesis takes ‘negotiated statehood’ as an analytical and critical starting point to examine the vernacularisation of these policies on the ground, and in doing so seeks to move beyond narratives of success and failure. It draws on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with recipients living in a small informal settlement in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, as well as those seeking to help them (politicians, development workers, other wealthy individuals) and those involved in the implementation of the policies. Consideration of the kinds of moral obligations that might underpin emergent forms of social protection has been central to debate on it, and the first chapters engage with the anthropology of politics and scholarship on African politics which challenge more static and culturalist, sometimes malign, conceptions of distribution. The ethnography attends to the assertion and cultivation of, and support for, morally good politics to demonstrate how legitimate distribution is highly contested. The thesis then zooms in on each of the *grands projets* in turn. A chapter on the *bourse familiale* examines how the cash transfer is drawn into idioms of subsistence which frustrates more ambitious developmentalist and rights-based approaches. By attending to how a kind of social contract emerges in this way, the ethnography supports calls for the reconsideration of the place of charity in the twenty-first century. The final chapter centres on early efforts to fund the establishment of universal health coverage through the establishment of community-based health insurance. In a context where promised government subsidies are lacking, alternative forms of support are sought out. With a particular focus on patronage and partnership, this chapter draws on the concept of improvisation to argue that what might appear to be very minimal gestures of support and material investment serve to maintain a sense of hope and potential in CMU, one however that is fragile and potentially unsustainable. The thesis concludes by reflecting on how *la sociale* articulates with a political and economic context increasingly shaped by the cost-of-living crisis that has emerged in recent years.Item Open Access Music and Noise: Loyalism, Marching, and the Meaning of the Political in Northern IrelandFrench, SeanIn Northern Ireland, Protestant marching bands are hugely popular despite the political controversy often associated with them. Many of their parades commemorate Protestant military victories over Catholics and are seen by many today as triumphalist, sectarian, and offensive. However, tensions between Catholics and Protestants have improved over the last twenty years and there have been attempts to change attitudes toward the marching bands. Prompted by the question: “Why do people continue to march with such enthusiasm in Northern Ireland despite the negative backlash?”, this thesis utilises 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Protestant areas of Derry in Northern Ireland. Answering this question required explaining the meanings the bands had for their members, with a particular focus on the diverse and complex ways in which people understood the bands as “political”. This thesis traces the lived experience of various band members and, in particular, their experience of politics through playing music and marching, ultimately elaborating on one facet of the complexity of political identity in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants or working-class and middle-class people were accompanied by a whole litany of more subtle tensions between different ways of being “political”. This thesis complicates previous readings of Protestant bands and parading as straightforwardly political or apolitical by treating the category of the political as an ethnographic one (as well as a theoretical one). Drawing on the relatively recent literature on the political as an ethnographic category, as well as theories of embodiment and affect, this thesis explains how the political appeared in fluid, diverse, and sometimes contradictory ways among the bands, including in explicit discourse, in embodied dispositions, and in vaguely sensed affects. Sound also played a central role, and people’s sensory experience of sound (and silence) is contextualised within wider socio-political and historical frameworks. The different “styles of politics” explored in this thesis are drawn together at the end in a contrast between “noise” and “music”, arguing that marching bands were an in-between form of “noisy music” which sonically embodied the broader in-between political position of working-class Northern Irish Protestants in a number of ways. Ultimately, this thesis explains how politics was experienced in complex, ambivalent ways, it complicates straightforward readings of Northern Irish Protestant parading as political or not, and positions Northern Irish marching bands at the nexus of a number of different socio-political contestations in modern-day post-conflict Northern Ireland.Item Embargo Timing Fate: Build To Order Romances in SingaporeWang, Xin YuanThis thesis examines the bureaucratic mechanisms through which housing is accessed in Singapore and the consequent impact on romantic, reproductive temporalities, and labour. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the primary focus of this thesis is normative relationships and a system that incentivises particular life pathways. However, it also delves into the fragile precarity of normative life courses when set against fateful futures, and in so doing, explores the human ballast that sustains the operation of Singapore’s highly praised public housing policies. By scrutinising the forms of straining and striving required to secure a public flat in Singapore, this thesis is interested in how the ineffable is drawn into the realm of human kinship as a technique that produces relationship-making idioms of inevitability. This thesis asks: Why do states use lotteries or ballots to distribute public goods to its citizens? How do grant applicant, balloting and flat building cycles structure relational and romantic life in Singapore? How does one learn to be Singaporean through the Build To Order (BTO)? What are the devices people use to manage the uncertainties of the ballot or to stretch their lives across temporal sutures? In brief, in Singapore, 80% of the population lives in Public Housing Flats. The easiest and most affordable path to a public housing flat is through the Build To Order (BTO) system. However, BTO flats are only accessible via a state-run ballot and are subject to strict eligibility conditions. For example, to enter the ballot for a flat before the age of 35, one must first form a conventional family nucleus (i.e., through heterosexual marriage). Furthermore, to retain ownership of the flat, one must continue to maintain a heteronormative arrangement for a period of five to ten years. In Chapter 1 ('Capricious Ballet; Magical State'), I present an ethnographic account of a single balloting cycle. I argue that the adventitiousness of the ballot transfers magical qualities to the Singaporean state. Chapter 2 ('Kinning through Fate and Chance’) demonstrates how families might use BTO outcomes to interpret the fateful appropriateness of a coupling. Through this, I contend that fate and chance should have a more prominent place in kinship literature. Chapter 3 ('BTO Romance') is centrally concerned with how couples rearrange romantic projects to hedge against the financial risks of relationship breakdown and pre-empt the uncertainties of balloting. I suggest that the financial risk to the state is absorbed and re-transmitted into the life fibres of personal romantic projects. In Chapter 4 (‘Attritional Waiting’) I coin the term “attritional waiting” to describe the effects of the long wait for a BTO flat in Singapore; one which makes a populace patient, but which also stretches into un-ideal times with ricocheting effects. Through focusing on those excluded by the BTO – queer couples, single women, and the homeless – Chapter 5 (‘Exclusions’) considers how resistances to the BTO speak to a different register of temporality and a much more self-conscious sociality.Item Open Access The Stocksman's Shadow: An Ethnography of Ethics and Symbolism in the Yorkshire DalesArcher, AlexanderNow, then. A question: if a farmer has thirty sheep, and one escapes, how many sheep does that farmer have left? A clue: the answer is not as straightforward as you might think. For, dear examiner, sheep are not as straightforward as folk tend to imagine. On the contrary, they are wily and elusive creatures. And knowing the ways of these wily creatures, well now, that too is elusive and, as we shall soon learn, anything but straightforward. This dissertation is about hill farming in the Yorkshire Dales (shorthand, the Dales). It is, therefore, about those who most certainly do know their sheep. The Dales is an upland region of The Pennine Mountains in Northern England. A region characterised by deep-sloping river valleys and high- ascending hills, that have been shaped by the husbandry of sheep and, in a supplementary capacity, cattle. These sheep, however, are not just any sheep. They are sheep that have, over time and generations, been bred to endure the fell conditions of their hard, upland surrounds. Sheep that, in short, are reckoned to embody this uncommon landscape and local ‘way of life’. The study to come is grounded in three bodies of literature. The anthropology of Britain, where the study of ‘the countryside’ has long been a concern. This dissertation continues that tradition. On moving in hill farming circles, the moral dimension of sheep husbandry fast becomes apparent. In the light of this, I draw on the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of animal symbolism. Combined, they provide the necessary tools with which to discuss both how sheep are here perceived and how that perception might shape the ways in which the Dalesman daily comports himself. The main ethnographic body of this dissertation is structured according to the rhythms of the pastoral round. The rationale for this approach is three stranded: first, to express the cyclical nature of pastoralism in the Dales; second, to communicate a sense of the culture and art of the Dales hill farmer; third, to show that, as he labours so diligently at home in the hills, he does so in the shadow of an unattainable ideal. This final strand is the true focus of this dissertation. It is a study of unrealised ambition. In the Dales, to be regarded as ‘a man who knows his sheep’ is to be regarded as a man of towering parts. Or, in anthropological parlance, a man of substance. The highest expression of which is ‘the Stocksman’. He is a figure with an unimpeachable ‘ken of sheep’, a mythologised figure and a figure who looms large over the Dales. In this dissertation, I describe the implications of the desire to meet this ideal. It is, therefore, a study of men who know their sheep, endeavouring to demonstrate to other men who also know their sheep, that they are, indeed, knowers of sheep. And, so, we return to the question: if a farmer has thirty sheep, and one escapes, how many sheep does he have left...Item Indefinitely restricted Item Embargo Hegemony and Culturedness: Elites after Socialism in Mongolia.Shagdar, TuyaThis thesis asks: how did a tiny minority, the 'oligarchic' elite of Mongolia, manage to dominate the economic and political life of the nation for over three decades since the transition to liberal democracy in 1990? With Mongolian media reporting that 99.6% of shares listed on the Mongolian Stock Exchange are owned by around 5 per cent of the total shareholders, and that the ownership of Mongolian businesses is limited to just thirty families (Sneath 2018), it might appear that the rule by this tiny minority has become hegemonic. In recent years, however, the superrich have been targeted by a brand of populist politics. This thesis argues that the emergence, maintenance, and recent targeting of the superrich would not have been possible without Mongolia’s complex history of engagement with the idea of independent statehood. Central to the rise, but also to the fall of oligarchic elites is the issue of ‘national interest,’ the valorized notion of an independent state which paradoxically shapes the capitalist dispositions of the elites, while also being a source of their insecurity. In liberal democracies elite power often appear in public culture as something tolerable. In structural Marxist terms, the elite frequently feature as a well-articulated ruling class. The notion of a self-conscious ruling class makes for convincing explanations of relations of stark inequality and the accumulation of resources by a small minority (Althusser 1970: 90; Poulantzas 1969: 74). Such a concept renders the elite a monolithic and well-orchestrated grouping in a capitalist society. Anthropological studies have shown, however, that this can be a misleading approach to elite power, which is frequently fractured and fluid (Armytage 2020; Lotter 2004; 2012; Simandjuntak 2012; Salman and Sologuren 2011; Sánchez 2016; Lentz 2000; Antonyan 2015; Derlugian 2005). A closer look at Mongolia's superrich, with many top careers ending in imprisonment, provides an image of a politically and economically dominant group that is anything but monolithic. The models of elite power most widely used in social sciences have tended to describe relatively stable milieus where knowledge and power are seen as working together to support their status quo (Marcus 1983: 19). For Foucault, domination is primarily discursive whereby power is exercied through production of knowledge and regimes of truth. In Mongolia, public knowledge about the ruling elite is by no means a uniform ‘regime of truth’ in which their power and wealth appear commonsensical. Much public knowledge of elites is profoundly negative. Oligarchy (oligarkhi) and the phrase “billionaires borne of the state” (töröös törsön terbumtan) have become well-worn Mongolian terms for describing the social order. Many of the richest individuals in the country are indeed politicians but their close affinity to the state also means that such privilege is precarious. By engaging with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony I trace the complicated factionalism among elites within the wider cultural setting of the contested ‘regimes of truth’ of Mongolian public culture.Item Embargo Freedom and the Heart of Democracy in Central Malawi: popular interactions with the 2019 Tripartite Elections in a rural constituencyFarrell, SamThis thesis is an ethnographic examination of the popular meanings and practices of democracy in central Malawi during the 2019 Tripartite Elections. Following the 30-year rule of Life President Kamuzu Banda and the Malawi Congress Party, Malawi transitioned from an authoritarian, single-party state to a liberal democracy in 1993, adopting multi-party elections and a new constitution guaranteeing a range of rights. However, the question still remains as to how the predominantly rural Malawian population engages with democratic politics and processes. The thesis explores this question through an ethnographic examination of how constituents in a rural constituency in the central region understood and interacted with the practices, actors and technologies that comprised the 2019 Tripartite Elections. Drawing on a 15-month period of fieldwork, a case study of a village and a variety of other actors, such as parliamentary candidates, local party officials and village headmen, are followed over the course of the election cycle. The focus on an election was inspired by recent anthropological work on democracy, which has not only demonstrated the usefulness of the ethnographic method for understanding democratic systems and elections, but has challenged normative, static definitions of democracy; suggesting instead that democracy is a historically grounded, open-ended process that shapes, and is shaped by, the contexts it travels through. The chapters in the thesis expand on this literature by describing how several aspects of the 2019 election process were interpreted and refigured by interlocutors through broader political, socio-economic and ecological contexts that had significance in their everyday lives, which were themselves affected by these interactions (chapter 1). It thus offers an in-depth account of a political process within social life. However, the thesis takes anthropological engagement with democracy a step further by highlighting the importance of popular practices of freedom in constituting the electoral process and broader social relations. In chapter 2, I argue that constituents interpreted the secret ballot through popular discourses and practices of secrecy, especially discourses surrounding the Chichewa word for heart (mtima) and the unknowability of others, which enabled them to participate in democratic politics more broadly by practicing a form of political freedom where they could keep their intentions hidden or unacknowledged. Subsequent chapters document the relevance of this freedom in shaping several features of popular democratic practice in the constituency throughout the election process, such as the dynamics of local party politics (chapter 3), the moral grounds of relationships between politicians or political parties and constituents (chapter 4), the formation of political legitimacy and national identity (chapter 5) and the importance of radio and social media and popular ways of scrutinizing and contesting the state (chapter 6). One of the key contributions of the thesis is therefore to suggest that anthropologists should consider the role of practices of freedom in constituting democratic processes. In anthropology more broadly, it highlights the applicability of freedom as an ethnographic category, but an expansive, open-ended category inclusive of a diversity of meanings and practices across different ethnographic settings, challenging restrictive or normative definitions of freedom.Item Embargo Faltering Care: Homeless Mothers’ Experiences of Caregiving in DublinLucey, HannahThis dissertation takes as its focus the caregiving efforts of a group of mothers in Dublin who were homeless, struggling with addiction, and separated from their children. It offers an ethnographic account of their attempts to reknit their relationships with their distant children by extending care, even as these caregiving efforts were thwarted by their wider social context. As such, this thesis demonstrates homeless women’s ongoing orientation towards their separated children in terms of their practical actions and affective lives, their efforts towards a better future, and moments of faltering. In so doing, this thesis sets forth a valuable contribution to the growing anthropological literature around care by examining moments in which our ardent attempts at caregiving fall short. It explores how moments of ‘care lapse’ were produced and exacerbated by the conditions in which interlocutors were forced to care (including at a distance from their children, without stable or safe accommodation and confronted with long periods of waiting). It also considers how care lapses came to be socially mediated through the lack of support interlocutors received from their intimate partners and service providers. Building on these ethnographic insights, this thesis suggests that the experience of continually providing care which was unreciprocated and unacknowledged yielded moments – however fleeting – in which my interlocutors’ capacity to respond to the challenges of caregiving as they unfolded crumbled. However, rather than concluding that my interlocutors were unsuitable caregivers for their children as a result, I explore how my interlocutors came to evaluate care which was perceived by themselves and others as being pockmarked by lapses, and the significance of providing and receiving this kind of care in orientating their wider being-in-the-world. This thesis thus puts forward the concept of ‘faltering care’: care which encompasses moments in which the provider’s practical action and attentiveness towards the recipient lapse. This concept brings a fresh perspective on the relationship between anthropological domains of gender and care, kinship and the state, in highlighting the caregiving travails of a group of women who found themselves the focus of accusations of neglect and positioned outside normative ideals of motherhood, leading their maternal efforts to be heavily mediated by external actors. It furthers anthropological conversations on the recursive relationship between caregiving and hope, in examining those instances in which hope seems lost, and thus the capacity for practical caregiving action extinguished. Most fundamentally, this thesis opens out onto anthropological conversations about the significance of caregiving relationships for people experiencing poverty, addiction and mental illness, in suggesting that my interlocutors’ experiences as mothers became a defining factor of their trajectories through homelessness, in both those moments when they succumbed to despair, and those others where they drove themselves to reach for something better.Item Embargo Transforming the Self through Benefiting Others: Fo Guang Shan Humanistic Buddhism in the People's Republic of ChinaLiu, XinyingThis thesis presents an ethnographic study of Fo Guang Shan (FGS, Buddha’s Light Mountain, 佛光山), a Taiwan-based Han-Chinese Buddhist movement that is socially engaged and highly active on a global scale. The particular focus is the development of FGS in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It aims to answer the question: wherein lies the appeal of FGS Humanistic Buddhist teachings and practices in contemporary China? My overarching argument is that FGS Humanistic Buddhism (renjian fojiao, 人間佛教) – ingrained in bodhisattva-oriented ethical pedagogies that not only concern self-focussed cultivation, but also underscore the importance of caring for others in the broadest sense – encourages and enables mainland Chinese participants in ‘doing personhood’ (zuoren, 做人) during the current epoch of prevailing moral uncertainty. Based on my twelve-month fieldwork across seven FGS branches, spanning from Beijing and Shanghai to other cities in Jiangsu province, this thesis takes two main aspects into account: the institutional development of FGS mainland branches and the experiences of mainland Chinese followers. It explores how FGS endeavours to ‘purify people’s hearts and minds’ (jinghua renxin, 淨化人心), pivoting on the guidance of its founder, Master Hsing Yun (星雲), in the highly distinctive religious ecology of the PRC. It also examines how adherents pursue self-transformation – whether they are successful or not – through ruminating over their own relations with the self and others. Key discussion revolves around how participants with multifarious demographic features heighten their awareness of self-reflection and make ethical choices when confronting different value clusters: (1) kinship-based relational morality of ego-centred relations, (2) Communist ideology (or ideologies), (3) individualistic views that have emerged during China’s socio- economic transformation, and (4) a double concern for the well-being of the self and others entrenched in Humanistic Buddhism. Practitioners learn to perfect their personhood in both monastic and daily settings: following the Six Pāramitās (Six Perfections, liudu, 六度) via monastic training, creating positive karmic bonds (jieshanyuan, 結善緣) via Buddhist Giving, and cultivating the Bodhi Mind (putixin, 菩提心) via Buddhist volunteerism. Indebted to many contributors in the anthropology of ethics and morality, this thesis participates in various discussions surrounding virtue ethics, ethical practice (self-cultivation and ethical pedagogies), and ethics in institutional life (moral economy and volunteerism). It also contributes to the anthropological study of religion (Buddhism) in China, as well as the study of Humanistic Buddhism. A four-pronged theoretical approach is developed in this thesis. First, moving beyond Euro-American philosophical traditions, Buddhist concepts have been deployed as analytical tools to enrich our understanding of the plurality of human ethical thought and practice. Second, examining Buddhism from the perspective of ethics broadens the analysis of religion in Chinese society. Third, reflecting Buddhist emphasis on both the ontological equality and the interdependence of persons, self–other relations are key to the FGS approach to self-transformation. Finally, my understanding of the ‘humanistic’ character of Buddhism as taught by FGS is predicated on the interplay between practitioners’ ethical and spiritual pursuits: people’s faith in Buddhism is spontaneously and gradually nurtured when their ethical aspirations for perfect personhood and a meaningful life converge with their spiritual pursuit to benefit the self and others.Item Embargo The making of art: sculptors, artisans, and artists in the Apuan AlpsRuiz del Río, JavierThis dissertation investigates the sculpture industry in the Apuan Alps and its relation to claims of artistic value. For centuries, this Italian district has specialized in extracting, marketing, and processing marble into luxury commodities. Ahead of many other parts of this economy (including design and architecture), art manufacturing has dominated local identity and commercial strategies. This thesis studies the Apuan industry in the context of transnational artmaking processes. It maintains that production reveals aspects of these economic activities that cannot be fully studied from the side of circulation alone. For example, while a sculpture’s making can be fundamental to our appreciation, we often rely on highly restricted information, sometimes misleading, in order to respond as spectators. In foregrounding production, this dissertation hopes not only to improve our understanding of sculpture-making itself but also to explain why it is often mystified. Its treatment of the topic refers to debates in the anthropology of art and those more traditionally engaged by scholars of economy and labour, such as technology, practical rationality, and alienation. Methodologically, the analysis combines in-person and remote fieldwork with a historical framework. As an international art centre since the Florentine Renaissance, the Apuan Alps present an ideal location for such inquiry. Around Carrara, Pietrasanta, and the rest of a local 20-kilometre-wide marble district, workshops host a diversity of carving activities. In the sculpture firms, artisans fabricate works for their clients, which may involve different degrees of automation and creative input. In private studios, amateurs and professionals share spaces to make art, for themselves and for others. The thesis’ approach to this intricate economic reality is structured around a central question: How can we understand art as industrial production? The response is both empirical and theoretical. In the Apuan Alps, sculpture-making appeared fraught with conceptually challenging phenomena, like outsourcing and mechanization. Consequently, the empirical investigation demanded a theoretical discussion of varied notions at play (including ‘art/industry’ or ‘design/execution’), which often appeared in conflict with one another. The main contribution of this work is establishing such dialogue between the anthropologies of art and the anthropologies of the economy. The argument proceeds in three parts. First, it explains the industry’s place and organization. Chapter 1 locates the district in the political economy of high art, while Chapter 2 describes its general organization and problematizes the notion of the ‘industrial district’. Then, the thesis investigates sculpture-making processes. Chapter 3 breaks such processes into operational sequences, interrogating whether art is a special ‘kind’ of production. Building on this discussion, Chapter 4 focuses on the division of roles (between the ‘artist’ and the ‘artisan’) that underpins fundamental phenomena like alienation and authorship. Finally, the third section (Chapter 5) questions why people dedicate themselves to sculpture in the way they do. When examining sculptors’ personal trajectories, it becomes apparent that the picture of practical reasoning championed by the anthropology of ethics has overlooked the non-moral goods that guide people’s actions in the workplace. These five chapters will contribute ethnographically and theoretically to an understanding of artmaking in an industrial context.Item Embargo Being Good Women: The Rise and Appeal of Femininity Among Globalist WomenQassim, SummerThis thesis is focused on ethics as a practice of becoming. It examines a large, growing group of geographically dispersed women united in their devotion to a neo-Buddhist relationship guru who instructs them, online, in the embodiment of femininity as the means to realizing success in their desired heteronormative relationships. This is Feminine Magnetism™, a global countermovement to mainstream feminism led by dating coach and guru Katarina “Kat” Phang. The central questions the thesis asks are: Why and how do these women seek to change themselves into feminine others? What is the relationship between coaching, online support groups, and the goal of recalibration into a polarized, feminine self? What does the process of becoming an “other” across a digital and non-digital interface mean as an ethical practice? As I observed this ethical self-cultivation that necessarily, for my interlocuters, mediated between their online and offline selves, it became clear that the discourse upon which their feminine ideal was born was itself a mediation between encounters – Buddhism and psycho-therapeutic self-help discourses – a hybridization that can be placed within those vague and varied spiritual practices that are often referred to as “New Age” or “New Thought” in what has come to be called the West. That is to say, “becoming” revealed itself not just as a micro-unit of analysis of split interlocuter selves – physical/digital, idealized/uncultivated, or real/virtual – but also as part of a broader conceptual and ethnographic focus: the discovery of a philosophical “ethical encounter with the Other”(El Shakry 2017: 17). At the same time, Feminine Magnetism’s™ founder, Katarina Phang, (which, fieldwork revealed, is not her real name) herself a product of an “awakening” that led to the initial establishment of her discourse and coaching business, over the course of my fieldwork, underwent a dramatic metamorphosis. This thesis, then, is also about a charismatic leader’s process of becoming an “other.” “Becoming” implies *a priori* the existence of an original, or, at the very least, an origin. If an origin is an *a priori* assumption, so too then is a destination. Becoming another, or an “other” points not only to notions of fundamental difference but also to the multiple shifts of differential iterations moving towards idealization, whether at the level of the self, philosophical tradition, or amidst anthropological discussions of cultural others and, in the ethnographic instances presented here, across a digital and ethical interface. This thesis, then, is also about these processes of movement.Item Embargo Cultivating Lost Land: Livelihood and Depopulation on São Jorge Island, AzoresBurger, TimThis ethnography of rural social life on São Jorge Island, Azores, examines the interconnections between depopulation, people’s practices of material livelihood, and their understandings of their overall historical and social condition. Following decades of transatlantic outmigration and demographic decline, subsistence farmers in my main fieldsite, the village of ‘Fajã’, shared a focus on overall decay. However, they evaluated and lived out what I call ‘depopulated social relations’ in different and conflicting ways. This study explores the heterogeneous range of reflexive, hands-on, and often counterintuitive modes in which island residents organized their historical consciousness around the social reproduction of agrarian livelihoods in unfavourable circumstances. My interlocutors’ central predicament was that their intensely valued agrarian land was being overgrown by brushwood. They often described this land as “already lost” (*já perdido*). Watching the physical change of their gardens and terraces was an unsettling and confusing experience that metonymically condensed broader concerns about the moral imperative of agricultural labour, the lack of desirable conviviality, the gendered dynamics of household subsistence, or sacred spacetime. A collective sense of failure regarding agrarian cultivation was the key category through which island residents made sense of depopulation. While gardening hence became a positively imbued activity in which people acted out their historical consciousness, other economic practices such as renting out houses to tourists or intensive cattle farming were more ambivalent in moral quality. Chapters One and Two approach these conflicting forms of livelihood-making through the lenses of land and households, respectively. I argue that the dominant asset for realizing wealth, public distinction, and moral selfhood has shifted from subsistence gardens to houses, producing novel forms of inequality and social heterogeneity. Chapter Three examines outmigration, which people held to be the leading cause for demographic change. I further develop the theme of heterogeneity by juxtaposing different migrants’ life-histories and varied understandings of emplacement. Chapter Four examines the intrinsic value residents frequently attributed to agrarian labour – portraying it as an end in itself, not a means to other ends – since working together consciously counteracted the impacts of depopulation in a convivial way. Chapter Five returns to general perceptions of land and landscape, now exploring models of masculinity and the violent potential of ideals of agrarian cultivation that take shape in relation to experience of ‘lost’ land as uncontrollable environmental change. Chapter Six explores the Holy Ghost Festival (*Festa do Espírito Santo*) as a disputed spatiotemporal model that both mediated decline and provided an iconic form to orient economic activities. The theoretical arguments that emerge from these chapters contribute to anthropological debates on value, space, and depopulation. I suggest that an action-centred theory of value requires attention to spatial semiotics in order to conceptualize how everyday practices give form to larger social and cultural wholes.Item Embargo Unjust Profit: Moral Economies of Recycling and Migration in Urban TurkeyYildirim, KevinThis dissertation examines how the arrival of foreign migrants into Istanbul’s recycling workforce has changed how citizens consider who or what should profit from the city’s waste. Based on twelve months of fieldwork in a peripheral Istanbul district, it proposes that labour encounters between foreign migrants and citizens are key sites where new moral understandings of work, profit, and citizenship are produced. The study aims to introduce new empirical and conceptual understandings of moral economic life, citizenship, and waste labour. As the largest city in a country that hosts nearly four million asylum seekers and irregular migrants— primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan— Istanbul is a prime location for such inquiries. Within Istanbul’s recycling sector, citizens of Turkey increasingly articulate what is right and wrong in social and political life by invoking the newly arrived figure of the migrant recycling worker. When asserting their own moral virtues, for instance, citizens will often claim that migrant workers lack such qualities in comparison. Expanding on this ethnographic insight, this thesis provides critical analysis of two broad phenomena. First, it contends that competing labour regimes in a precarious urban economy—one comprised of citizens, the other of irregular migrants—relate to each other primarily in moral registers. Second, it demonstrates how these moral registers influence economic action in tangible ways. The thesis understands these phenomena by developing the concept of moral authority. This term refers to a relation that is produced when one person claims their right to assert a vision of how social life ought to be organised, whether on the scale of an individual relationship or society at large. By looking at migrant-citizen relations in Turkey’s recycling sector with the analytic of moral authority, the thesis attempts to improve anthropological understandings of how political hierarchies influence moral economic life, and vice-versa. It does this by developing the argument that relations between citizens and international migrants in Turkey’s recycling sector are structured by citizens’ efforts to reproduce their moral authority. Doing so, it engages with debates in the anthropology of citizenship, waste labour, moral economy, hospitality, and work. Chapter 1 claims that the introduction of foreign migrants into the recycling sector in the 2010s has led citizen-workers to articulate a right to work in registers that exclude foreign migrants. Chapter 2, in contrast, examines how irregular migrant waste pickers seek a right to work in Istanbul by appeasing and avoiding figures of authority rather than confronting them. Chapter 3 contends that, for citizen-workers in Istanbul’s recycling sector, moral authority is produced through discourse that regards migrant recycling labour as an immoral and asocial form of work. Chapter 4 critically analyses hospitable forms of giving between shopkeeper citizens and irregular migrant waste pickers. Chapter 5 interrogates tense relations between ethnic Turks and Kurds in a recycling depot that imports plastic waste from the United Kingdom. The conclusion suggests that moral authority is central to the exercise of political power within contemporary Turkey.Item Embargo Mastering the Margins: A Chinese Mine in MongoliaZhu, RuiyiIn recent decades, Mongolia’s rich natural resources and small population have made it a sought-after destination for Chinese capital investment and labour migration, facilitated by China’s ‘going out’ policy. While this cooperation has been founded on the ostensible complementarity between Mongolia’s structural shortage of industrial labour and China’s surplus, the presence of Chinese workers has become a source of anxiety in Mongolian society. Historical interethnic and interstate entanglements, as well as Mongolia’s fear of China’s contemporary economic might, cast a long shadow over the relationship between these two neighbours. Examining the complex, delicate, and fraught Sino-Mongolian relations, this thesis presents an ethnographic study of a Chinese-owned private fluorspar mine and processing plant in Mongolia. I followed a group of middle-aged workers who endured mass layoffs in China and sought to regain economic agency by participating in Mongolia’s extractive economy – an industry buoyed by hopes and rife with controversies. I argue that the Chinese workers view their time in Mongolia as an opportunity to ‘master the margins’ by extracting the marginal value of their own labour and exploiting their relationship with the geographically peripheral land and socioeconomically marginal other. In this thesis, I seek to explore the nuances that elude the official discourse of interstate friendship and widespread apprehensions of neo-colonial hegemony by navigating a variety of quotidian interactions between Chinese workers and their Mongolian counterparts. The thesis consists of two parts, each with three chapters. The emphasis of Part I is on the emergence of the desire to command the margins, shedding light on familial bonds and entrepreneurial ethos as the twin forces undergirding the circular migration of laid-off workers, labour hierarchy on the shop floor, and ritual practices of ingratiation. Part II focuses on the discontent and ambivalence toward Chinese ‘masterhood’ by exposing the translation politics between monolingual and bilingual employees, the failure of skill transfer between the master and apprentice, and the aspiration for improvement through the discourse of standards. The analytical concept of ‘mastering the margins’ delineates the dual position of people who are simultaneously victims and enablers of capitalist expansion. With its exploitative potential, ‘margin’ elicits opposing views in economic and social theories. While maintaining an anthropological openness to social complexities and contingent processes, this thesis investigates the concerns, strategies, and dilemmas of ordinary Chinese and Mongolian workers in a transnational labour regime. I describe and analyse marginalised subjects’ attempts at overcoming material and ontological insecurities within structural constraints. In a broader perspective, this Sino-Mongolian industrial encounter serves as a case study for examining the contradictions in a globalising China.Item Controlled Access Norms and Reasons: Modernity and subjecthood inside (and outside) a Chinese schoolJiang, EdwinThis dissertation has three intertwined aims. First, to elucidate (and defend) Weberian modernity as drastic transformations in peoples’ conceptions of normativity, which radically breaks with the past (Chapter 1), thereby illuminating how contemporary moral educational focuses in China function as a “pre-modernist” response to the effects of modernity (Chapter 2). Second, to understand how historical developments of Chinese modernity motivated mass educational migration (Chapter 3), thus identifying how top-down decisions to modernise inspired and sustained perhaps unexpected pluralistic perspectives on the Chinese nation-state (Chapter 4). Third, to examine the lived experiences of pupils within the Chinese schooling system, motivating anthropologists to rethink the “individual subject” in practical and theoretical contexts as actor (Chapter 5) and knower (Chapter 6) alike. The title of the dissertation, “norms” and “reasons,” derive from these three related aims. I propose to understand modernity as a reversal in the direction of normative fit; while I hope to reconceptualise what it means for the individual to be the locus of both practical and theoretical reasoning qua actor and knower respectively. To these ends, I undertook ethnographic investigations of the educational paradigm within China, as well as into the effects of studying abroad on informants from China who have since left. I relied heavily on historical arguments regarding China’s transformation and development—both material and abstract—since its encounter with Western powers in the mid-1800s. Throughout this dissertation, I drew generously from philosophical discussions in epistemology, action theory, and moral philosophy to make sense of the ethnography.Item Restricted In the Shade of the Kangla: Kingship and Revivalism in Northeast IndiaMoon-Little, Edward[Restricted]