In this thesis, I explore the formation of digital tipping culture in American counter service establishments through an ethnographic study conducted in Princeton, New Jersey. I begin by situating tipping within its broader historical, legal, and economic contexts, tracing how it evolved into a normalized component of the American service economy. Using participant observation, interviews, and classical theoretical frameworks, I examine how digital point-of-sale systems have reconfigured tipping as an economic ritualized interaction shaped by cultural pathways, reciprocity, morality, and social relations. I argue that while tipping appears as a voluntary expression of gratitude, it is structurally embedded in labor relations and shaped by power asymmetries across customers, tipped employees, and managers. By foregrounding the screen as both prompt and agent, I trace how digital infrastructure reshapes the emotional, economic, and symbolic dimensions of tipping. My analysis centers not on the “correct” way to tip, but outlines digital counter service tipping as a culture in formation, where social and moral negotiations occur within everyday transactions – those brief yet loaded moments where people must decide whether and how to tip.

This thesis explores how people perform their religious identities, commitments, and ambivalences, taking special interest in the negotiations of queerness and religious belonging and of dance and spiritual practice. I use three methods to consider three sites: 1) rhetorical analysis of digital resources for queer Muslim youth; 2) ethnography of Princeton’s student Christian dance company; 3) autoethnography of my (queer? Muslim?) improvisational dance practice. The first chapter examines how online brochures employ the analytics of social constructivism to argue that queerphobia is man-made whereas queerness is Islamic, overwriting the discursive incompatibility of queerness and Muslimhood with a divine compatibility. The second chapter demonstrates how religious performance is imbricated in and made possible through ‘secular’ social conventions, particularly by exploring how questions of skill surface in an inclusive Christian dance environment. The third chapter looks to my own dance practice to ask how the theories of queer performativity might bear on the practices that constitute religion: if queerness is improvised and enacted through doing and dancing, can the same be said for my queer Muslimhood? Altogether, this thesis proposes and takes a performative approach to study how people ‘do’ their religions and strive to belong.

This thesis is based on six weeks of ethnographic research conducted with an NGO in Tamil Nadu, India during the summer of 2024. During my fieldwork, I conducted semi-structured interviews with beneficiaries and participant-observation with NGO staffers to learn more about how the NGO was facilitating health access. Drawing from this material, I question why welfare services are still not reaching marginalized communities despite the abundance of welfare schemes in Tamil Nadu. I point to narratives of deservingness stemming from dominant political imaginaries that construct beneficiaries as lazy and stigmatize welfare. I highlight how these narratives, the hidden costs of accessing welfare, and historical dehumanization serve as barriers to availing of free schemes. I then examine waiting as an obstacle to care. Finally, I look at the role of care and affective labor within the NGO in facilitating access by addressing feelings of misrecognition and maintaining initiatives in the face of scarcity.

This thesis examines the Northwest Michigan cherry community enduring the multifaceted crises of this decade. By working on a farm and engaging with a diverse range of growers, their attitudes and histories, I have uncovered the tensions surrounding familial, systemic, and emotional dimensions that afflict this region’s culture. Cherries represent Leelanau County’s identity emblem, centered around their primary commodity. I intend to explore how primarily fourth and fifth-generation farmers perceive and respond to the shifting climate, the urgent economic challenges stemming from globalized imports and declining cherry demand, labor shortages, and uncertain succession, as well as their views on the future through concepts of failure, legacy, and purpose. I utilize assemblage to capture the dynamic array of influences, employing theoretical frameworks such as runaway change, commodity fetishism, alienation, vocational “calling,” and habitus to understand the complexities among these various factors.

This thesis seeks to consider how Mexican migrants work to sustain and build relationships with loved ones “back home,” amidst trying to find social and economic footing in the United States. I analyze my father, José’s, first and second migrations to the United States in the context of 21st century United States surveillance-oriented, restrictive immigration policy and as an experience of uncertainty (Chapter 2). Looking at letter and telephone call communication, I consider what each technology affords and the moments of relational strain and not that are produced (Chapter 3). I examine how remittances are used for home construction “back home” and signal, public-facingly, the position and health of a migrant’s relationships to community and non-migrant families. I contextualize how these cross-border exchanges form, and work to create an aesthetic of migration by focusing on my father’s architectural plans for his family home in Mexico (Chapter 4). My thesis does not intend to romanticize such aesthetics. Rather, I hope to engage with them critically and consider how they might help us determine the future modes of our cross-border relationality.

In this thesis, I examine how Bitcoin’s value is interpreted, experienced, and reimagined by three key stakeholder groups – Miners, Institutional Investors, and Retail Participants – by tracing its origins through the sociocultural forces that shaped its emergence. I draw upon conversational interviews and a close analysis of both primary and secondary sources of money and value to demonstrate that Bitcoin is not a conventional form of money, but rather an extension of long-standing symbolic systems of credit and debt. Assessing Bitcoin within the crux of anthropology, finance, and the social sciences enables me to argue that Bitcoin’s value is practically indeterminate – its value is contingent upon the imagination and implementation of each user. Ultimately, I conclude that Bitcoin diverges from traditional monetary functions; each user engages with it through a unique lived experience, belief system, and perception of risk.

This thesis places the fashion industry under the microscope, illustrating its role in the construction, restriction, and commodification of Black identity. More broadly, I investigate the entertainment industry's reliance on distorted depictions of Black masculinity. In investigating the modeling industry as a space of aesthetic creation, I uncover a site of racialized meaning-making that upholds Eurocentric ideals. Through my ethnographic fieldwork, I center the lived experience of Black male models, revealing structural inequalities that challenge narratives of progress and inclusion. Ultimately, I question who gets to be represented, how, and by whom, calling us to reimagine modes of representation outside of the limitations of controlled-inclusion.

This thesis examines Hudson Headwaters through an anthropological lens of medical trust due to its unique history, infrastructure, and ways of providing care compared to other U.S. community health centers. Because community health centers serve a significant number of the U.S. population (more than 31 million patients in 2023), my research explores the evolving nature of healthcare over the past fifty years using Hudson Headwaters as a case study (Pillai, Corallo, and Tolbert 2025). Due to Hudson Headwaters’ well-documented series of growth in their historical archives, I was able to detail the provision of women’s healthcare and how methods of care have changed over time from its humble beginnings providing only prenatal services to its current status as the only women’s health provider in the Glens Falls, New York area. Drawing on the oral history of Hudson Headwaters’ creation through qualitative interviews with Hudson Headwaters’ providers and staff, I aim to introduce new interpretations of the barriers that come with living in upstate New York, allowing a more multidimensional understanding of rural women’s experiences that otherwise are rendered invisible. This dissertation emphasizes the simple yet core values of successful caregiving: mutual trust, patient agency, and identifying and responding to a community and an individual’s needs.

This ethnographic project explores how Latina family caregivers contend with and redefine sociocultural expectations to find purpose and meaning in their role. With over 11 million family caregivers supporting individuals with Alzheimer’s disease in the United States, the majority of whom are women and disproportionately women of color, understanding caregivers’ lived experiences to provide adequate and accurate support is important now more than ever. Existing literature on this topic often frames this labor as burdensome and coercive, emphasizing the ways in which cultural values, gender norms, and caregiver burnout negatively impact the caregiver’s wellbeing. While these frameworks are critical, they overlook how caregivers themselves make sense of their role. Through the stories of Gloria and Catalina, I aim to demonstrate that while stepping into the role of a family caregiver can be challenging and emotionally demanding, these same sociocultural forces were often cited as sources of strength, purpose, and pride. In doing so, this project argues that while caregiving may be shaped by sociocultural forces and accompanied by moments of burnout, it is also often internally experienced as a calling that, through religious grounding, provides caregivers with a profound sense of purpose.

As refugee and migrant populations find themselves changing environments for the sake of their own health and that of their families, there comes a redidniton od what it means to be well and to be healthy. Through conversations with those who have migrated and now work in health and community service, assisting these communities of need, the concepts of prioritization, survival, and a “basic need” are brought into question as different aspects of wellness intertwine.

This thesis examines how climbers learn to become climbers; it argues that climbing is a moral project by tracing the historical, embodied, and emotional dimensions of climbing practices and identity formation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Princeton University Climbing Team, I investigate how climbers articulate what it means to be a “good” climber, and by extension, a certain kind of moral self. The first chapter traces the historical development of climbing ethics, highlighting how debates over risk and respectability shaped modern climbing practices. The second chapter analyzes the formation of a climbing habitus by paying attention to climbing’s phenomenological, aesthetic, and normative aspects. This thesis’ final chapter discusses fear as socially mediated and morally significant, and maintains that climbers learn to manage it in ways that affirm their control and legitimacy. More broadly, this thesis situates morality as a practical, enacted project that arises from discourse and embodied practice. As climbing grows in reach and popularity, it is important to examine the motivations and origins of climbing ethics, and how they shape climbers’ senses of self.

This thesis synthesizes existing scholarship with the perspectives of young, socialist-identifying New Yorkers to elucidate the mechanisms and limitations of American socialism under contemporary capitalism. I find my entry in the study of narratives, both unconscious and agentively told. I argue that socialism is polysemic and adopted as a positionality when it offers a narrative that maintains individual imaginaries as cohesive with personally observed contradictions within synecdoches of capitalism. “Capitalism,” in its totality, is only available for representation, and thus criticism, in its microcosms and mechanisms; not all structural appendages are equally opposable, and not all opposition is politicized. I elaborate on two mechanisms of contemporary leftist practice, consumption discretion and digital activism, which reaffirm the desirability of ideology and are qualified by more than just their potential political efficacy. I analyze two aspects of contemporary capitalism – digital capitalism and financialized private equity real estate – and focus on the ways those structures are affectively experienced in order to conceptualize political agency in the contemporary condition. Contemporary American socialism, with all its contradictions and limitations, fosters competing imaginaries of a better world; for my interlocutors, even limited imaginations are more habitable than resignation to the status quo.

This paper intends to provide a qualitative description of an experimental alternative education program for formerly incarcerated adolescents. In doing so, it intends to construe this school as a site of liberation - in opposition to its former iteration as a correctional institution. It examines the school’s architecture, pedagogical practices, and practices around care to reveal that this institution has been reconfigured to empower students in any number of ways - from meeting their material needs to providing the conditions for immense intellectual enrichment. This ethnographic exploration may be used as a manual for replication or as fodder for thought on what education can do and mean.

This thesis investigates the dual realities of Black student-athletes at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), revealing how their experiences are shaped by racial stereotypes, social exclusion, and systemic commodification. Through a combination of historical analysis, scholarly literature, and over a dozen interviews from Black student-athletes themselves, this study uncovers the structural dynamics that influence how Black student-athletes are perceived, supported, and utilized by their institutions. At PWIs, athletes often face spaces, highlighting a pattern of conditional inclusion rooted in racial assumptions. In contrast HBCUs offer cultural affirmation and a greater sense of community however, they are often hindered by chronic underfunding and limited resources which inevitably affects the quality of athletic and academic support.

Drawing on the works of scholars such as Billy Hawkins, Pierre Bourdieu, Elijah Anderson, Shaun Harper, and others, this thesis frames college athletics as a modern continuation of historical systems of labor extraction, where Black bodies are commodified for institutional gain. Key concepts like social capital, the “cosmopolitan canopy,” and habitus help explain how exclusion and exploitation are embedded in the fabric of higher education. Through interviews with student-athletes from both institutional types, the research offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day realities, emotional tolls, and strategies of resistance that define their collegiate journeys. The thesis concludes by calling for structural reforms that move beyond symbolic gestures and instead center the holistic development, academic achievement, and personal agency of Black student-athletes. In doing so, it reimagines college athletics not only as a site of competition but as a potential platform for equity and transformative change.

Okinawa was famous for being a “Blue Zone,” a locale with a healthy lifestyle and high concentrations of centenarians. However, those born in generations after WWII do not demonstrate a longevity advantage over Japanese people from the mainland as those in previous generations do. Through a combination of ethnographic, database, and media analysis, this thesis reveals underlying social mechanisms which have reinforced behavioral shifts that contribute to Okinawa's decline. A key finding is the concept of the selectively curated, cultural consumer identity which emerged during the US occupation. In the case of Okinawa, the unified Ryukyuan identity which dominates the Okinawan consciousness is actually curated from traditions which have been selectively emphasized through commercial mechanisms. How does the commercial intersection of cultural branding and traditional identities inform the lives of a population?

This thesis aims to explore the relationship between extreme heat and cold events and mortality rates to better understand public health vulnerabilities in the context of climate change and the rising of global average temperatures. Using a combination of data modeling and analysis with ethnographic research in the form of interviews, this study investigates both quantitative patterns and qualitative experiences related to temperature extremes. Using the programming language Python to plot excess mortality during heatwaves and cold spells in continental Europe, it was observed that more people died during a recent cold event than a recent heat event. However, this finding seems to contradict the current climate narrative, which often portrays heat as the more immediate and impactful weather-related health risk. This discrepancy ultimately served as the motivation for this research, inspiring the investigation into medical professionals’ perspectives and experiences with heat and cold extremes and their associated health impacts. Interviews with healthcare providers revealed that both heat and cold are dangerous in the appropriate contexts, with factors like local climate, population vulnerability, and infrastructure influencing how the temperature extremes manifest in terms of health risks. This research emphasizes the need for a more comprehensive approach to public health– one that addresses both heat and cold vulnerabilities, and which adapts to the evolving challenges of a changing climate.

This thesis examines how Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) reforms have restructured the landscape of collegiate sports by blurring the boundary between amateur and professional sports structures. Through a historical analysis, my own argument and analysis, and ethnographic interviews with current and former Division I athletes this thesis investigates how athletes navigate the institutional structures that have been shaped by commercialization, visibility, and labor dynamics. This study reveals how NIL has promoted athlete advocacy and empowerment while also complicating the role of amateurism and the erosion of the NCAA’s control over collegiate athletics. Within this argument, I explain how NIL has generated both benefits and unintended consequences to its amateurism model and question the role of the NCAA’s authority in the future.

Keywords: Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL), NCAA, Amateurism, Commercialization, Professionalization, Agency

Ecotherapy is a form of complementary and alternative medicine that seeks to address multiple dimensions of wellbeing via nature-based interventions. Despite a growing recognition that wellbeing is more than just physical health (Witeska-Mlynarczyk 2015), holistic health practices like ecotherapy remain widely under-researched and under-utilized. This project draws upon ethnographic research with two ecotherapy organizations– one in the United States (Bloom) and one in Japan (Shinanomachi Healing Forest)– to examine how these challenges manifest in practice. The purpose of my research is twofold: 1) to provide a framework of ecotherapy that moves beyond strictly scientific understandings, and 2) to outline potential paths forward for ecotherapy organizations that struggle to gain widespread acceptance and use. Because ecotherapy exists outside of mainstream medicine, I argue that ecotherapy organizations must strategically leverage relationships across multiple levels in order to succeed. These partnerships are rarely simple; they require constant negotiation, creative compromise, and a deep understanding of how to work within–and sometimes around– unwelcoming systems.

This thesis explores the lived experiences of late-diagnosed college students with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at elite universities in South Korea and the United States. Using ethnographic case studies from Princeton University and Yonsei University, this thesis investigates how institutional policies, cultural norms, and academic structures intersect to shape neurodivergent students’ challenges and coping strategies. Through interviews, participant observation, and policy analysis, the study reveals the structural limitations and cultural stigmas that influence diagnosis, disclosure, and access to accommodations. In the U.S., legal frameworks like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) have fostered more inclusive systems, yet students still face inconsistencies in support and cultural resistance to self-advocacy. In contrast, South Korean students contend with deeply rooted stigma and rigid academic hierarchies that discourage mental health disclosure and accommodation use. By centering student narratives, this thesis calls for culturally responsive and structurally integrated support systems, emphasizing early diagnosis, educator training, and institutional reforms that honor neurodiversity across global academic settings.