http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1690 Sun, 26 May 2013 08:26:33 GMT 2013-05-26T08:26:33Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6461 Title: Life worth living: learning about love, life and future with Colombo University students. Authors: Sirisena, Rasika Mihirini Abstract: This thesis focuses on the course through which romantic relationships gain meaning in the lives of students at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Drawing from research conducted with some students from the university in 2007/08, the thesis illustrates the process of investing in relationships, arguing that romantic relationships feature significantly in their imagination of 'a life that is worthy of living.' The story that is related in this thesis demonstrates that, in the lives of the research participants, romantic relationships provide a cocoon for self-development. Arising out of a need that they described as youthful, the research participants pointed out that romantic relationships are all but a passing phase. While providing a space in which one could fulfil their youthful desires, romantic relationships became a part of the larger plan of life by paving the way for the birth of 'real' love. Being a king of love that lasts, real love provides a formidable base for marital bonds. The stories the search participants told of their love lives suggested that 'real loves' are born when one invests oneself in it, pouring in time, effort, trust and commitment. It is the investment of trust and commitment that makes these bonds last, thus making it a kind of a bond on which a successful marriage could be founded. Investing in building trust and commitment is likened to investing oneself in the relationship, because in doing so, the research participants pointed out that they emerge as men and women of particular natures. The investment of oneself in the relationship is a process that revolves around giving and taking. Drawing out three aspects through which the research participants embedded themselves in romantic relationships, the thesis highlights the relational aspect of self, pointing out that one's life's worthiness could be tied to the people who are around them. Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6461 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6424 Title: Making the srok: resettling a mined landscape in northwest Cambodia Authors: Arensen, Lisa Joy Abstract: This thesis is an ethnographic study of place-making in a war-altered landscape. It describes over a decade of resettlement efforts in a village in northwest Cambodia. As war drew to a close in the late 1990s, land on the former frontlines was allotted to those willing to risk occupancy on possibly mined terrain. Area resettlement was driven by need, forged by hope, and fraught with physical risk and material dangers. Food security and the prospect of acquiring land rights required settlers’ physical presence in and active engagement with the materialities of a forested landscape strewn with the remnants of war and the ruins of earlier settlements. Residents' conceptual and corporeal engagements with place were influenced by longstanding Khmer depictions of the srok, the ordered and cultivated landscape of agriculture and human dwelling, and the prai, the wild and fecund landscape of the forest, replete with powerful but often malevolent spirits. The srok was the landscape that the inhabitants of Handsome village longed to dwell within and struggled to create. The area’s pre-war reputation as a famously fertile agricultural zone had drawn many of its residents to risk the hazards of resettlement. The dream of the srok drove residents' actions in the actively dangerous, ever fluctuating terrain. In addition to being envisioned, the place was intimately known and directly experienced through the corporeal bodies of its inhabitants and their engagements with its material assemblages. Making the srok involved arduous physical effort in a constantly shifting material environment along with concentrated social and conceptual work. Resettlement did not merely entail hewing fields out of forests and removing mines and ordnance, but also encompassed attempts to transition into peacetime—to move from soldiering to farming, to come to rest after years of mobility and displacement, and to recreate social and moral order. This study analyzes successes and failures in place-making processes, illustrating how different aspects of landscape posed both affordances and constraints to these processes. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which material assemblages contributed to uncertainty in place-making efforts, illustrating that the material dimensions of landscape may resist as much as they acquiesce to human alteration. On a material level, place-making was a struggle that pitted human agency and will against an active and agentive landscape. Village residents were interacting with material environs in a constant state of change and becoming. The unsettling material traces of the past and the continuing threat some remnants posed in the present contributed to the ongoing indeterminacy residents experienced about the state and contents of the once famous ground. The landscape that residents sought to form and fix was always in danger of undoing its formation and categorization and revealing itself to be something else. Yet despite their failures at establishing and fixing the srok in the constantly shifting landscape of Handsome village, residents maintained their quest to transform the present configuration of place into the landscape and the future that they desired. Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6424 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6392 Title: Protestants and prawns: enchantment and 'The Word' in a Scottish fishing village Authors: Webster, Joseph Abstract: This thesis attempts to understand what it is like to live and work as a ‘sincere’ and ‘committed’ Christian in Gamrie, a small fishing village of 700 people and six conservative Protestant churches, whose staunch religiosity is itself on the cusp of dramatic economic, social and spiritual change. More than this, it is an attempt to show how the everyday religious experiences of Christians in Gamrie are animated by – but not reducible to – their social context. It seeks to do so by considering how local folk theologies relate to larger social processes occurring within Scotland and the north Atlantic. Arguing that these realms are necessarily (and simultaneously) ideational and material, my theoretical focus is upon the relationship between belief and experience – a relationship mediated, first and foremost, in and through the significance of ‘The Word’. Where beliefs have objects and where objects ‘have’ materiality, beliefs are held to be essentially material. Equally, where material happenings in the world are framed by theological (say, eschatological) ideas, objects and events are held to be unavoidably implicated in belief. Thus, my aim is to present an analytic of the relationship between the lived local experiences of belief and objects, materiality and language. Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6392 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6384 Title: Equality works: how one race equality centre conceptualises, articulates and performs the idea of equality in Scotland Authors: Dennell, Brandi Lee Abstract: This thesis focuses on the Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland (CERES), based in Edinburgh, which was funded by the Scottish Executive and Scottish Government to develop several programmes to promote equality in education. Drawing together the disparate approaches to anthropology of organisations, the methodology has included both a focus on a small core group of workers as well as the flow of the materials produced throughout a larger network. Rather than conduct fieldwork at various locations as network or policy studies emphasise, I chose to work for two years with CERES due to their geographic and creational centrality to the ‘mainstreaming equality’ initiative. Beginning at a time when questions of identity in Scotland flourished as a result of devolution, increased immigration and the UK publication of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, the mainstreaming equality projects signify the Scottish Executive’s attempt to uphold its duty of promoting race equality. CERES managed three of the seven funded mainstreaming equality projects. The production of these resources contributes to a campaign through which the Scottish Government has worked to reformulate understandings of what it means to be Scottish. This is achieved by drawing upon the myths of a new and egalitarian Scotland in order to displace the myth that there is no racism in Scotland. Within this context, the research’s central questions revolve around this creation in the stages undertaken at CERES. Examining the Centre’s daily tasks, this research demonstrates that although commissioned to contribute to the same overall initiative, the way in which CERES depicts equality is ultimately very different than the approaches developed within the government. The materials created by CERES, which unlike One Scotland, do not include national symbols, have engaged with the complexities of equality and discrimination more than the media campaigns yet have had a smaller audience. Once the idea is developed it encounters further manipulation, both physical in the case of teaching tools and ideological in working to make the identities included reflect Scotland through statistics and discussions of subjects already embedded in the national curriculum. From the vantage point of the creation process, this ethnography contributes to the anthropology of organisations and highlights the legal and policy negotiations undertaken across various levels of governance. Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6384 2011-07-04T00:00:00Z