Anthropology

This dissertation examines the experiences of Egyptian activists in the diaspora, tracing their trajectories of exile, reinvention, and identity formation. Through ethnographic research and personal narrative, I explore how individuals navigate mobility, political displacement, and building new lives in Tunis and Washington D.C. I examine how institutions have relocated to Tunis and explore forms of institutional migration. Drawing from interviews and participant observation in Washington, D.C., Cairo and Tunis, I analyze how former activists reconstruct their lives, careers, and social circles in a new context—often seeking not just financial security but also social legitimacy and recognition. I organize my dissertation around three main themes: bread, freedom and social justice. These were the main demands of the January 25th revolution in Egypt. Exile is central to this study, both as a personal and intergenerational phenomenon. I interrogate the concept of al-manfa (exile) as a historical and affective condition, showing how political displacement is experienced across generations. I use life history interviews and archival materials to explore phenomena from the Cold War-era exiles of my grandfather and uncles in the USSR. I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork to explore the post-2011 Egyptian revolutionaries seeking asylum in the US and in Tunisia. The dissertation also examines ghurba (estrangement) as both a material and affective experience, revealing how exiles adapt to new cultural landscapes while maintaining ties to home. At its core, this project situates personal narratives within a broader political landscape, demonstrating how revolutionary ideals do not dissipate in exile but are instead reshaped and lived through new forms of activism, economic survival, and community building. By weaving together ethnographic accounts and autoethnographic reflections, this dissertation highlights the complexities of exile, belonging, and the continuous negotiation of identity in transnational spaces.

This dissertation argues that primitivism continues to haunt anthropology because of the discipline’s ambivalent relationship to a core Enlightenment tenet: myth-busting as moral act. Prevailing anthropological critiques of racialization turn on a semiotic ideology that is itself racialized, originating in European dismissals of African religious practices (fetishism). In this moral economy of proper and improper knowing, primitivists and racial fetishists are cast as modern, secular subjects who suffer and subjugate because of their mystification. As a result, primitivists continuously swap places with the “primitives” they dream up. I call this oscillation primitive dialectics.
To trace these dialectics, I explore the erotic and spiritual pursuits of self-avowed racial fetishists and primitivists. Drawing on 18 months of research in Paris and supplementary work in Martinique and Benin, I show how a sympathetic yet critical ethnography of these two groups challenges foundational theoretical assumptions of anti-racist anthropology. The first part of the dissertation (“The Sacred in the Sexual”) delves into the lives of white French people who predominantly date Black people. There I show how violent, racist fantasies allow my informants to navigate questions of displaced religious significance under secular, liberal conditions. In interpreting these attempts, I advocate for a historically attuned, anti-racist form of psychoanalytic myth-making. The second part of the dissertation (“The Sexual in the Sacred”) investigates the racially inflected spiritual journeys of white “Primitive Expression” (PE) practitioners. PE is a dance therapy method that draws on structuralism and psychoanalysis to convert “primitive” ecstatic trance rituals into “universal,” secular ritual forms. I argue that PE’s ecstatic effects are achieved not through the successful distillation of universal ritual structures, but rather, by channeling the disavowed sacrality of race in France. Thus, while Part I shows how conceptual armatures derived from primitivism elucidate how white people reproduce anti-Blackness, Part II demonstrates how these very frameworks continue to structure anti-Black violence. Ultimately, I argue that we scholars can strengthen anti-racist critique by taking seriously people we’d prefer to distance ourselves from. Along the way, I make contributions to the anthropology of race, sexuality, France, whiteness, and modernity.

This dissertation examines the rise of seemingly progressive programs of participatory and community-centered technological innovation in Taiwan. In sectors from public health to environmental sustainability, collaborative innovation—on devices from smart watches to precision agriculture technologies—is increasingly being offered up to rectify longstanding inequalities faced by the country’s Indigenous communities. Yet these projects—not because of cunning or corruption, but simply due to their optimistic portrayal of bottom-up collaboration—can mask disagreements about what constitutes human health or environmental well-being in the first place. My dissertation—contributing to medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, critical design studies, and global Indigenous studies—examines two such cases of participation among Amis communities in eastern Taiwan. In public health, government bureaucrats are collaborating with elders to produce new Indigenous-friendly health education apps and smart health systems, in hopes of reducing a 10-year Indigenous life expectancy gap in the country; meanwhile, in agriculture, government researchers have urged Indigenous farmers to collaborate on new agricultural technologies to mitigate climate challenges and bolster crop yields. Through 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation makes two core arguments. First, far from just a tool of community engagement, participation represents a new form of global Indigenous governance that nuances the study of contemporary settler-colonialism. Participation as government policy has produced new ways of evaluating and tabulating the cooperation of Indigenous communities with state power, exceeding the condition of global Indigenous governance that scholars have called “recognition politics.” Second, “self-sufficiency” (zijizizu) is emerging as a controversial ethical value in geopolitically threatened Taiwan. While the Taiwanese government invests in collaborative technology innovation to pursue national self-sufficiency, measured through increased life expectancies and crop yields, Amis communities are advancing alternative notions of long-term, Indigenous self-sufficiency, with holistic notions of human and environmental health at their center. I interrogate how Amis Indigenous communities insist that systemic issues like economic inequalities, lack of health resources, and severed land relations well exceed the scope of inclusive design practices. Contesting design thinking, they tactically seize the resources and civic spaces introduced by policies to steward new institutions that accord with their needs.

This thesis investigates feather-inspired flaps as novel flight control effectors for tailless airborne wind energy harvesting (AWEH) kites. Accurate execution of aerodynamically complex maneuvers in AWEH systems requires developing high-fidelity aerodynamic models that precisely describe the system’s behavior under various operating conditions. Tailless kites pose significant aerodynamic control challenges due to the lack of conventional control surfaces. Inspired by bird covert feathers, this work explores the deployment of covert-inspired flaps on both the suction- and pressure-sides of a wing section to enhance aerodynamic control authority without a tail section. Wind tunnel force/torque measurements, particle image velocimetry experiments, and data-driven modeling are used to investigate the fundamental aerodynamic mechanisms of covert-inspired flaps under static and dynamic conditions. We demonstrate that simultaneously deflecting pressure- and suction-side flaps expand the achievable ranges of lift, drag, and pitching moment modulation compared to any single-sided configuration. We also uncover flow interaction mechanisms essential to expanding the flight control authority of the covert-inspired flaps. Results from the experiments and models show that the covert-inspired flaps are effective flight control devices during both static, steady-state flight conditions and dynamic pitch maneuvers. For dynamic pitch maneuvers, where the dynamic stall is dominant, results show that the placement and configuration of the covert-inspired flap can be tailored to amplify, maintain, or suppress the dynamic stall response of the wing section, making them multifunctional flight and flow control devices. Results from the wind tunnel experiments are then validated during free flight experiments on the Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA) Gen 8 AWEH kite. During flight tests, the covert-inspired flaps enabled the kite to successfully perform stability augmentation maneuvers necessary to maintain flight, as well as pumping cycle maneuvers required for energy harvesting. Finally, this thesis develops and modifies a system identification framework, previously developed for conventional aircraft, to an AWEH kite for the first time. Such a framework enables the development of accurate kite aerodynamic models and improved control laws. Thus, this thesis establishes novel bioinspired lightweight, effective, and multifunctional control effectors for tailless AWEH kites, making new pathways toward efficient high-altitude wind power generation.

Abstract: Britain Alone: Conspiracy And Disorder After Brexit Britain’s narrow decision to leave the European Union in 2016 brought shockwaves across the Western World.Many scholars attributed the decision to a still-nebulously defined manifestation of ‘populism’, a term which - despite tremendous usage - still contains a great many varied (and occasionally contradictory) definitions. Adding complexity, Brexit as a phenomenon itself remains profoundly overdetermined; shaped by many varied factors including long-term Europsceiticsm, geographical isolation from the continent, political infighting amongst Conservative elites, as well as general demographic and social shifts towards more liberal, diverse values and the subsequent backlash that confronted them. In this thesis, I examine the cultural lifeworlds of pro-Brexit interlocutors over a number of years in the UnitedKingdom. Spending two years of fieldwork interviewing, participating in political rallies, and generally seeking a more intimate understanding of the motivations, beliefs, and attachments of ‘populist’ supporters, this thesis provides a systematic account of this significant period of British politics. I seek to make sense not only of their particular beliefs in and of themselves - such as conspiracies about the COVID-19 lockdown that appear coeval with a right-wing populist worldview - but to understand them from a classically anthropological point of view. In this way, the thesis seeks ultimately to demonstrate the long-term strength of many concepts in classicalanthropology - myth, ritual, sacrifice, selfhood - which are under emphasised in the populist studies to date. Most of them largely draw on theoretical concepts developed by political scientists and sociologists which, although clearly having their place, do not necessarily cut to the heart of the cultural nature of political beliefs. Although still critical of the ethnographic perspective taken by some contemporary anthropologists, the dissertation overall seeks to solidify the importance of taking an anthropological view on the most pressing political issues of the modern Euro-American world.

Kinmen, a Taiwanese island territory merely two miles from China’s coast, was Taiwan’s battlefront against China from 1949 to the 1980s, but has since become the most-used border-crossing between these polities before the COVID-19 pandemic. Tensions have risen again since the 2010s, with Kinmen now caught between the Taiwanese who push for the global recognition of Taiwan’s statehood, and a China that forcefully insists that Taiwan belongs to itself. Through ethnographic research conducted between 2021 and 2024, this dissertation examines the ways by which Kinmen people who came of age during demilitarization in the 1980s envision, articulate, and create political futures through religious rituals and other ritualized practices when met with rising political tensions as they approach later life. I foreground older adults’ ritualized activities, grounded in everyday life, in an attempt to sidestep the ideologies that suffuse an already-volatile Taiwan Strait. I develop “projects for later life” as a concept concerned with the ways by which people cultivate and actualize visions for the future through the material and subjective spaces that ritualized practices and designs afford, and with aging experiences and mortality in view. I also use “familiar futures” to express how futures are created in ways that reflect people’s earlier lived experiences, through cultural resources that they possess. “Familiar futures” describe how “transitional” thought objects cushion against abrupt changes and facilitate the articulation of political possibilities. This dissertation zooms into how curated religious sensations interact with lived experiences to engender familiarity (Chapter 1), how ritual improvisations enable inter-generational continuity (Chapter 2), how the ritualized documentation of “vanishing” traditions through digital media create particular temporal subjectivities (Chapter 3), and the remodeling of Taiwan Strait’s political futures through museums, temple-building, pilgrimages and protests (Chapter 4). These elaborations of how my interlocutors’ “projects for later life” create “familiar futures” at Kinmen and the Taiwan Strait illustrate the usefulness of (1) placing research on aging and vernacular politics in dialogue, (2) tracing how subjectivities develop in the interstices of ritual and design, and (3) understanding how and why familiarity and transitional spaces facilitate future-making, especially amid political instability and uncertainty.

This dissertation chronicles the minor gestures, visceral and sensorial practices, and queer socio-poetics and politics of ‘anti-caste livingness’ amidst everyday regimes of structural casteism in contemporary urban northern India. Based on fine-grained ethnographic fieldwork between 2019-23 with queer Dalit/Bahujan doctors, community healthcare workers (ASHAs), Dalit-feminist poet-creatives and a collective of ‘lower-caste’ substance-users and their families across multiple sites in northern India, it offers novel theoretical and ethnographic insights into how assemblages of casteism, gender, sexuality, racialization and quotidian politics intensify and exceed the (hetero)normative modes/codes of postcoloniality, abjection and negation in South Asia, while striving to draw anthropological attention to the everyday conditions under which anti-caste consciousness (chetana) is produced through ordinary experiences of pain (dard), humiliation (tiraskar), debilitation (tootan/durbalta) and injury (ghav). By striving to put Dalit, Black, feminist and queer-of-color scholarship in dialogue with critical race and caste studies, cultural/medical anthropology, Hindi Dalit literature and anti-caste aesthetics, it also offers radical insights into the world-making potentials of Dalit/Bahujans to imagine, intuit, sense and hone radical practices of redress and repair. Importantly, by provincializing queer/race studies from the global South, it further offers a critical rumination on the possibilities of ‘queer hope’ and ‘caste-queer’ ways of re-signifying the carceral logics of casteism and racialization. In so doing, this dissertation also makes critical interventions in addressing the fraught relationships between caste, public health and everyday life-chances; sexuality, desire and the erotic life of embodied caste violence, and the queer intimacies animating everyday struggles for reparative justice for bodies ‘dying of casteism.’

This dissertation investigates a conflict around nature conservation and the Bikin National Park in Krasnyi Yar, a small taiga village in Primorskii krai within the Russian Federation. Founded in 2015, the Bikin National Park officially protects both nature and traditional Indigenous ways of life, especially Udege ways of life as the largest Indigenous people in the village and in the region. While this conflict is often framed as between those who help nature conservation efforts and those who are antagonistic to them, it has much deeper implications because there are Udege on both sides of it. Within this conflict, the Udege who are for the Bikin National Park are understood as being for conservation, while those Udege who are against the Bikin National Park are understood as being against conservation. However, based on over 15 months of ethnographic and archival research, I argue that this conflict should instead be characterized by conflicting conservation futures—ways of organizing the present and future through a particular concern toward nature by means of past and present ethical actions that conserve both wildlife and nature more broadly. Both sides draw of late Imperial Russian and late Soviet histories respectively to provide evidence of how the Udege as a whole and how their side of the conflict protects nature. Each of the chapters demonstrates aspects of Udege conservation futures from its broad conceptualization, through the imperial and Soviet histories that each side of the conflict draws on, and to the ways conservation futures also relate to Indigenous citizenship in Russia today. Focusing on the contested genealogies and timelines of Udege connections to nature protection, I illuminate how the Udege of Krasnyi Yar shape their relationships to past time periods, historical figures, and long closed institutions through their connections to protecting nature and their perceptions of how these past times, historical figures, and long closed institutions do or do not protect nature.

This dissertation explores how Indo-Fijians operationalize narratives of plantation labor and contemporary farmwork to produce a non-settler local identity that reconfigures relations between diaspora, indigeneity, and nationalism. Through multiple government coups and violent anti-Indian rhetoric, indigenous politics in Fiji has repeatedly attempted to render Indo-Fijians, whose ancestors arrived en masse to Fiji as indentured laborers to work on sugarcane plantations, alien to lands they consider home. Drawing from ethnographic research among farmers in the Sigatoka Valley, I demonstrate how Indo-Fijians imagine farm practices as simultaneous projects in nation-building, heritage/traditional knowledge preservation, and environmental protection. Thus, Indo-Fijian farmers simultaneously mirror and challenge ethnonationalist interpretations of indigeneity to produce a local identity that protests the exclusivity of belonging in Fiji today. Engaging theoretical frameworks in historical consciousness and geographic imaginaries, I introduce and situate the Sigatoka Valley as a “farmscape,” a site where colonial pasts, racial tensions, and climate anxieties are diversely (re)imagined through agriculture. In Chapter One, I draw from ethnographic work on an agro-forestry biodiversity conservation initiative at the Sigatoka Sand Dunes National Park to examine how plantation logics of land distribution and property-defined personhood shape how locals design and envision shared environmental futures. In Chapter Two, I study how colonial-era notions of “hard work” persist in racially charged discourse that shapes Indo-Fijians' claims to local identity through narratives of nation-building plantation labor and landscape-tethering agricultural work. Chapter Three explores how Indo-Fijians use agricultural “miracles” and unexplained phenomena on the farm to affirm their metaphysical relation to the landscape, paralleling indigenous articulations of land custodianship. In Chapter Four, I take a phenomenological approach to studying Indo-Fijian local sensory knowledges of the farmscape, often expressed through weather forecasting, seedling selection, and taste. I argue that local knowledge in Sigatoka draws from Indo-Fijian plantation memory and thus becomes a dynamic record of landscape transformation, introduced plants, and built environments, challenging colonialist interpretations of indigenous knowledge as ethnobiology limited to endemic species and ecosystems. I position the Sigatoka Valley as a place of expanding relational possibilities between iTaukei (indigenous) and Indo-Fijians that imagines Fijian identity outside of categorical and agonistic ethnic accounting.

In the fall of 2015, Germany captured global imagination with its unexpected welcome of asylum seekers in the aftermath of the Syrian refugee crisis. Yet this atmosphere soon evaporated, leaving in its place a divided German body politic that outlined new ethnic and religious tensions between newcomers and locals in almost every aspect of public life. This dissertation is based on over two years of ethnographic field research I conducted between 2017 and 2022 with groups of asylum seekers that arrived in Berlin in 2015. It traces the complex and contradictory afterlives of German Willkommenskultur (Welcome Culture), examining the way it became a certain turning point for German society, Berlin, and my interlocutors. I argue that two approaches to newcomers haunted practices of refugee reception and incorporation. The first sees newcomers as threats, moral, physical, cultural and sexual, to the German body politic. The second sees them as potential labour to be selectively and hierarchically absorbed into Germany’s ageing working population. I show how the trajectories of my interlocutors dovetail in and out of these two fields, symbolic and material, as they look to establish interpersonal, local, and national modes of belonging in Berlin. Over the course of six chapters distributed into three sections, I show how this played out in multiple, and often contradictory ways. Practices of hospitality were constantly contrasted with hostility and hierarchy. Encounters and relationships between refugees and locals were full of instability, erotic tensions, volatility, and inexplicable closures. If the desire to change and be changed by city life pulled my interlocutors in one direction, the expectations of German economy, and the proliferation of precarious legal statuses began a process of boundary formation that ever worked to marginalise and sequester refugees into spaces that isolated them from the pleasures of the city. These insights address the emergent contradictions that need to be reckoned with, if at all incorporation is to provide a tool in the management of diversity and contact in post-migrant societies.

This dissertation focuses on two predominantly Black Shiʿi Muslim communities in the Valle del Cauca department in southwestern Colombia. The first community is located in the Pacific port city of Buenaventura, while the second is based in thedepartmental capital of Cali. In both communities, the founding members are double or in some cases triple converts, who previously adhered to the Nation of Islam and Sunni Islam before becoming Shiʿi Muslims. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation explores modes of citizenship that are engendered through the religious histories, contemporary socialities, political solidarities, and spiritual practices of Black Shiʿi Muslims in the Colombian Pacific. I argue that my ethnographic collaborators enact religio-racial and theopolitical regimes of citizenship that run counter to the discursive and affective logics of the nation state. The religio-racial mode of citizenship arises from the community’s first wave of conversions to the Nation of Islam beginning in the late 1950s and is rooted in a diasporically-oriented Black consciousness and an attachment to Islamic ideals that allow for collective racial empowerment. Theopolitical citizenship emerges through their subsequent conversion to Shiʿi Islam and is characterized by the prioritization of religious fellowship over ethno-racial or national affiliations, in addition to a commitment to a Shiʿi messianic vision of Islamic government. This dissertation therefore examines the mechanisms through which Black Shiʿi Muslims articulate their own politics of belonging within the multicultural Colombian landscape. Black Muslims in the Colombian Pacific: Race, Religion, and Regimes of Citizenship opens new avenues of inquiry within the anthropology of religion and the African diaspora by probing the nexus of religion, race, and citizenship. Taking into account the historically unsettled positionalities of Black peoples in citizenship and nation building projects in the Americas, I analyze the ways in which religion functions as a critical site from which to assert Black humanity and redemptive political futures. Additionally, this dissertation contributes to a growing field of research on Black Islam in the Americas by inviting us to consider ‘Blackness’ and ‘Muslimness’ as ontological and epistemological paradigms that unsettle Eurocentric frameworks of citizenship in the Americas.

This dissertation chronicles an incredibly charged moment in the lives of young, Muslim women from poor backgrounds at a time of great flux for their generation and a moment of profound political insecurity for Muslim communities in India. Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in low-income, Muslim neighborhoods of Delhi, India, this dissertation traces the aspirations of young, Muslim women to a vibrant and radiant life in both their personal and collective lives. I argue that these women were experiencing a new, prolonged window of youth and exploration before marriage, during which they pursued college degrees, had premarital romances, and worked in beauty salons and office jobs. The expansive openness of their worlds was overshadowed, however, by rising anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, as Hindu nationalist government politics threatened the rights and safety of Indian Muslims. As these events darkened their horizons, figuratively and literally circumscribing their lives and futures, this ethnography documents how my interlocutors continued to seek out moments of effervescence, radiance, open-ness, variety, refreshment, and love (mohabbat), fighting to preserve the vibrancy of their communities.

When someone dies intestate and without close family willing to administer their estate in New York City, the Public Administrator (PA), a small state agency, steps in to take care of the estate. It is the PA’s responsibility to lay the decedent’s body to rest, to look for family, to settle any legal matters, and to collect, liquidate, and distribute their assets. Based on two years of fieldwork with the PA, this dissertation examines the process of state-led estate administration while also looking at the lives and deaths of the PA’s decedents. The dissertation is concerned with both sides of this work: the knowledge-making practices of the administration process, and the intimate and incomplete stories of the dead that are visible through the work of the state. The PA’s work is depicted as a kind of storytelling shaped by formal and informal narratives that circulate among coworkers and their publics. Although formal narratives in the shape of official reports and court documents are, to an outsider, the only “visible” evidence of narrative-making, this evidence is shaped by the informal narratives constructed by coworkers. The more possessions of market value a decedent has, the more substantial their narrative. Market value is directly linked to the storied life. This dissertation examines the consequences of this insight and argues that the PA’s legal narratives are primarily material. The dissertation also argues that the convergence of different temporalities and temporal rhythms in the PA’s work produces the distinctive material afterlives of the dead. The dissertation argues that the work of estate administration requires a level of emotional distance to be sustainable for its practitioners. Rather than “indifferent,” PA employees practice a state of “limited caring” in relation to decedents. This argument is positioned against the cases made by scholars who have argued that bureaucracy is “stupid” and a kind of “violence.” Finally, the case of a famous decedent is examined, a case that turned the assumptions of the PA’s work upside down. By attending to the ethnographic details of the PA’s work, this dissertation proposes a new approach to the study of bureaucracy.

In recent decades, a small, tight-knit group of legal experts and diplomats—the ICL cohort—has worked to build a system of international criminal justice. This movement has given rise to the establishment of several ad hoc and hybrid criminal tribunals for international crimes and culminated in the 2002 establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a permanent criminal court charged with addressing “the worst crimes of concern to the international community as a whole,” per its founding document, the Rome Statute. My dissertation focuses on the sociality of international criminal justice, by taking seriously the social ties, orientations, and shared meanings that sustain the field of practice and work to maintain systematicity and coherence against fundamental gaps and contradictions. It shows in particular how the technocratic register of international criminal justice is sustained by an affective register. I bring an ethnographic sensibility to bear on the sites, proceedings, objects and expertise of international criminal justice: in addition to observing trials and speaking with dozens of practitioners, I participated in training sessions, went on capacity-building missions, joined legal teams on trial and attended diplomatic conferences. I demonstrate the ways in which the turn toward international criminal prosecutions has given way to efforts to collect and preserve evidence and document atrocities, and argue that the logic of criminal culpability instrumentalizes data in ways that impede broader approaches to justice. This study therefore challenges legalistic accounts of international law as a solely technocratic field and, at a broader scale, offers a model for the possibility of anthropological engagement with spaces of bureaucratic governance.

This dissertation is based on ethnographic, participant observation and virtual fieldwork conducted with four former foster youths who had experienced aging out of foster care or social services in Kentucky, beginning in 2019 and concluding in 2022. In addition to former foster youths, I also incorporate participant observation fieldwork with lobbyists, child welfare experts, and other local advocates and service providers, as well as analyses of archival sources, journalism, government reports, text messages, and art objects. The central question of the dissertation is: In the absence of normative familial pathways to adulthood, how do young people who age out of foster care in Kentucky learn and understand what it means to be a responsible adult? Using a framework of ethical subject formation, drawn from Foucault and Foucaultian scholars, the dissertation investigates former foster youth’s reflective practices and notions of freedom, in concert with the political, social, religious, racial, gender, and spatial structures that shape and inform the ways they come to understand their own responsibility and craft a good life for themselves. I argue that listening to former foster youths on their own terms reveals insights about both child welfare and family regulation, but also about an array of other aspects of adulthood that many social scientists might take for granted. The dissertation is organized into four Parts, each of which examines ethical and moral conundrums in different aspects of normative adult life in Kentucky. Part I examines the moral landscapes into which former foster youth age out, specifically the historical religious origins of Kentucky’s child welfare system and the narrative blind spots produced in the shifting of local and federal politics of child welfare reform. Part II tracks the mobilities of former foster youths, investigating the ways they move around the and engage with the bureaucratic and racial organization of the commonwealth. Part III examines their relationships with caring adult mentors, and considers the challenges and difficulties associated with youth mentoring. Part IV examines their artistic and creative practices as a commentary on work and notions of the good life. In treating former foster youth as ethical subjects, capable of reflection and critical thought, I show how they incorporate, refuse, or invent new ways of abiding by normative notions of adulthood imposed on or offered to them by a number of social and state actors.

This dissertation examines concepts of foreignness as they are lived, experienced, and reproduced in the contact zone in the borderlands of two empires. It is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Russian migrants and local residents in Northern China between 2017 and 2019, as well as three months in Siberia and the Russian Far East in 2016. Tracing the tensions between colonial heritage as a generative component of local identity and the contemporary presence of a new wave of Russian migrants in the Chinese Northeast, I focus on the idea of “Russian presence” that is both physical and symbolic, as well as reproduced in media and tourism industry.Set against the backdrop of the complex history of Sino-Russian relations and shifting power dynamics that included periods of colonization, this study is further contextualized by China’s rapid social and economic changes, the rise of China as an international migrant destination, and the legal landscape that determines the treatment of foreigners and the foreign. By attending to these entangled phenomena, “Representing Foreignness” asks how “Russianness” can be an integral part of placemaking in a country that otherwise attempts to control “foreign influence” over its territory and culture; and how contemporary migrants negotiate their livelihoods between these conflicting trends. More broadly, this dissertation is located at the intersection of postcolonial, postsocialist and borderland studies. It also discusses challenges of conducting ethnographic fieldwork under the condition of mistrust.

My dissertation, “Healing Justice: Environmental Defenders and a Thriving Amazonia,” uses multi-sited transnational fieldwork to explore the political economy of contamination and people’s struggles for biocultural survival in the oil frontier of Amazonian Ecuador. Over 27 months, I conducted participant observation and ethnographic interviewing in Ecuador and several international courtrooms with Indigenous leaders, mestizo campesinos, state authorities, lawyers, and oil industry spokespeople. Whereas affected people described the lived experience of oil contamination as akin to targeted chemical warfare, industry representatives denied any intention to cause harm. I address this gap by questioning scholarly accounts of contamination as the collateral damage of capitalist pursuits. By probing entanglements of the industries of oil, health, and environmental remediation, I instead consider contamination—and the management of its attendant harms—as a means for enacting control over people ‘in the way of’ extraction. My dissertation’s central contribution to social science’s understanding of environmental violence is its analysis of how the harmful impacts of biotoxins allow for the consolidation of state and corporate power. While critiques of neoliberalism and Marxist-oriented environmental theories have focused on disincentives to responsible business conduct, my work examines financial flows between industries that create what I call an “incentive to contaminate.” Demonstrating, for instance, how the sale of petroleum-derived chemicals to clean up oil spills feeds into this incentive, my findings point to how ecological harm enables the expansion of extractive industry. By centering community-led projects for repair, this dissertation additionally elaborates local political ecologies of health, which weave together a decolonial ethics of multispecies care in a world relationally ruptured by oil development.

This thesis examines the migrant and migratory culture that has emerged in the small Indian state of Goa since Independence in 1961. It considers how the state’s unique colonial and postcolonial trajectory within India has made it a place of cultural hybridization and set it on a path to becoming a locality that, while situated within India, also sits at the nexus of various global social, economic and cultural flows.The dissertation considers several key routes into and out of the state, including the Goa Trance music scene, a burgeoning film production and consumption space, and the adaptation of local conceptions of the festival to world-oriented framings of culture as spectacle and oppositional framed identity. In this vein, the thesis considers what happens to local ideas of belonging when a culture becomes mobile and how xenophobic framings of belonging emerge in response to ethnically “other” in-migration and replacement labor. It offers reflections, too, on how mobility results in novel, differing life trajectories for men and women in Goa. In addition to these questions of place-making and cultural hybridization, the thesis examines the processes by which people in Goa transform their citizenship status, from Indian to Portuguese, and what the implications of religious difference between Catholics and Hindus are for undergoing citizenship change. Taking this approach, the thesis examines the ways in which differing migratory trajectories shape religious and cultural identities at home in Goa and attempts to explain how these alter-identities flow out into the world and create a sense of diaspora. In considering all of the above, the dissertation engages with anthropology’s longstanding theorization of cultural holism and hybridity and the role of anthropology in an increasingly mobile world. It suggests that, in step with this mobility, exploring the transformation of culture with our interlocutors can enrich the theoretical and observational tools of the discipline.

Based on twenty months of participant ethnography conducted in the Altailanguage, this dissertation explores the complex temporalities of eating, cooking, and feeding in a village in the Karakool Valley of Russia’s Altai Republic. The foodways of the Turkic-speaking Altai people of the Karakool Valley have weathered momentous historical change in the past century, from sedentarization and collectivization in the Soviet period, to privatization in the post-perestroika era. As this dissertation argues, however, food as object, activity, and idea in the Karakool Valley is not experienced as simply a sign of a fading traditional past. Examining the various ways in which foodways are used to both narrate temporal experiences and directly produce them, I argue here for an understanding of contemporary Altai food culture as reflecting a complex multiplicity of times and histories. This dissertation challenges both the prevalent focus on nostalgia and memory in contemporary post-socialist studies and what I argue is a privileging of retrospectivity in the anthropology of food—what this dissertation deems “the Proustian mode.” As I demonstrate in my discussions of Altai food practices, however, the Proustian mode fails to capture the ways in which my interlocutors link past, present, and future in their culinary experiences. Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson, I argue that the temporal experience of food is best understood as a “qualitative multiplicity” linking past, present, and future. This position is not, however, a complete repudiation of nostalgia: instead, this dissertation’s Bergsonian approach attempts to unveil the depths beneath the iceberg of seemingly nostalgic experience. In this manner, it intervenes in both the anthropology of food and post-socialist studies at their precise point of convergence, offering a supersession of the master topos of retrospectivity common to both.

This dissertation examines how hospital staff, patients, and families at Jamot, the flagship public psychiatric hospital in the secular Republic of Cameroon, negotiated the idea and experience of mental health and the kinds of life outside the clinic engendered by mental health. I ground this examination in two years of fieldwork at Jamot and in patients’ urban communities within the Republic’s capital, Yaoundé, and against the backdrops of public mental health reform, initiated in 2016; the increasing domestic popularity of Pentecostalism; and an ongoing Republic-secessionist conflict, widely known as the Anglophone Crisis, that was militarized in 2016. My ethnography moves with patients over time and in time among the clinic and their churches and homes, in the dual sense of home as house and as homeland. Through this ethnographic movement, I argue that time and its variations are central to health and its possibilities. This dissertation has five chapters. Chapter One situates Jamot within history and futurity. I trace how institutional and clinical practice at this hospital has been influenced by the mid-20th century school of transcultural psychiatry at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal; and by more recent, ongoing Global Mental Health initiatives. Chapter Two examines present-day practice at Jamot. I detail how hospital staff sought to teach patients and families that a mentally healthy everyday life was one from which patients would not seek or want to escape. Chapter Three delves into the vital role of psychopharmaceuticals in patients’ navigations of everyday life upon discharge from the hospital; and of the means, ends, and vitalities of life itself, in encounters with their families and clinicians. Chapter Four examines how many patients’ confidence in psychopharmaceuticals and public psychiatry was imperfectly reinforced by their religious faith, in a process I conceptualize as a Pentecostalization of psychiatry. Here I detail convergences and divergences of time amid the secular public clinic and Pentecostal churches. Chapter Five focuses on how the progression of the Anglophone Crisis during my fieldwork influenced certain patients’ confidence in psychiatry, faith in Pentecostalism, and imaginaries and timing of political possibility and of health itself.