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The Anatomy of Ephemeral Care: Health, Hunger, and Short-Term Humanitarian Intervention in Northwest Nepal
(2013-04-17)
Drawing upon two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2006 through 2010, this dissertation explores the experiences, traces and (after)lives of three prominent models of short-term care--medical volunteer stints, what I call "medical voluntourism"; "health camps"; and intermittent food aid distribution ...
Living our Values, Living our Hope: Building Sustainable Lifestyles in Seattle Intentional Communities
(2013-02-25)
Sustainable consumption and the sustainable use of resources is a growing concern as negative environmental impacts such as carbon emissions, overuse of natural resources, and degradation of non-renewable resource stocks continue to rise. Disproportionate consumption by Northern countries and particularly the United States ...
Creating and Transcending Territorial Boundaries in Late Holocene Pacific Coast Communities
(2013-02-25)
In this research, I investigate precontact territorial behavior in the San Juan Islands, Washington and San Nicolas Island, California. Drawing on economic defensibility models, I generate hypotheses for change over time in boundary defense and permeability in the context of Late Holocene climate and settlement pattern change. ...
Stratified Foreign Bodies and Geopolitics of Desire: Gender, Class and Race in the Transnational Marriage Market in Taiwan
(2013-02-25)
This dissertation investigates the market formation of transnational brokered marriages between Taiwanese men and foreign women mainly from China, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. It looks at what kind of desire and needs in the rapidly global circulation of capital and labor is created to trigger the formation of the ...
Collective Action, Reputation, and Social Support Networks in the Andes of Southern Peru
(2013-11-14)
This research approaches two interrelated aspects of life in an Andean community. First, I explore the management of communally owned herds, gardens and other common pool resources. Specifically, I address how successful collective action (CA) can be maintained in a social environment in which there are enticements to free ...
Population Structure and Large-Scale Cooperation in Pohang, South Korea
(2013-11-14)
Large-scale cooperation is one of the fundamental questions in the social sciences. In order to explain cooperation beyond household members and explain the creation of public goods, the peculiarities unique to human culture must be explored. Humans uphold cultural norms and have developed sanctions for those who do not follow ...
Social Support Networks and Self-Efficacy of Peruvian Women Diagnosed with Cancer: A Biocultural Analysis of Health Behavior Constructs
Objectives The primary goal of this dissertation research study was to contextualize health behavior psychological constructs such as self-efficacy and fatalism among cancer patients in Peru, identifying individual, social, cultural and structural factors that are associated with these constructs. The secondary goal was to ...
The Impact of Global English in Xinjiang, China: Linguistic Capital and Identity Negotiation among the Ethnic Minority and Han Chinese Students
My dissertation is an ethnographic study of the language politics and practices of college-age English language learners in Xinjiang at the historical juncture of China’s capitalist development. In Xinjiang the international lingua franca English, the national official language Mandarin Chinese, and major Turkic languages ...
Creating an Empire: Local Political Change at Angamuco, Michoacan, Mexico
Regime change is a critical social process that has occurred throughout human history and yet much is still unknown about how political developments shape local communities. This dissertation examines the impacts of the Late Postclassic (1350-1530 CE) Purepecha Empire on residents at Angamuco, an ancient city within the Lake ...
Understanding changes in mobility & subsistence from terminal Pleistocene to Late Holocene in the highlands of New Guinea through intensity of lithic reduction, changing site types, and paleoclimate
Why did people in the highlands of New Guinea move from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and subsistence pattern, and develop a subsistence pattern centered on root and tree crop agriculture? How did the ancient residents of the highlands actually move around the landscape in the late Pleistocene, and how did that change though ...