Dissertations and Theses based on EFS-sponsored field research

Making peace on the island of love: An ethnographic exploration of peacebuilding in Cyprus

Modenos, Lisa — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:24:13 PST

This is a dissertation that examines peace. In particular this dissertation will explore the paradox of peace on the island of Cyprus, a paradox that has continued to challenge both international and local peace activists in their pursuits to build peace. For how does one build peace when it seems that peace already exists? Yet, how can peace truly exist within the context of a stalemated, decades-old protracted ethnic conflict on a politically and ethnically divided island? The paradox of the Cyprus conflict being deemed a peaceful conflict only begins to touch upon the problems and limitations inherent in building peace on the island. This dissertation explores what those problems are through the eyes of local peacebuilders, and argues for a more anthropologically informed peace research in order to help surpass peacebuilding limitations in Cyprus and in other post-conflict zones around the world.^ This dissertation explores how peacebuilding theories and methodologies in Cyprus have and have not shifted within the wake of the opening of the Green Line and the subsequent sociopolitical changes on the island. It explores the changes in methods and theories of peacebuilding on the island by focusing on the activities and perspectives of local Cypriots involved in peacebuilding. In particular this dissertation describes the historical context in which bicommunal peacebuilding came about as a strategy; it explores the principles and goals that defined the particular kind of peacebuilding that emerged in Cyprus; it describes who was involved in the local world of peacebuilding; and it explores the multiple changes to the island that have also affected and changed the nature of peacebuilding – and it does so particularly through trying to understand how local peacebuilders have experienced and conceptualized those changes. Through the extended interviews and observations of the networks and activities of peacebuilding that I conducted in Nicosia, I argue that we can learn a great deal about the complex ways that peacebuilding is experienced by the intervened, and that those experiences can help contribute to the transformation of the doing of peacebuilding in the future.^

"Driven" women: Gendered moral economies of women's migrant labor in postsocialist Europe's peripheries

Keough, Leyla J — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:17:10 PST

In the last decade, labor migration of women from the former Soviet Union has grown exponentially. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Moldova, where 1/3 of the population works abroad, most illegally, and where about 1/2 of these migrants are women transnationally "commuting" to work for 6 to 12 months at a time. This dissertation examines the effects of the neoliberal global economy in this region on women's migration and questions how notions of gender inform this new economy. Bridging ethnographies of postsocialism with those on migration and gender, and drawing upon poststructural feminist works, I show how shifting ideas about gender play a key role in the moral economies of supply and demand for these labor migrants, in the experience of this migration on the ground, and in state and organizational responses to it. I offer a comprehensive view of one particular migration pattern—(Gagauz) Moldovan women who work as domestics in Turkey—drawing on multi-sited and transnational ethnographic dissertation research and interviews conducted in 2004–5 with these migrant women at home and abroad, their village compatriots at home, their employers and employment agents in Istanbul, and employees of the foremost institution dealing with migrants in the region, the International Organization for Migration. I deploy Bourdieu's concept of social fields of values—here conceptualized as gendered moral economies—to show how notions about women, wealth, migration, and work play out in discursive practices at these sites, conditioning the experiences of this migration from these various perspectives and helping this illegal labor market to function. This dissertation also problemmatizes claims about 'postsocialist women' by specifying their experiences in terms of overlapping and various subjectivities. In so doing, it shifts the anthropological gaze from a narrow focus on 'postsocialism' in this region and 'postsocialist women' as a special case of migrant women to identify problems and processes of neoliberal globalization that hold wider significance. In this, I am concerned with relating the common dilemmas of migrant women, the ambiguities of all female labors, and the complexity of women's agency. ^

Emergent socialities: Networks of biodiversity and anti-globalization

Sterpka King, Mary — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:36:53 PST

There are a number of distinguishing features that mark globalization as a historically significant period. This includes changes in technology which allow for greater levels of economic integration and the international division of labor. At the same time, global communication networks enhance the amount of transnational coordination between social movements. This project details the formation of the anti-globalization network through the history of biodiversity politics. It explores networks in terms of social and technological transformation, but also as distributive phenomenon with unique properties. The research also speculates on the political dynamics of networks. ^

Towards the within: Visual culture, performance, and aesthetics of acupuncture

Anderson, Kevin Taylor — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:56:37 PST

This research attempts to account for the current popularity and use of acupuncture and other holistic therapies in Galway, Ireland. I have identified three research areas that are essential for understanding the popularity and use of holistic medical practices: visual culture, performance, and aesthetics. The visual culture of holistic medicines draws from exoticized imagery associated with Asian and Celtic/Folkloric Ireland and produces visual narratives marked with cultural syncretism. This imagery also provides the initial context in which patients and the general public begin to recognize and distinguish the status of these therapies as alternatives to biomedicine. Patient interpretations of the therapies—and their efficacy—are influenced by the images, symbols, and metaphors used in the magazine and leaflet promotions, as well as by the design of clinical spaces.^ Examination of the patient-practitioner interactions comprises the “performative” aspects of acupuncture and the social reality it creates. The verbal and nonverbal interactions play a significant role in constructing acupuncture as an appealing form of holistic healing, and how patients come to define it as pleasurable, naturalistic, and—curiously enough—as noninvasive. Patient interpretations of the social and bodily aesthetics of treatments contribute to the ways in which patients develop constructs of efficacy. Descriptions of bodily sensations and somatic imagery, use of metaphorical language, and the aftereffects of treatment experienced by patients all influence how patients define acupuncture’s efficacy. Research into how acupuncture is successfully constructed as a form of holistic medicine in Ireland suggests that its popularity is in part due to its alternative status, which indicates that the success of holistic healing practices in Ireland stems from the culture’s history of concurrently sustaining both biomedical and folk healing practices. We can also regard the popularity and use of acupuncture (as well as other forms of holistic therapies in Galway) as signaling an increase in economic standards of living while also embodying a means for negotiating the social stresses and pressures associated with late-Capitalist modernity.^ Key words. Visual and medical anthropology, Ireland, Ethnomethodology, Visual Culture, Phenomenology, acupuncture ^

The Croatian public sphere and the journalistic milieu

Wallace, Richard — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:32:38 PDT

Social theorist Jürgen Habermas describes the public sphere as a network for communicating information and perspectives that creates public opinion, a network which is neither of the state, nor of private economic and household life. The ideal public sphere is a rational communicative process allowing participation in political and scholarly debates towards finding agreement, where speakers and addressees need not talk about themselves. Habermas does not blur the line between public and private; the two complement each other instead. Intersubjectivities reach consensus---or achieve what journalism calls "professional objectivity". ^ Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 1999 to 2003 and contextualized with historical sources, this dissertation explores these Habermasian ideals with data from the everyday life of Croatian journalists, important participants in transforming their post-socialist, post-war nation-state. Using broad strokes, the public sphere model is useful to describe transitional Croatia, but, when we look at the fine grains of the everyday lifeworld and put the newsroom in the wider context of culture, the communicative rationality of the journalistic milieu is not just the complementarity of the public and private, but the complicative, as well. ^ The concept of the public sphere is a useful analytic descriptor for institutional creatures with a "monolithic" identity as "journalist". Ethnography, however, shows us journalists as individuals---individuals with sanguine and affinal ties, with organizational and associative pulls, with overt and covert identities. As I tell the stories of Croatian broadcast reporters and consider their ever-evolving subject matter (in this case, the Croatian presidency), I describe molecular variables of the journalistic field within wider cultural articulations. I find the concept of the public sphere needs to include a rhizomic model of communication, where uncentered connections are made or broken at any given spot, with interruptions and new networking happening at any occasion. As planes of communication mediate between structured orderly thinking on the one hand and the chaos of chance happenings and the complexity of their ever-shifting origins and outcomes on the other, Habermas' modernist attempts to find the normative place in communicative rationality are fleeting when working from the ground up in the Croatian journalistic milieu.^

Good Fridays, Celtic Tigers and the Drumcree Church Parade: Media, politics and the state in Northern Ireland

Taaffe, Thomas H — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:43:05 PST

This dissertation ethnographically examines media-political power relations during the negotiations, ratification and implementation stages of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement marks the latest effort to construct an 'agreed-upon' state where none has previously existed. This effort is contextualized within the socio-economic changes brought about by an emergent 'Celtic Tiger' Irish economy and set against Unionist opposition to the peace process, as expressed by the Loyalist Marching Season and the annual violence around the Drumcree Church Parade. These processes are further contextualized within the long historical processes that gave rise to contending Irish and British nationalisms and the role of the news media in producing them. ^ Drawing on Gramsci, Weber, Anderson, dialogic and articulation theory, this work argues that the nation-state is historically 'produced' and---if successful---its ideals are embodied by those who claim that nationality as a part of their identity. If so, then the project of producing the nation-state is ongoing process where the ideological ties that bind members of that community to each other and to the state must be constantly reinforced and re-articulated in order to sustain that nation-state. ^ Hegemonic and coercive strategies are seen here as intertwined tactics of power that shape and define the social fabric of any cultural matrix---including historic blocs and nation-states---conditioning and shaping the terms of discourse and parameters of violence. As Foucault pointed out, these relations trace their way upward from the micro-physics of meaning/value production upward to larger social value/meaning systems, including news production and ethno-political struggle. ^ This dissertation explores the ways the news media and the political realm---including international capital and the state---overdetermine each other and shape the terms of political discourse and the capacity to express violence. This work also explores the limits of media-based, political strategies to gain popular consent. In the intimate social landscape of Northern Ireland converges with the historically deep argument over national aspiration, to reveal the fragility and contingent character of the nation-state project and the limits of state-inspired propaganda campaigns to gain consent. ^

Contextualizing the history and practice of Paleolithic archaeology: Hamburgian research in northern Germany

Roveland, Blythe E — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 14:49:12 PDT

For decades, archaeologists have investigated the history of the discipline and, more recently, some have suggested that self-reflection be incorporated into fieldwork and archaeological reports. These efforts should promote critical understandings of archaeological practice as well as of the data and interpretations originating from such practice. This dissertation represents an exploration of the influences, at various levels, affecting one body of data (constituting the German Hamburgian) and interpretations about that data. ^ The Hamburgian was first defined as a late Paleolithic cultural complex on the North European Plain in the early 1930s. Throughout its research history, avocational archaeologists have played a prominent role in the discovery and interpretation of the Hamburgian record. The most influential of these amateurs was Alfred Rust, whose fieldwork at the now-classic sites of Meiendorf and Stellmoor was carried out at the very inception of Hamburgian research. His discoveries inspired a host of other explorations of Hamburgian sites in northern Europe and shaped subsequent expectations and interpretations about this prehistoric period. These findings were eagerly followed by an interested public and were the source of intense regional and national pride during the unique social, political, and economic climate between the World Wars in Germany. ^ Among the early investigations that followed upon the heels of Rust's work was the excavation of Pennworthmoor 1 in Cuxhaven-Sahlenburg by another self-trained archaeologist, Paul Büttner. Sixty years later Pennworthmoor 1 was again the site of archaeological fieldwork at which time I played a part. ^ Past practices of Hamburgian archaeology in northern Germany, in general, and at the site of Pennworthmoor 1, in particular, are considered through documentary and collections research. The formative first decade of Hamburgian archaeology is the primary focus. In addition, a reflexive approach to my own fieldwork at the Pennworthmoor 1 site is offered to illustrate the complexities and effects of daily practice involved in data recovery and interpretation that cannot be readily gleaned from historical records. ^

The construction and practice of place in Weimar Republic Berlin

Arndt-Briggs, Skyler J — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 14:48:03 PDT

This dissertation looks at the spatial strategies which people enact in their daily lives and which, in turn, become part of the sociocultural and historical context of their existence. It examines this nexus, which conjoins human behavior with the physical world, in the context of an urban built environment located in Europe during a period of intense social and political change early in the twentieth century. Specifically, the dissertation focuses on life in one part of Berlin—Moabit—during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), drawing on historical data and life histories I gathered from people who lived there during that period. ^ The chapters which make up the first part of this study explore historical documents and studies to establish that Moabit was home to a heterogenous urban population and to sketch out the social profile of this population. The assertion that Moabit was socially heterogeneous is in direct opposition to popular and scholarly stereotypes of the area as a working-class district. The contradiction between this stereotype and how people talk about Moabit in their life stories gives rise to questions about how places gain reputations and how we think and talk about places. ^ The second part of the dissertation is ethnographic and plumbs personal narratives to show how different place-related practices contributed to an urban heterogeneity that was sociohistorically specific to the Weimar period. It opens with a look at what we can learn from the different ways in which people talk about the place named Moabit in their life histories. Ensuing chapters reveal that people's construction and practice of place were intimately involved with their sense of social identity, both integral components of and contributors to a system of social relations which set the working and middle classes in opposition. Further, spatial strategies varied within both these groups as well, most clearly along gender and political fines and in ways indicative of attitudes towards social change and modernity. Finally, the life histories allow us to trace how such practices of differentiating urban place developed through the socialization of children and youth. ^ In conclusion, this work returns to an examination of the importance of place as a cultural construct in Weimar Berlin, by looking at the value placed on being sedentary. I argue that the ideal of sedentarism was a cultural response to the contemporary economic and social stresses experienced by Berliners, but was rooted in politically-loaded practices of the modern era in Europe as well. During the Weimar Republic this cultural construct provided a vehicle for place-making practices which concurrently addressed people's material and social needs. ^

Constructing ancestors: Archaeology and folklore in Scotland

Gazin-Schwartz, Amy — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 14:45:09 PDT

In this dissertation I explore the ways folklore and archaeology construct the past, and the potential for folklore to contribute to archaeological interpretation. Nineteenth-century antiquarians viewed both folklore and ancient monuments as relics of the past, and some popular literature today follows this tradition. Archaeologists have been more wary of the relationship. My own approach does not seek correlations between folklore and archaeological sites. Rather, I take the view that both folklore and archaeological materials cannot reveal the past in themselves, but only give us information about the past through interpretation. I therefore develop interpretative dialogues between the two fields in four areas: for interpreting material culture; for conducting archaeological surveys; for understanding the significance of time in constructing ideas about the past; and for interpreting monuments. I illustrate the potential for such a dialogue through a case study of archaeology and folklore in Scotland, and in particular the islands of Raasay and Skye. ^

Households in industrial agriculture

Briggs, Gregory M — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 14:42:12 PDT

This work investigates the historical development of mechanized agriculture within the framework of family farming in Friesland province, the Netherlands. The research follows changing domestic composition in three historic municipalities which have been incorporated into the present day municipality of Franekeradeel. Changes within households are compared to changes in the sources of farm labor and the number of people and farms commercially involved in agriculture. The overall impact of these changes is then weighed with respect to the demographic, as well as the spatial make-up of the rural locality.^ The objective of the research is to study cultural continuity under conditions of rapidly changing technology. The main inquiry focuses on how rural families have modified productive and consumptive technologies over the last one hundred years to fit local and domestic social conditions. The primary focus is to study how an expansion of agricultural productivity has been effected within the households organizing farming. The secondary focus has been to study the effect expanding productivity has on farming households and local rural society. The analytical framework outlines changing dimensions of property rights by focusing on changes in the social form of labor, which is itself a dynamic property relationship. Other dimensions of historic property relations explored include domestic dynamics, technical change, land tenure patterns, patterns of productive ownership and devolution.^ Results of the demographic research indicate that since the advent of industrial processing, particularly dairying and crop harvesting, lack of employment and changing expectations for women have led to a higher outmigration of women than men, engendering changes in domestic composition. A diminished number of female headed households and a diminished retention of unmarried adult female, versus male children within the domestic unit are two primary markers.^ Conclusions arising from the analysis of the social construction of property rights indicate an ongoing diminution of private alienable rights, in favor of increased public/state allocation of property right's content. The construction of rights around the ownership of dairy production values following the establishment of the 1983 European Community quota system provides an example of this. ^