This study in media anthropology uses participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, and recorded broadcasts to analyze how people use FM radio technology in the Koutiala area of southeast Mali, and particularly how they use FM radio to produce locality by relating audience members to one another, to the dominant national culture,...
This dissertation examines the role of market makers in making markets for options and futures on Chicago's derivatives exchanges. Recent institutional and technological changes in the ways that financial products are traded have given rise to the possibility of markets without market makers, raising the question of how these developments...
How do you map a rebellion, especially when its participants do not want to be seen? Between British colonization in the 18th century and emancipation in 1834, Dominica presented a number of slave and Maroon rebellions. This mapping project considered the First Maroon War (1785-86), the New Year’s Day Revolt...
Migrant illegality gives way to irregular livelihoods in Spain and around the world. Studies on migrant illegality have generally focused on its political, legal and economic production and the social impact of a states specific biopolitics. While invaluably important, there remains the need to better understand the modes of life...
The dissertation illuminates the centrality of communication to the way environmental policies and practices arise and unfold, and it shows how the living materiality of ecological phenomena are entangled with the social dynamics of communication. The work innovatively bridges insights from the field of political ecology with theory and method...
Raising California Together, an ethnography of licensed family childcare homes, contributes significant theoretical and empirical knowledge to our understanding of workfare, immigration and education institutions that shape the lives of the youngest subject-citizens and of those who care for them. I draw from more than three years of participant observation...
This dissertation explores how the environment shapes energy expenditure and cardio-metabolic disease risk by investigating multiple timescales of adaptation to cold stress among the Yakut, an indigenous circumpolar population. This study pursues three main objectives. First, the adaptive and health significance of brown adipose tissue (BAT) is explored by examining...
This dissertation examines how preparing settlements for war (i.e. fortification) relates to the maintenance of power relations. Violence has psychological and physical effects that can lead to asymmetries of power and extreme forms of social inequality (Brumfiel 1998; Carneiro 1970; Earle 1997; Fanon 1968; Farmer 2005; Flannery and Marcus 2012;...
This dissertation examines how producers in the capital city of Burkina Faso manage to generate gains in producing utilitarian goods from scrap materials. Aluminum-smelting, tinsmithing, and tire-workings are three modern trades that have developed with the rising import of scrap supplies and consumer goods from Europe, the Middle East, and...
This dissertation reviews the contexts and conditions for the appearance of monuments in the upper and middle St. Johns basins of peninsular during the Mt. Taylor period. Beginning with an attempt to determine if mortuary monuments built of shell could be distinguished from shell middens, the archaeology of four preceramic...