dissertations – anthropologyworks

See also the best cultural anthropology dissertations of 2011, 2010, and 2009.

Again, this year, I did a key term search in Dissertation Abstracts International to find dissertations completed in 2012 that address topics related to the anthropologyworks mission and heart.

I searched for anthropology dissertations related to human rights, justice, migration, gender, health, violence, conflict, environment, and energy. As someone commented last year, this post could be called “Best cultural anthropology dissertation abstracts” since I do not read every dissertation listed. It’s true — I choose my favorites on the basis of their abstracts, assuming that an abstract does have something to do with the body of the dissertation.

So, here are my 64 picks for 2012: cultural anthropology dissertations, mainly in the U.S., that address issues that I think are really important. I am sorry that I cannot provide a more global list, since so many excellent and important dissertations are written outside the U.S./Canada. Maybe others will address this gap?

All the best to my readers, and Happy New Year 2013!

Living in Limbo with Hope: The Case of Sudanese refugees in Cairo, by Gamal Adam. York University. Advisor Daniel A. Yon. This dissertation, about Sudanese refugees in Cairo, highlights the resilience and hope that distinguish refugees’ lives. The research has resulted in three key findings. First, the refugees have adopted a resource pooling strategy, which includes living in larger households, exempting the newcomers from rent and purchase of food for some time, and ensuring that the individuals who have more resources contribute more. Second, the traditional gender roles have changed and in some cases reversed, many spouses have separated, and children have lost the rights of play and education. Third, refugees are hopeful in celebrating events and setting plans for a better future despite the turbulent experiences they have gone through; most of them are resilient people who encourage each other and are rejuvenated by speeches delivered during various events which they celebrate.
Documenting and Contextualizing Pjiekakjoo (Tlahuica) Knowledges through a Collaborative Research Project, by Elda Miriam Aldasoro Maya. University of Washington. Advisors: Eugene Hunn and Stevan Harrell. People in Pjiekakjoo (Tlahuica), Mexico, have managed to adapt to the globalized world. They have developed a deep knowledge-practice-belief system, Contemporary Indigenous Knowledges (CIK), that is part of the biocultural diversity of the region in which they live. I describe the economic, social and political context of the Pjiekakjoo, to contextualize the Pjiekakjoo CIK, including information on their land tenure struggles, their fight against illegal logging and policies governing the Zempoala Lagoons National Park that is part of their territory. The collaborative research is influenced by the ideas of Paolo Freire and, as a translational work, it draws on the New Rationality proposed by Boaventura De Sousa Santos that appeals for cognitive justice.
Career Women in Contemporary Japan: Pursuing Identities, Fashioning Lives, by Anne Stefanie Aronsson. Yale University. Advisor William Wright Kelly. This dissertation explores what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in today’s neoliberal economy and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. I ask why and how it is that one-fourth of women stay on a career track, often against considerable odds, while the other three-fourths drop out of the workforce. I draw from interviews gathered during fieldwork in Tokyo between 2007 and 2010 with 120 professional women ranging in age from early twenties to mid-nineties. I organize these interviews along two main axes: the generation when each woman entered the workforce, and the work sector she entered. I look at five work sectors – finance, industry, entrepreneurship, government, and academia – that attract women because of the new career prospects that emerge as the sectors’ institutional policies change.
“If ih noh beat mi, ih noh lov mi” [If he doesn’t beat me, he doesn’t love me]: An ethnographic investigation of intimate partner violence in western Belize, by Melissa A. Beske. Tulane University, advisor Shansan Du. I examine the cultural underpinnings which normalize gender-based intimate partner violence (IPV) in western Belize and efforts of local activists to diminish the problem. I use multiple methods to investigate why women in heterosexual dyads have come to begrudgingly accept or even justify abuse by their male partners with discourses that conflate “love” and “violence.” Joining forces with former NGO colleagues, I initiated a sustainable survivor assistance program. Continuing to incorporate new members since my time in the field, the group now offers occupational and educational assistance to survivors leaving abusive relationships, and the shelter has expanded as well and thus remains a vital resource for women across Belize and surrounding countries.
Infected Kin: AIDS, Orphan Care and the Family in Lesotho, by Mary Ellen Block. University of Michigan, Advisor: Elisha Renne. This interdisciplinary dissertation in anthropology and social work examines the intersections of HIV/AIDS and kinship and its impact on orphan care and the family in rural Lesotho. It is based on fieldwork in the rural district of Mokhotlong, Lesotho. I find that HIV is a fundamentally a kinship disease and therefore: interventions for AIDS orphans need to include caregiver support; the household should be considered as a salient unit of analysis, evaluation and intervention; and biomedical or biocultural interventions for HIV/AIDS that need to incorporate the underlying theoretical framework of HIV as a kinship disease in order to be effective.

Continue reading “The 64 best cultural anthropology dissertations, 2012” →

Doctoral dissertations are an excellent indicator of the health of a discipline. They are a weather vane pointing toward where the discipline is heading. They represent a huge chunk of work by the researcher and his/her mentors as well as generous contributions from people in the field site(s). With luck, they are a crucial basis for a newly minted PhD to getting a job to which all the years of training and research will contribute. Dissertations are very important documents, and they deserve more visibility.

Last year, to mark the end of 2009, I created an annotated list of my favorite 25 North American cultural anthropology dissertations. It was based on a rapid scan of an electronic database of dissertations available through my university’s library. The list contained rich examples of what 2009 had produced, but it excluded many more excellent dissertations on important topics that (a) I didn’t include in the interest of keeping the list reasonably short and (b) that my search simply missed. I well know about (b) because I did a re-search, out of interest, a few days ago and was stunned to see so many exciting studies pop up that I hadn’t known about last year.

In any case, we must move on to 2010. This year, I did a similar search using terms such as health, inequality, gender, violence, environment, family, and population.

Instead of a list of 25, I have included 40 dissertations. In spite this substantial increase, I am nonetheless certain that the list omits many important theses. The list, thus, is just a tantalizing sample of a much wider universe of exciting work completed in 2010. Furthermore, by including only North American theses, the list excludes many dissertations submitted in the rest of the world. One can only imagine the entire spectrum of riches untapped.

On a brighter note: as the 40 dissertations demonstrate, cultural anthropologists are producing in-depth knowledge about important global issues.

My apologies to the authors for reducing their abstracts to around 100 words each and for the deep editorial cuts involved. Please forgive me for any misrepresentations this degree of editing can create.

The 2010 list is presented here in alphabetical order, by last name of the author:

Elite Landowners in Santarem: Ranchers, Gauchos and the Arrival of Soybeans in the Amazon, by Ryan T. Adams. Indiana University. Advisor: Richard Wilk.
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of large-scale landowners in Santarém, Pará State, Brazil. I investigated immigrant large-scale farmers who were using industrial farming techniques, as well as the established local elite who were mainly engaged in large-scale ranching and business. The research asks whether or not the two groups of large-scale landowners would form a single landed elite class, as implied by a class analysis based in political economy. This research has implications for understanding of agricultural expansion in the Amazon.
Belonging to the (S)Oil: Multinational Oil Corporations, NGOs and Community Conflict in Postcolonial Nigeria, by Omolade Adunbi. Yale University. Advisor: Kamari Clarke.
This dissertation examines what oil and land represent in the Niger Delta. I investigate how contestations over oil and land resources are redefining and reproducing new forms of power, governance, and belonging. I examine how the physical presence of oil drilling platforms, flow stations, and pipelines represent a promise of widespread wealth, while the realities of resource control and legal institutions of the state have excluded local people from the benefits of oil modernity. This ethnography maps how these exclusions create conditions of possibilities for the establishment of competing governmentalities through the mobilization of political organizing against the state and multinational corporate control of land and oil in the Niger Delta.
Stepping Outside the Ring: An Ethnography of Intimate Associations in Japanese Professional Sumo, by Nanao Akanuma. University of California, Irvine. Advisor: Mei Zhan.
This dissertation is about the embodied professional lifecycles of sumo professionals, or rikishi in Japanese. I examine the ways in which they enter, train, socialize into, and retire from Japanese professional sumo. My ethnographic fieldwork reveals that sumo is neither a sport nor a tradition. Rather, it is the world of relations and different characters: sumo stars, unsuccessful lower-ranked sumo professionals, entrepreneurial-minded sumo masters, wives and daughters of the sumo heya (dormitory-cum-training facility of sumo apprenticeship), media reporters, fans, and spectators. I explore the lifecycles of sumo and how each stage of the professional lifecycle opens up a stage for particular sets of relations for them.

Continue reading “Top 40 North American dissertations in cultural anthropology 2010: AnthroWorks picks” →