Established on July 1, 1944, the World Bank has become the largest lender to developing countries and operates under a goal of poverty reduction. The institution may be implicated in human rights in at least three possible activities: the Banks lending of money to governments that violate human rights； its direct or indirect violation of human rights e.g., the forcible displacement of indigenous peoples resulting from a Bank-financed dam project)； and the Banks promotion of human rights e.g., designing projects with specific human rights objectives). Yet while the Bank has adopted a number of social and environmental policies, it has not adopted any overarching policy or framework on human rights. Despite the Banks rhetoric in support of these concerns, its employees do not systematically incorporate human rights into their everyday decision making or consistently take them into consideration in lending. I argue that legal and political constraints do not fully explain the marginality of this issue in the Banks operations. What has been missing from existing explanations is an anthropological account of the bureaucracy that uncovers internal obstacles to the adoption of human rights norms. This dissertation offers an ethnographic analysis of the Banks organizational culture based on 24 months of extensive field research at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. over the 2002-2006 period. The dilemma of human rights at the Bank represents a clash of normative rationalities: economics versus human rights, or more broadly, the market versus social democratic liberalism. In this study, I demonstrate how the bureaucratization of human rights imbues them with a technocratic rationality through a process of delegalization and depoliticization. Internal conflict among experts uncovers the multiple logics that encompass human rights, including their regulatory and sovereignty dimensions. By analyzing the culture of an international economic institution through the lens of a universal discourse, I analyze the technologies of neoliberal governmentality, the dynamics of global normmaking, and the negotiation of competing values that underlie global governance.

In this research I explore the social construction of a particular category of space. The space in question is the coastscape, consisting of shoreline land, the shoreline itself, and the adjacent tidal waters. At the center of the research are shoreline residents living on the water in the rural setting of Dorchester County, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Of interest is how they see themselves connected to the coastscape, how they know and act in it. I explore in two ways how they develop their sense of place. The first is to consider how various structural factors associated with the residential place on the water – the land, house, shoreline, tidal waters, boat and pier – shape perceptions about place. The second is to review what practices shoreline residents engage in and how these practices shape perceptions about place. I also review the role of the state in the social construction of the coastscape because the legal and regulatory framework affects shoreline residents in many ways. In addition I look at the role transitional spaces such as thresholds, edges in space, in time, and in being, and hybrid spaces play in the social construction of the coastscape, adding a theoretical element to the research. The methodology is based on open-ended conversations with shoreline residents, participant observation of crabbing and farming and archival research. The research contributes to the body of anthropological research on place and space, reflecting recent trends in the social sciences where place is seen as an active element in cultural processes. I conclude that the natural environment of the coastscape and the everyday practices of shoreline residents are the key constituent parts of sense of place rather than community discourse. Furthermore, the coastscape is legally complex and heavily regulated by all levels of government. From a theoretical perspective I conclude that the coastscape is linked in significant ways to transitional spaces both in the way the shoreline residents construct it and in the way the state constructs it.

Disability is not only a biological issue, it is an inherently social one. People are only as disabled as their society allows them to be. Enhancing our understanding of the social processes affecting the disabled will allow for their increased participation within society. The researcher employed qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews and participant observation to perform case studies at fieldwork sites providing care to the disabled in Chicago, IL, USA and Santarem, Para, Brazil. The researcher spent two consecutive weeks in each location. The former location is a residential facility for people with developmental disabilities and the latter is a school for people with mental and physical disabilities. The results showed that cultural phenomena such as social inequalities, gender roles, and intolerance for difference affected the experience of those living with disabilities. Social inequalities account for many disabilities found in Brazil such as those caused by preventable infectious diseases or by inadequate living conditions. The results suggest that the greatest obstacle for the disabled is the strained social interaction they have with the able-bodied. The prevalence of stigma against the disabled is a product of human discomfort with liminality and ambiguous status. People with disabilities are viewed as not fully human. Exposure and increased education, especially among children, can reduce discrimination allow people with disabilities to function within society and develop an identity therein.

For Hispanic residents of Northwest Arkansas, folk medical wisdom and its practice provide the front line of health care. This study examines the ethnobotanical component of Hispanic folk medicine and what it reveals about health and healing among a marginalized ethnic subpopulation. Using a chain referral technique, interviews with healers revealed a core of edible cultivars widely believed to allay symptoms, cure or forestall infections, and provide acute relief to the suffering patient. The remedies include common kitchen ingredients that are widely found in other folk medical healing systems. A broad range of illnesses emerged in the study, alongside a successive inventory of corresponding botanical remedies. The results further indicated a shared and cohesive perspective among Hispanics on the bifurcated nature of what is considered ‘natural’ versus ‘chemical’ medicine. Analysis suggest cultural consensus within this healing paradigm, specifically with list length of remedies as well as chronic ailments.

The Cajuns are an American ethnic group founded primarily on the ideology of a shared history and language. Their history begins with the expulsion of the Acadian peoples from Nova Scotia in 1755 and continues into modernity with the Cajuns of Louisiana. The goals of this paper are to present an updated ethnographic account of Cajuns in Louisiana, as well as to present an example of how ideology and rhetoric may be utilized in the social sciences to explore and present ethnographic research. The data presented are based on first-hand observations and interviews conducted in the field in and around Lafayette, Louisiana, during a 2008-2009 field season. I argue that identity is based in a cognition-social-discourse model of ideology. Cognition encompasses shared memories, such as history； social refers to the elements of culture； and discourse aids in the negotiation and maintenance of ideology and identity, in large part due to rhetoric. Participant interviews are utilized to explore the ways in which individuals express their personal identities and their cultural ideologies. An Acadian ancestry and the Cajun French language appear to be the primary boundaries under negotiation in the Cajun ideology. Other cultural elements, such as food, music, and personality traits, are also part of the Cajun ideology and identity, and are used as symbolic rhetoric to validate membership in the Cajun culture. While the overall Cajun ideology has not changed substantially since published accounts in the 1980s, the extremes of the negotiated boundaries, as well as the mechanisms of reproduction and maintenance, have changed. Academia, tourism, and the Internet are offered as contemporary mechanisms through which the Cajun ideology is negotiated, reproduced, and maintained. This project adds a renewed perspective to the Cajun academic literature by presenting data collected through first hand interviews and observations, as well as addressing contemporary ways in which individuals navigate and maintain their identities within a Cajun ideology. Furthermore, this project explores the ways in which a theory of ideology may be utilized in anthropology to present ethnographic data for a multidisciplinary approach to culture, identity, and ethnicity.

Over the past 30 years research into the Early Paleoindian archaeological record around 11,000 B.P.) in the North American Lower Great Lakes region has mostly focused on data collection, individual site interpretation, and artifact descriptions. Large amounts of data are now available, which allows us to begin asking questions of broader anthropological relevance, beyond a mere regional synthesis. What options did hunter-forager humans Homo sapiens sapiens) have when colonizing an unfamiliar landscape? What sort of mobility patterns were used? And what kind of technology helped a band to tackle this new and potentially dangerous Ice-Age landscape? Studying early human colonization processes is problematic in most areas around the world. We cannot tell if the prehistoric foragers under consideration were colonizers or were already in place at the time that their stuff entered the archaeological record. However, recently deglaciated landscapes, like the Lower Great Lakes, offers us a blank slate: the earliest human detritus there must be that of colonizers. There simply could not have been human occupation any earlier because glaciers occupied the area. Despite the global warming trend taking place during the end of the Last Glacial period, an anomalous glacial re-advance, called the Younger Dryas cold-event, kept the climate and environment stable around the Great Lakes. It is well documented that extreme mobility among hunter-foragers plays an influential role in the way forager tools are designed, requiring differing degrees of portability, reliability, maintainability, and versatility. Thus, if the habitat and social organization in which prehistoric mobile foragers found themselves influenced the design, manufacture, maintenance, and discard of their stone tools, then the study of those tools should inform us about those same contexts and the strategies for dealing with them. This dissertation presents data on nearly 2,000 Paleoindian unifacial stone tools from seven base camps of early colonizers around the Lower Great Lakes. It establishes quantitative benchmarks for the amount of stone tool variability to be expected for different mobility, tool-maintenance, and tool-design strategies. From quantitative assessments of artifact morphological diversity this dissertation concluded that: 1) Colonizing Paleoindians in the Lower Great Lakes practiced logistical mobility, that is they moved their base camps long distances but infrequently. If Clovis colonizers in the Lower Great Lakes used a logistical mobility strategy, it follows that they did not follow intensively or rely exclusively upon terrestrial fauna. In turn, the traditional notion that humans were “pulled” into a new territory through their dependence on hunting loses strength while concurrently the pull factor of information acquisition becomes that much more compelling both through exploration of far away lands and learning of immediate environments). Information acquisition and exploration regarding far away lands would have occurred through logistical forays before any long-distance base camp move took place. The implication of this conclusion means that even though Clovis foragers moved far and fast across the landscape, we can infer they did not move blindly. And while this exploration may have been embedded in, or even an impetus for, logistical trips, it was probably positive assessment of landscape potential that ultimately determined base camp moves, the infrequency of which in turn allowed them to maximize their time in a single location to learn and adapt to their immediate environment. 2) With regards to unifacially flaked stone tools, rather than choosing or knapping a set of standardized “ideal” flake-blanks to later modify to particular tasks a responsive tool-maintenance strategy), colonizing foragers initially selected/created sets of variable morphologies which were maintained throughout the tool-sets use-life history an anticipatory strategy). This suggests that Clovis foragers broadly anticipated the sorts of tasks that would need to be conducted with sets of unifacially flaked hardware. 3) The unifacial stone tools of human colonizers in the Lower Great Lakes possessed attributes exhibiting both “maintainable” expediently made, quickly and easily refurbished, and readily converted for different uses) and “reliable” over-designed to tackle specific tasks, i.e. could not be adapted to multi-tasking) tool-design strategies. In other words, there seemed to be evidence that unifacial stone tools were both hand-held and hafted. There are very few such regions in the world where a clean slate is offered upon which to examine human hunter-forager colonization processes. Both the data and the conclusions reached here help to advance our understanding of the behavioral adaptations that determined how our species came to colonize the planet.

Intersecting phenomenology and political economy, this dissertation explores the ways in which borders and memories become embodied in the everyday practices of people living on the two sides of the Italo-Slovene border of Trieste. It aims to demonstrate how the “excess” of history in the Julian region is strictly linked to the regions role as a border area and therefore exposed to historically stratified conflicts, which differentially impact the daily interactions among border inhabitants. The study takes an embodied approach to memory both framed in the everyday practices and in ad hoc commemorations. The embodiment of memory emerges as a complex conjunction of habitual and contingent memories, which tend to be framed by the different regimes of governance that have shaped the history of the region. The people of the Julian region embrace the border as a constitutive aspect of their subjectivities—at the same time a burden and a resource. Throughout the dissertation I highlight the role that state and inter-state relations have played in “determining” the border and in producing governmental relations aimed at “normalizing” traumatic historical memories, which have affected the individual and the “normalizing” traumatic historical memories, which have affected the individual and the social body, producing diffuse “social suffering.” Specifically I examine how inter-state diplomacy since 1954 aimed at normalizing memories through three different regimes of governance: 1) Normalization with emphasis on economic development and exchange, which meant unrestricted border crossing and increased shopping privileges for border people； 2) Normalization through silencing the past in public spaces. Social suffering was relegated to the private realm, and when it threatened the boundaries of the public sphere it was either institutionalized as mental illness through mental institutions, in Italy) or as political dissidence through detention camps, in Yugoslavia)； 3) Normalization through official processes of “reconciliation,” which produce revisionist histories marked by the rhetoric of leveling culpability. This dissertation aims at shedding further light on the study of political borders by showing how state, nation, gender and subjectivities become constitutive forces in their creation and negotiation.

An analysis of Frank Speck’s anthropological representations of Aboriginal territoriality in northeastern Canada indicates a direct connection between anthropology and advocacy during the early part of the 20th century. In situating Speck’s work on the Family Hunting Territory Complex within the context of Aboriginal treaty and resource issues in Canada during the late 19th and early 20th century, this analysis examines how Speck’s representations of Aboriginal territoriality challenged the strict management and regulation of Aboriginal traditional territories and resource use by the Canadian government. This thesis is not an intellectual biography. It is an examination of the practical conditions and the working assumptions associated with the production, accumulation and distribution of anthropological knowledge connected to the multiple domains of Speck’s representation of Aboriginal territoriality. I argue that Speck was a participant in a much larger political struggle that included the active engagement of Aboriginal peoples. I also situate Speck’s representations of Aboriginal territoriality within the broader field of ethnographic activity that existed prior to the emergence of the discipline and Speck’s contributions to the discipline. I examine the tensions of colonialism and Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations inherent in the archives, texts and the networks of knowledge production associated with this disciplinary history and the practical relations and encounters that contributed to the production of anthropological knowledge associated with Speck’s representations of Aboriginal territoriality.

This thesis discusses adaptations of Augusto Boal’s interactive improvisational Theatre of the Oppressed for North American praxis through two projects. First, the March 2004 production Practicing Democracy of Headlines Theatre Company, dealing with policy issues surrounding cutbacks to social services and how the municipal government of Vancouver can be more proactive in protecting citizens affected by these cuts. And second, the Theatre of the Oppressor and Anti-Racism for White Folks programs of the Mandala Centre for Change, in Port Townsend, Washington and New York, New York respectively, two programs that attempt to disrupt asymmetrical power relations through working with the powerful. Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus is used as a foundation for thinking through how cultural and behavioural patterns are generated and maintained. The Theatre of the Oppressed is introduced as an embodied pedagogy that works from the hidden knowledge of the body to understand social dynamics, and through physical play to rehearse more liberatory social action.

The research for this thesis utilizes a new participatory research technique called Domain Analysis to understand farmers knowledge regarding the values of agricultural biodiversity. The Domain Analysis technique is applied toward two case studies featuring the mixed cropping practices of the Kuvi and Korku Adivasi tribes of India. The findings of the research indicate that these farmers employ mixed cropping practices because they offer stable and diverse food and economic security by maximizing resiliency against unpredictable ecological conditions despite minimal external inputs. In addition, a comparison of the Domain Analysis exercises of Kuvi and Korku farmers reveal that each has developed their mixed cropping practices along different lines according to their distinct socio-economic and environmental circumstances. Nonetheless, problems with the application of Domain Analysis exercises result in this research not fully realizing the ideals of “participation”. An analysis of these problems concludes that rapport, experience and the flexible use of participatory techniques are necessary to ensure optimal participation and the genuine elicitation of farmers knowledge.