Browsing by Department "Cultural Anthropology"
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Item Open Access A Home of Our Own: Social Reproduction of a Precarious, Migrant Class(2019-04-29) Aguilar, ErickMany of the recent migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico have experienced the rise of drug-related gang violence and declining economic conditions in their home countries brought on by transnational agreements. With the ongoing collapse of their communities and homes via these conditions, many of these migrants move to the United States and join precarious jobs, such as agricultural labor. This thesis explores the ways in which family connections, inside and outside the home, affects the decision-making processes that leads migrant parents to join these precarious labor regimes. Through participant-observation and semi-structured interviews with migrant mothers and fathers from Honduras and Mexico living in rural towns in Eastern North Carolina, I investigate the social reproductive forces of the family that help fuel mass migration into rural North Carolina. Furthermore, I use my own experience as the son of an agricultural worker to complement my findings within the fields. My findings show that migrant mothers choose to migrate to North Carolina to raise their sons in proximity to their fathers, which they believe will allow their sons to learn how to become successful laborers in the future. Additionally, migrant parents believe that the home can be a place where the trauma of displacement can be undone. These findings show a glimmer of how lives can be structured and shaped outside of wage labor.Item Open Access A Politics of the Unspeakable: The Differend of Israel(2012) van Vliet, NettaIsrael's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.
Item Open Access Acting Natural: The Sociopolitical Construction of Nature in the Mesilla Valley(2017-05-05) Hadfield, ElizabethThis thesis explores how nature is imagined in the Mesilla Valley of Southern New Mexico. Through analyzing multiple forms of ethnographic fieldwork data collected in the Mesilla Valley, this thesis illuminates the ways in which current understandings of nature in the Mesilla Valley are deeply rooted in colonialism, domination, escapism, and white supremacy. The ethnographic fieldwork data collected and analyzed in this thesis primarily consist of (1) interviews and interactions with interlocutors in spaces of nature in the Mesilla Valley, (2) experiences with different forms of nature in the Mesilla Valley, and (3) representations of nature in the Mesilla Valley through sources such as advertisements, articles, museums, and archives. Based on this data, this thesis produces a counternarrative to the popular idyllic representation of nature; rather than a pristine entity, autonomous from humans, I show that the Mesilla Valley as nature only exists in relation to human brings, always connected to people, via the social, political, and historical forces that impact it. IN doing so, this thesis challenges the idea that nature can be defined in any one specific way; instead, nature emerges as a host of constellated meanings, holding multiple definitions, experiences, and realities within it and around it that make it nearly impossible to characterize as one essentialized thing. The thesis therefore calls for a more inclusive discourse surrounding nature, allowing for perspectives that show nature and human activity as inextricably linked.Item Embargo Algorithmic Dispossession: Automating Warfare in Israel and Palestine(2024) Goodfriend, Sophia LouiseThis dissertation offers an anthropological portrait of how algorithms are transforming what it means to wage and live with war across Israel and Palestine. My findings emerge from three years of ethnographic research with Israeli intelligence veterans, Palestinian advocates and influencers, and ordinary civilians living at the cross-hairs of regional conflict. I begin in the early 2000s, as Israel’s surveillance apparatus across Palestine proliferated amidst the violence of the Second Intifada and receding visions of regional peace. I conclude more than two decades later, as AI-powered surveillance and weapons systems intensify warfare across the region. I argue that the imperatives of a globalized information economy tangle with violent forms of dispossession across the occupied Palestinian territories to entrench warfare, a process I call algorithmic dispossession. Bringing critical algorithm studies to bear on an anthropological portrait of warfare in Israel and Palestine, I show how the buildup of algorithmic systems embedded the Israeli army into the most intimate domains of Palestinians’ lives. As new technologies drove up arrests, displacement, and death for Palestinians, the economic value placed on algorithmic development cleaved Israeli soldiers and military strategy writ large off from the imperatives of reducing bloodshed, ensuring warfare continued at a profound human cost to Israelis and Palestinians across the region. By placing ethnographic evidence gathered through years of fieldwork in Israel/Palestine alongside urgent debates surrounding the ethics and impact of new technologies, this dissertation ultimately foregrounds the iterative relationship between war and automation today.
Item Open Access American Realities, Diasporic Dreams: Pursuing Happiness, Love, and Girlfriendship in Jamaica(2009) Robinson, Bianca C.At the heart of "American Realities, Diasporic Dreams" lies the following question: How and why do people generate longings for diasporic experience, and what might this have to do with nationally-specific affective and political economies of race, gender, and age? This dissertation focuses on the women of Girlfriend Tours International (GFT), a regionally and socio-economically diverse group of Americans, who are also members of the virtual community at www.Jamaicans.com. By completing online research in their web-community, and multi-sited ethnographic research in multiple cities throughout the U.S. and Jamaica, I investigate how this group of African-American women makes sense of the paradoxical nature of their hyphenated-identities, as they explore the contentious relationship between "Blackness" and "Americanness."
This dissertation examines how these African-American women use travel and the Internet to cope with their experiences of racism and sexism in the United States, while pursuing "happiness" and social belonging within (virtual and territorial) diasporic relationships. Ironically, the "success" of their diasporic dreams and travels is predicated on how well they leverage their national privilege as (African) American citizens in Jamaica. Therefore, I argue that these African-American women establish a complex concept of happiness, one that can only be fulfilled by moving--both virtually and actually--across national borders. In other words, these women require American economic, national, and social capital in order to travel to Jamaica, but simultaneously need the spiritual connection to Jamaica and its people in order to remain hopeful and happy within the national borders of the U.S. Their pursuit of happiness, therefore, raises critical questions that encourage scholars to rethink how we ethnographically document diasporic longings, and how we imagine their relationships to early 21st century notions of the "American Dream."
Item Embargo Anxious Care: Radioactive Uncertainty and the Politics of Life in Post-Nuclear Japan(2023) Cho, JieunSince the 2011 meltdown, the health of “Fukushima children” has become a problem for parents, politics, and future imaginaries in post-nuclear Japan. What are the ethical and political implications of making life around a child imperiled by radiation when (re)productivity of life must be remade in a compromised environment? This dissertation investigates (re)production of life in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan by studying the strivings of families who seek to raise healthy children amidst radiation as a condition of living: what I call “anxious care.” By foregrounding the family as a site for environmental struggles in an emerging politics of life, I examine the work of making children live against and within radiation, looking to consider the radical implications of caring for children in radioactive uncertainty. In particular, this project focuses on inner cities of Fukushima Prefecture that have been on the frontline of radiation debates for having been exposed to disaster-induced radiation while not designated for evacuation. Shifting focus to the edges of delimited disaster zones, I examine the multifaceted aftermath of the nuclear disaster, ranging from differentially altered forms of life conditioned by radioactive uncertainty, the unequal distribution of radiation risk through public/private organizations such as the family form, and the everyday impact of post-Fukushima radiation. Theorizing the stakes of living with nuclear risk as situated political ecologies which generates tensions and possibilities for new forms of life, this dissertation argues that notions of life are undergoing a moment of reconfiguration in post-nuclear Japan by both real-life families and the family form. In doing so, it contributes to critiquing and broadening the anthropological horizons of life amid environmental uncertainty in and beyond Japan.
Item Open Access Anxious Citizenship: Insecurity, Apocalypse and War Memories in Peru's Andes(2007-05-10T16:02:45Z) Yezer, CarolineThe war between the Peruvian state and the Maoist Shining Path rebels began in the Department of Ayacucho, an area with a majority of indigenous Quechua- speaking peasant villages. After twenty years of violence (1980-2000), this region of South America’s Andes began a critical period of demilitarization, refugee resettlement, and reconciliation. In this transition, the rebuilding of villages devastated by the war raises critical questions about indigenous autonomy, citizenship, and the role of international human rights initiatives in local reconciliation. I examine the tensions between interventions by national and transnational organizations, and the insecurities that continue to define everyday life in villages like Wiracocha - a newly resurrected community that was in the heart of the war zone.1 Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in this village and ten months of comparative fieldwork in villages across the Ayacucho region and in the city of Huamanga, my research shows that villagers were often at odds with the aid and interventions offered to them from the outside. I focus on the complicated nature of village war history, paying attention to the initial sympathy with Shining Path and the village's later decision to join the counterinsurgency. In Ayacucho, memory has itself become a site of struggle that reveals as much about present-day conflict, ambivalences, and insecurities of neoliberal Peru as it does about the actual history 1 Wiracocha is a pseudonym that I am using in order to maintain subject confidentiality. of the war. Villagers sometimes oppose official memory projects and humanitarian initiatives - including Peru's Truth Commission - that that they see at odds with their own visions and agendas. Finally, I examine the less predictable ways that villagers have redefined what it means to be Andean, including: the maintenance of village militarization, a return to hard-handed customary justice and the adoption of bornagain Christianity as a new form of moral order and social solidarity.Item Open Access Atmospheric Pressure: An Ethnography of Wind, Turbines, and Zapotec Life in Southern Mexico(2018) Friede, StephanieAs one of the windiest places in the world, it is no surprise that companies have flocked to Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a narrow neck of land connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Primarily foreign corporations have installed more than1500 wind turbines in less than ten years' time. While wind energy appears an ethereal, amorphous, and limitless resource, the wind can only become electricity through turbines that require vast tracts of land. The question of land ownership — a historical flashpoint in the region — has amplified tensions between residents, straining the already frayed web of social relations that have long bound this indigenous Zapotec community to one another.
Many of the indigenous Zapotec residents are thrilled these once bothersome winds are becoming productive — as profits, job security, and perhaps their shot at progress. Landowners are among the most ardent supporters of wind energy development, tending their livestock in the morning, leveraging their land in exchange for more favorable lease agreements with executives in the afternoon. Opponents of the industry liken their boosters to an earlier colonial power, asking, "What are we going to eat if you turn everything into gold?" – depicting wind energy as merely the latest in a long history of dispossessions. For them, the wind has always been productive, an actor in their everyday lives: it awakens the fruits of the sea, sustaining fishermen and feeding their families; it causes illness and destroys property, and it conjures residents to recall the joys of living in this place. What Istmeños are aware of are the stark geopolitical realities that have brought wind turbines to their doorstep.
In a moment when Mexico's oil reserves are dwindling and the state searches for alternative revenues, the case of wind energy development on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec complicates the utopian narrative that industry and government advocates recount regarding the so-called win-win possibilities for green energy development across the global South. What happens when the wind is transformed from its unruly natural state into a natural resource? Far from an isolated case, this dissertation draws upon broader theories of power, both electrical and economic, to show how individuals, institutions, and experts are laying claim to nature's force. Neither the fable of green techno-optimism nor a return to some mythical nature adequately explains the messiness of the everyday realities I observed. Based on more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the generative possibilities of the wind, reconfiguring social relations through technological change. Ultimately, however, it is the imponderability of the natural world, its scale and power, and the very real consequences that efforts to mitigate global climate change are having in one particular place that I hope to convey in this work.
Item Open Access Beyond “Revolutionary Humanitarianism”: Chinese Doctors in South Sudan(2019) GONG, YIDONGThe transnational movement of medicines and medical professionals to post-war settings has given rise to various forms of caregiving, expertise and ethics. However, little is known about the broad range of actors and agents from the Global South engaging health and the body, beyond the spectacle of international NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières. My dissertation, entitled “Beyond ‘Revolutionary Humanitarianism’: Chinese Doctors in South Sudan,” analyzes the historical formation and contemporary reconfiguration of China’s longstanding medical programs in South Sudan. Through extended participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and archival research, I explore the role of medicine from China in South Sudan, a hybrid system that integrates aid and business. I argue that China’s medical interventions in conflict zones represent an assemblage of “regimes of living,” not only opening up possibilities for sustained care beyond global health agencies’ provision of emergency food and transitory medical campaigns, but also bringing about disparities in quality of life. Rooted in technological advancement rather than Christian tradition, China’s medical programs in Africa are producing a new form of everyday ethics, open to interrogation and debate on the ground. My research is in dialogue with literature on humanitarianism, biopolitics, and the anthropology of life. Focusing on bodily experience and medical expertise in a volatile setting, my project explores the new biopolitical landscape of present-day Africa, offering an alternative to the widely accepted logic and values of medical humanitarianism in places marked by “crisis” or “conflict.”
Item Open Access Black Love and Black Power: An Intersectional Analysis of Gender Violence and Political Activism(2015-04-21) Tynes, BrendaneThis thesis examines the intersections of political activism and gender-based violence in the Black student body at Duke University. Extensive interviews were conducted with members of the Black student body, as well as faculty members. Racism and sexism intersected in social interactions to produce a rape culture that was perpetuated by sexism in Black Liberation movements. Historical roots to the politically active past of Duke’s Black students in the Allen Building Takeover are explored, as well as gender relationships between Black men and women. Due to the failure to intersectionally view the social positioning of Black women, intraracial sexual violence can be silenced and justified in pursuit of Black liberation.Item Open Access Brewing Development: Multinational Alcohol Companies, the Neo-Concessionary State, and the Politics of Industrialization in Ethiopia(2019) Tekie, ChristinaThis dissertation examines the politics of industry and industrialization in Ethiopia. I analyze how multinational alcohol companies and the Ethiopian state are brewing development, meaning spurring the creation of industrial linkages through the production, distribution, sale, and consumption of commercial beer as well as their corresponding socio-cultural consequences as the Ethiopian people respond to such processes. An ethnography at the nidus of corporate supply and value chain management and the state’s industrialization policy, the following pages examine how state and companies are making industry to meet the developmentalist goals of an Ethiopian ruling party and the needs of capital, respectively, albeit not without local collaboration and resistance.
Item Open Access Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile(2017) Yako, LouisIraqi academics have had a pivotal role in shaping and building Iraqi society, identity, and national structures, since the country’s independence from British colonial rule. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a significant number of academics were assassinated and forced into exile and internal displacement. Since this population has always been intertwined with the state and different regimes of power, they are uniquely-situated to provide critical and multifaceted analyses on politics, the intertwined relationship between academics and power, and the complexity of exile. Through what I call a “genealogy of loss,” this ethnography traces the academic, political, and social lives of academics in contemporary Iraq to uncover the losses this population-and the Iraqi people- have incurred in contemporary Iraq. Beginning with the period from the ascendancy of the Ba‘ath Party in 1968, to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and up to the present, I examine the lives of Iraq’s exiled academics in three sites: the UK, Jordan, and Iraqi Kurdistan. I first examine their experience during the Ba‘ath era to explore their work, struggles, and hardships, as they made significant contributions to building their society and nation. I attempt to provide a nuanced anthropological account of life under the Ba‘ath regime and its ideals and complex realities. The second part examines these academics’ post-US occupation experiences both inside Iraq and in exile. I argue that the reconfiguration of the Iraqi state, and the shift from a secular, unified, one-party system into a divided space ruled by the occupying forces and their appointed sectarian and ethno-nationalist leaders and militia groups, has reconfigured the role of the academic and of higher education. The occupation and the subsequent Iraqi governments used death threats and assassinations, sectarianism, and “de-Ba‘athification” as forms of governance to restructure society. Many academics and professionals were either assassinated or forced into exile by sending them bullets and threat notes in envelopes. I explore how academics’ relatively stable jobs in pre-invasion Iraq are now “contracted lives” with devastating effects on their personal lives, intellectual projects, and the future of Iraq. Such lives entail living in spaces under precarious and temporary contracts and with residency cards subject to annual renewal or termination. These academics now live in constant fear and what I call a “plan B mode of existence.” While an extreme and violent case, this ethnography argues that the conditions of Iraqi academics in exile are connected to neoliberal global trends marked by the commercialization and corporatization of higher education, adversely affecting academic, social, and political freedoms of writing, thinking, and being in this world.
Item Open Access Click Here for Community: One ethnographer's journey through a mostly virtual world of fantasy, literature, sexuality and Harry Potter(2011-04-27) Cowans, DeenaThis thesis seeks to answer the question “Why are there communities on the Internet that read and write sexually explicit fan fiction?” Part 1 moves through an examination of the history of the publication of the Harry Potter novels, the appeal of fantasy literature to children and adults, and an exploration of the current norms in heterosexual practices of “hooking up” on college campuses. This line of argument seeks to understand the various components that make the ethnographic community, Smutty_Claus, so unique. Part 2 of the thesis addresses the appeal of this community through ways of mixing fantasy and reality. Writing is discussed as a mode of performance and a way of achieving agency that is otherwise inaccessible to many women. The conversion of fantasy to tangible commodity through writing is compared with the commodification of other fantasies associated with Harry Potter through the sport of Quidditch and the Universal Studios theme park “Wizarding World of Harry Potter.” Using auto-ethnography as method, the thesis relies on the stories of the author as a child and college students to understand the way in which the content of the stories on Smutty_Claus and involvement in the community can increase confidence and self-awareness. Through the ethnographic process, the author has found a way to live on the border between fantasy and reality.Item Open Access Collective Care: Community-Based Practices in Reproductive Justice(2024-04-27) Francisco-Zelkine, CoraliThe mainstream reproductive rights movement tends to focus on abortion and contraceptive freedom. The movement has historically 1) been led by cisgender, White women, and 2) only addressed autonomy in reference to the “choice” to not have children. Reproductive justice (RJ), which has emerged in recent years, is both a framework for understanding inequality in reproductive rights, and a movement that fights to make visible the particular needs of women of color and queer folks. RJ operates largely through community-led work, which separates it from national campaigns and organizations that take a more top-down approach to their work. This thesis asks: how do community-based initiatives promote the fight for RJ? The ethnographic project draws from Black feminist and intersectionality theory, participant observation and interviews with various RJ organizations and activists, and digital content analysis of different organizations’ social media platforms to explore the relationship between community and the RJ movement. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which community-based organizations that ground their operational strategies in the RJ framework offer a space for folks from marginalized racial and gender identities to advocate for themselves. Furthermore, the thesis sheds light on the way that the inclusivity of the RJ framework makes it valuable in potentially expanding beyond sexual and reproductive rights to other social justice issues.Item Open Access Configuring Local Resilience to Coastal Erosion in Togo(2023) Nomedji, Koffi AmegboThe West African coast is prey to an erosion washing away communities’ houses, livelihoods, and ancestral temples. By studying locals’ lived experiences and state resilience efforts my research investigates environmental and social issues and possibilities emerging from this climate disaster. I focus on Aneho, a historic town and former site of transcontinental commerce during the precolonial period, and a center of the famous African Print Textile trade since the early colonial period—which today risks disappearing into the sea. While the situation is dire, Aneho has a long history of survival and resilience to, among others, local wars, the slave trade, and colonialism. Reproduced through collective festivals and rituals, these traits are deployed today in their fight against coastal erosion. The ontological turn shows how native knowledge in the Amazonia and beyond offer alternative ways of being and knowing; however, this literature fails to answer the fundamental question of how this form of knowledge can influence our collective response to the current global climate crisis and change our ways of living. By analyzing Aneho’s biopolitical terrain where both scientific and ontological knowledge intersect, my work addresses this question through the examination of power relations underlying the way policymakers and traditional leaders address coastal erosion. The intersections I am exploring generate new possibilities for local agency and innovation in the face of climate catastrophe while also enabling my work to address the uncanny absence of West Africa’s rich cosmology in the canon of ontological literature. My research essentially pushes environmental anthropology beyond its theoretical limits by engaging the field in a pragmatic conversation with public policy on resilient development.
Item Open Access “Conquest without Rule: Baloch Portfolio Mercenaries in the Indian Ocean.”(2008) Lutfi, AmeemThe central question this dissertation engages with is why modern states in the Persian Gulf rely heavily on informal networks of untrained and inexperienced recruits from the region of Balochistan, presently spread across Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The answer, it argues, lies in the longue durée phenomenon of Baloch conquering territories abroad but not ruling in their own name. Baloch, I argue, conquered not to establish their sovereign rule, but to open channels of mobility for others. The rise of nation-states and citizen-armies in the twentieth century limited the possibility of Baloch conquest. Yet, the Baloch continued to find a place in the Gulf’s protection industry through historically shaped informal, familial, commercial, and parapolitical transnational networks. Flexible and persistent Baloch networks provided territorially bounded states the ability to access resources outside their boundaries without investment in formal international contracts.
Moreover, this dissertation makes the argument that mobile Baloch operated as ‘Portfolio-Mercenaries’, offering their military-labor to foreign states in order to build their own portfolio of transnational economic, social and political activities. At times these portfolio projects contradicted state interests; at other moments they corroborated them. In either situation, the non-soldiering activities of mercenaries went on to transform the nature of political order in the twentieth-century space of the Indian Ocean. They shaped the nature of international law, carried state order beyond borders, stabilized unpopular regimes, and provided ready sources of labor. Through the example of Baloch Portfolio-Mercenaries, the dissertation thus highlights the thick and enduring relationships between state and transnational networks.
Item Open Access Contemporary Turkish Youth as Subjects of State, Family, & Self: The Particular Case of University Students in Istanbul(2010-05-05T15:15:33Z) Tsegaye, SalemThis thesis identifies the various processes of identity formation among contemporary Turkish youth, specifically urban university students. Turkish youth are situated at a crossroads between tradition and modernity—they strive to maintain Turkish tradition while working towards achieving full modernity. These youth, however, understand the paradox behind this challenge. If Turkey wants to achieve European modernity, it must first address issues of the past. This poses a problem because so much of Turkish culture is rooted in nationalism, the antithesis of global citizenship. Much of Turkey’s strength falls on this nationalism supported through a defensive military and decades-old ideology. Youth understand to raise Turkey to the status of a competitive global player, the nation as a whole must come to a consensus on what it means to be Turkish. This means reconfiguring the “collective identity” so it is representative of Turkey’s ethnic diversity. This reconfiguration would also necessitate a rewriting of Turkish history to include those who were marginalized from the very beginning. Turkey’s tradition/modernity dichotomy is most visible through youth’s development of selves. Rather than give the illusion that these youth have whole identities, their anxieties in everyday life serve as visible representation of the discontinuity between their multiple senses of self. Using Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I demonstrate how youth are subject to three sources contributing to their identity formation. I argue contemporary Turkish youth are subject to state, family, and global culture—three points of reference governing their everyday lives. The practices involving these three aspects of governmentality are: faithfully serving the interests of the state, fulfilling family obligations, and mirroring global culture in hopes of developing a more autonomous self and ultimately, contributing to a more developed, modernized Turkey.Item Open Access Cosmetic Citizenship: Beauty, Affect and Inequality in Southeastern Brazil(2010) Jarrin, AlvaroThis dissertation examines how perceptions of beauty in Brazil reflect both the existing social inequalities and the struggles to produce a more egalitarian society. While hegemonic discourses about beauty in Brazil foster an upper-middle class, white standard, the working-class make claims to citizenship by redefining beauty according to their own affective, sensory experiences. As I see it, the affective relationship that plastic surgery patients have towards their own bodies is central to understanding why beauty is a source of social recognition in Brazil. In this dissertation, I argue that even though discourse attempts to discipline the body to perceive only the "truths" it produces, subjects reinhabit discourses through their immediate sensory experiences, opening up the political space to generate social change.
In order to access this form of "cosmetic citizenship," however, working-class patients undergo low-cost aesthetic surgeries in public hospitals, which are subsidized by the State and help build the national reputation of plastic surgeons. I argue that this national investment in beauty establishes personal appearance as a precondition for citizenship and inclusion in the nation. While media narratives construct beauty as a vehicle for upward mobility in Brazil, the medical discourse about beauty imagines the Brazilian population as becoming progressively homogeneous through "miscegenation" and surgery. These discourses depend on the raciology established by Neo-Lamarckian eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later popularized by the work of Gilberto Freyre.
Item Open Access Crafting an Egyptian Evangelicalism: Revolution, Revival, and Reform(2020) Dowell, Anna JeannineThis dissertation research explores the practices and aspirations to national belonging among Evangelical Egyptians, converts to a distinctively Euro-American form of Protestant Christianity through the proselytizing efforts of European and American missionaries between the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although Evangelical Egyptians have historically been known as politically quietist, in the wake of the January 25 Revolution, leading Evangelicals began to adjust their practices of public engagement with the revolution, civil society, and political activism. Through participant observation, in-depth person centered interviews, and archival research, this dissertation argues that far from severing Evangelical Egyptian imaginations, desires for, and practices of national belonging, conversion from the historic Coptic Orthodox church and to a more internationally connected form of Christian community, in fact provides Evangelicals with some of their most potent tools for articulating their historical and contemporary place in the nation-state of Egypt. This dissertation aims to bring timely and productive debates on the anthropology of religion to bear on the shape of global evangelicalism in the global south as a key shape of politics and sociality. Indeed, this dissertation argues that it is precisely the ‘will to the global’ as the future imagined community of ‘God’s kingdom’ that paradoxically roots Evangelical Egyptians in a robust nationalistic articulation of their faith.
Item Open Access Critiquing Operation Streamline’s Role in the Mass Criminalization of Immigration(2019-04-29) Oballe Vasconcellos, JairStarting in the late 1990’s, U.S. immigration policy began categorizing and punishing illegal immigration as a criminal act, penalizing what had solely been a civil offense through the criminal justice system. This shift coincided with the implementation of various systems in the early 2000’s to address rising rates of apprehension and detention at the border. This thesis explores the impact of one of these systems, a judicial procedure in border states known as Operation Streamline. It explores the role of defense lawyers whose clients are parts of mass change of plea and sentencing procedures of up to 70 individuals in one court hearing. Drawing upon recent literature on Streamline, as well as interviews with lawyers familiar with and working in Streamline cases at the border, this thesis illuminates the numerous constraints placed upon lawyers and their clients from a compressed timeline between apprehension and sentencing. This includes the length of time a client must wait in jail for a bench trial, an inability to pay bail, and the irrelevance of an asylum claim within criminal justice procedure. Through this, I place Streamline within a larger narrative in understanding how the act of migration has been criminalized and subsequently punished through our immigration and criminal justice system and how this shift affects lawyers and undocumented immigrants.