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This thesis explores midwifery in the United Kingdom (UK) from my perspective both as a midwife and a member of the Association of Radical Midwives (ARM). The rhetoric of contemporary midwifery and the ARM speaks to a relational and social model of care which focusses on the pregnant woman, her baby, and her family. However, childbirth in the UK is increasingly complex and there are tensions between the provision of care in a medically dominated health care system and the ability of midwives to work as advocates for women. Central to this tension is the self-perception of midwives as a professional group, and their position in a care hierarchy. The majority of midwifery care in the UK is provided through the NHS, although a minority of midwives work outside but alongside the NHS maternity care system. The ARM was founded in the late 1970s in the UK as a support group for midwives who were concerned about the erosion of their professional role and identity. It remains active and has evolved into a grassroots midwifery organisation which has been influential on the development of UK midwifery over the last forty years. Focussing on the ARM provided me with the lens to examine the challenges that have shaped midwifery and therefore influenced my own practice experiences. To achieve this, I have taken a historical perspective, critically reflecting back on my own practice, the writings of the ARM and a range of ethnographic observations and interviews with midwives who were members of the ARM.

This interdisciplinary thesis is based on six months of multi-sited fieldwork with the Machine Gun Corps Old Comrades' Association (MGC/OCA) in the UK and Voices for Creative NonViolence (VCNV) in the UK and the US, and remote follow-up interviews (due to COVID-19 restrictions), as well as the analysis of a primary corpus of WWI literary texts (Under Fire: The Story of a Squad (1916) by Henri Barbusse; Undertones of War (1928) by Edmund Blunden; All Quiet on The Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque; Storm of Steel (1920) by Ernst Jünger; and Testament of Youth (1933) by Vera Brittain). Straddling the disciplines of Modern Languages and Social Anthropology this thesis proposes an interdisciplinary methodology through applying 'abductive ethnography' across both disciplines (Bacj 2012), drawing out the points of convergence at the same time as accounting for their specificities. Interacting with my interlocutors and my corpus of WWI texts through what Kermode (1988) calls the commentary on these canonical works, this thesis begins with 'endings' as a way of articulating different stories. Critically engaging with my own 'multi-situated' positionality (Sunder Rajan 2021), I allow the fieldwork to influence the literary analysis and my engagement with the texts to inform my fieldwork. The various narratives addressed in this thesis are brought together to explore and question what moves people to engage with war through remembrance and activism, and how these practices take shape. Drawing on various theoretical approaches, this uncovers the ways in which this research shows both remembrance and peace activism as engaging with the dead but nonetheless geared towards the future. I ultimately propose a notion of multi-sensorial (re)reading which leads to interpretation and action.

This project explores principles of "meaning" and "the meaningful" as active and embodied "gestures" or "lived-realities", via concepts of "sharing" and communicative relationality. These concepts were ethnographically researched in the far northern, religiously-plural Indian state of Uttarakhand. This is a state with faith-based populations variously self-identifying as Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, or Muslim. I met members of all of these faiths regularly, although my interlocutors were predominantly Christian and Hindu. Formerly a region of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand is known for its close proximity to the Himalaya, the Indian borders with Tibet and Nepal, and for its religious sanctity as an area of devout (usually Hindu) pilgrimage. All of these diverse factors have led to the consistent and complex intermingling of a number of sub-communities and regional populations. This was evident within many of the larger towns, such as Mussoorie, found in the Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, and the central-base for my fieldwork. My methodology was ethnographic and qualitative, focusing on oral-verbal communications and person-to-person interactions. These processes defined my principal concepts within this project by demonstrating the lived-realities of religious identities, religious communities, and the prevalence of inter-faith communication (or "sharing") within this region. Most significantly, my research highlighted the ongoing importance of meanings - as well as the notable variance in what "the meaningful" was actually considered to be across and between faiths. Such diversity in understanding was made even more complex by different meanings being expressed in the same language, forms, narratives, or verbal images. Within these communications, metaphor was a creative, commonly used, and actively-engaged principle, evidenced within the practice of (different) faiths. This demonstrated a form of "relationality" or "inter-relationality" that seemed to reinforce contemporary, anthropological concepts of embodied lived-realities being a fundamental aspect of the relational, but not the same as "definitionality" or as "meaning". Yet, when in use in Uttarakhand, principles, concepts (and uses) of expressive form, representation, communication, "sharing", and "meaning", were frequently entangled . Many apparent "oral metaphors" and "descriptions" - including images of "sacrifice", "heart-speech", God, Gods, or the cosmological/transcendent - had extended-meanings and purposes in their Garhwali context. Such meanings and actions were in contrast to what I had previously understood metaphor "to be". These were not solely representational-metaphors, they were, instead, acts of agency (via expression). These observations led to my own evolution of the term "ontological-metaphor". The metaphorical was persistently utilised not only as a "symbolic- tool", but as an overlapping, entwined lived-form that was capable of encapsulating the relational and definitional-meaningful. This was not merely in a simultaneous representation, but as a co-creational state-of-being or "ontology".

This thesis is an ethnographic study of identity, belonging and bureaucracy among permanent officials in and around the European Union civil service. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the European Quarter of Brussels over 18 months, its focus encompasses two central research queries. The first seeks to capture a shifting institutional ethos inside the European Commission, investigating how policymakers see their roles as Union officials and embody, negotiate and problematize a particular administrative identity. The second analyzes how Europeanness as a recognition of selfhood, a mode of belonging and a way of life is enacted and performed within these spaces. Data was collected primarily through semi-structured, in-person interviews with current and former officials working in 16 policy directorates and services. The study pays special consideration to the aspects, norms and formalities of 'work-life', defined as the dimensions of experience pertaining to one's occupation. It argues that Brussels-based European identity is not a delimited category anchored in specific points in time and space but an 'elective identity' that is a steppingstone to a global cosmopolitan manner of being in and interacting with the world. Its findings speak to an anthropological understanding of the conditions and possibilities for being European and belonging to Europe, where Europeanness emerges as an assertion of systemic integration in a turbulent geopolitical context marked by overlapping crises and enduring fragmentation.

This thesis addresses the heretofore unexamined effect of transparency on the practices of killing animals in meat production and zoo animal management in Denmark. At the intersection between economic anthropology, human-animal relations, and phenomenological anthropology, I investigate the epistemic, ethical, and affective modes that animate these multispecies encounters. I describe how making practices of killing animals transparent confronts us with the existential discomfort of being human triggered by a confrontation with our self-anointed imperial control over life and death. Such an existential angst is negotiated by the disciplinary, coercive, and conforming influence of a collective identity, and in the zoo and the slaughterhouse, this is manifest in the discursive marshalling of national identity rhetoric, or Danishness. In order to engage with the affective ethics and critique the underpinning anthropocentric logic of killing animals in meat production and zoo animal management, this project takes a multispecies multimodal ethnographic approach. A more-than-human sensibility disrupts the anthropocentric logic of exploitation and commodification that animates both field sites. A multimodal approach, specifically incorporating visual methods, discloses the boundaries of transparency by showing that which is not shown. Through writing affectively, imagistic wordplay cultivates an experiential engagement with the ethnographic world that is wrought in the words of this thesis. The aim of this thesis then is to understand the logic underpinning transparency in a zoo and a slaughterhouse and how this corresponds to Danish national identity. In doing so, I articulate the paradoxes of care, the emotional landscape of killing and death, and the affectively-wrought ethics of making meat and managing captive animal populations. In its interrogation of the epistemic, ethical, and affective dynamics of making transparent practices of killing animals, this work challenges the widely-held positive connotations of transparency, by illustrating both its desired effects and desired affects that are institutionally-defined and societally-reinforced.

This dissertation is situated at the intersection of the anthropology of ethics and politics in the context of the People's Republic of China (PRC). I ground my analysis in a long-standing ethical-political tradition, dating from the Warring States Period (475-221 BCE), which sees societal political progress as predicated on prior individual self-transformation. My overarching argument is that in contemporary China, discourses and practices of self-improvement have mediated, and continue to mediate, the relations between the political subject and the state. This dynamic is manifested in party-state-led projects of citizenry reform as well as in grassroots social initiatives centred on xiuxing - a polyvalent term denoting processes of self-amelioration, whose significance must be unpacked through a situated ethnographic exploration. To this end, I examine the social life that unfolds via the 'Wu-Wei School', a private organisation that provides educative xiuxing retreats. The school claims to use an areligious rendering of Daoist ascetic techniques to help citizens live healthier, more fulfilling lives, thereby contributing to the national rejuvenation project inaugurated by the Xi government (since 2012). My primary interlocutors are organisers and participants of the school, the majority of whom are urban professional householders belonging to relatively privileged social groups. They embark on xiuxing projects via grassroots organisations such as this school to address tangible problems in their lives, especially in areas of health, child rearing, and relationships. Notably, many hold that by undertaking xiuxing, they are reshaping not only themselves, but also their families and their situated socio-natural environment. I trace how my interlocutors engage with esoteric forms of self-transformation knowledge-practice, adopt forms of Daoist autogenetic healing, and intersect with other alternative education schemas such as Steiner Education. While ostensibly retreating into their bodies and interiorities, I argue that these Chinese citizens articulate a historically-sedimented mode of influence which connects human interiorities and sociohistorical transformations through the avenue of reflexive self-improvement. I further demonstrate how this mode of influence is integral to diverse components of the PRC political-cum-moral project, delineating the surprising ways in which my interlocutors operating 'outside the system' (ti zhi wai) coalesce with injunctions and techniques issued from 'within the system' (ti zhi nei). Through a historically-situated consideration of grassroots initiatives centred on xiuxing in the PRC, this dissertation contributes to anthropological studies of ethics, personhood, education, health, and governance. My theoretical contributions are fourfold: Firstly, I deploy indigenous Chinese concepts as analytical tools on a par with social theories constructed in Euro-American academia, enriching the conceptual repertoire of anthropological analysis. Secondly, I explore new ways of engaging with the 'affective' domain of social life by analysing how actors deploy indigenous theories of influence and potentiality in their situated articulations of socio-political belonging. Thirdly, I propose a theory of citizen-state interrelation in the PRC: 'coopetition', a framework borrowed from management studies that underscores practical interdependence and creative coalescence, eschewing notions of a reified structural divide. Finally, I develop an analytic of 'recreational asceticism' to elucidate the ethical life found at the Wu-Wei School, which differs significantly from what has been described as 'self-cultivation' in the anthropology of ethics.

This dissertation focuses on a small but growing group of Marxist Muslim youth activists on the Indonesian island of Java and explores the relationship between Islam and Marxism in their activism. The activists are part of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU; The Awakening of Religious Scholars), a traditionalist Sufi organisation, which was established in 1926 in light of the growing influence of Islamic Modernism and is particularly strong in rural Java. In the first half of the 20th century, NU was pitted against the Communist Party in a conflict over agrarian reform. After an alleged coup attempt in 1965, the Communist Party was banned, and alleged communists were persecuted and killed. Marxism remains largely discredited despite a resurgence among youth activists from the 1990s onwards. Since the 1990s, political Islam, has grown to increasing influence, while at the same time, debates around Islamic ethics have largely emphasised piety and private morality. NU is commonly regarded as a 'moderate' Islamic force, emphasising pluralism and tolerance. In this context, I examine an activist project that aims to establish a distinct form of Islamic political ethics. My thesis therefore examines an unlikely alliance between different value spheres. It focuses on FNKSDA (Front of NU members for the Sovereignty over Natural Resources), an activist movement engaged in solidarity primarily with peasants, but also fisherfolk and urban dwellers, who are faced with agrarian conflicts over natural resources with the state and corporations, for instance over the construction of a new international airport or a gold mine. Making use of NU's influence in the countryside, they regard it as the organisation's responsibility to support justice for their peasant members and work to convince religious authorities to stand up for them instead of siding with corporations, thereby exercising moral critique. My interlocutors were brought up in neo-traditionalist Islamic families within NU and turned to socialist thought at university. In my thesis, I examine what motivates them to mobilise theological justifications for political ends rather than becoming involved in existing Islamic social or secular leftist political activism. I show that their religious interpretation iii radically critiques modernist approaches that tend to emphasise individual piety and otherworldly salvation and that solidarity with the kaum Mustadl'afin - the downtrodden - is a central value to them. Developing a "materialist theology", I argue, forms the basis of how activist leaders bring Islam and Marxism together through intellectual work and ethical reflection. However, as I show, in the process notions of hierarchy and religious exemplary leadership are reinforced despite an explicit commitment to equality because this work requires in-depth knowledge both in theological and philosophical matters, elevating a few knowledgeable individuals. Their exegesis guides the activism of FNKSDA and informs the practical work the group is doing. Beyond making strategic use of their authority as aspiring religious leaders, activists regard it as their ethical responsibility to make their religious tradition more progressive by endowing traditional religious practices with new meanings, even if this project entails tensions. At the same time, they maintain a broadly secular conception of politics and speak out against the increasing involvement of Islamism in Indonesian politics. Throughout the thesis, I focus on their reflexive ethical effort in bringing together Islam and Marxism, illuminating how they approach ethical challenges. The thesis argues that activists do not simply make strategic use of their religious authority to spread their political ideology but are motivated by religious belief and regard it as their ethical responsibility to critique their traditionalist Islamic organisation instead of giving up on it. Beyond reformism, their project aims at the development of a new version of progressive Islam. Furthermore, they apply religious practices such as prayers in their activist struggle alongside elements of the leftist activist repertoire. Acknowledging that there are no easy solutions for ethical dilemmas between these value spheres, activists nonetheless hold on to their ethical-political project. In light of this, I examine their moral lives as they seek to navigate reflexively between conflicting value spheres.

This thesis is a study of discourses of contemporary Bedouin identity and political economy in central Jordan. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it follows the experiences of young, mostly male, interlocutors living in small villages around the town of Madaba, from two largely settled but still discursively Bedouin 'ashā'ir (socio-political categories normally glossed in English as 'tribes'); the Bani Sakhr and the Bani Hamida. I explore the ways in which these interlocutors imagine and anticipate their futures, considering the dilemmas they face in seeking meaningful social reproduction, and their entanglement with various modes of everyday politics, in order to understand how and why political forms and identity categories are adapted and reproduced, especially in the context of new rural protest movements. This provides a new approach to wider processes of nation-building, identity-formation, and state encompassment of marginal areas, in the face of mass forced migration, structural adjustment, the rise of new social forums (on- and off-line), and widespread protests. It considers questions of land settlement, sovereignty and the politics of everyday life in a rural region from which the protest movement dubbed Jordan's 'Arab Spring' emerged among supposedly traditionalist and loyalist Bedouin. I examine the historical context behind the current social, political and economic position of my interlocutors via histories of land settlement, sedenterisation initiatives, and changing political institutions through Ottoman rule and the British Mandate, examining various processes of frontier governmentality that sought to pacify and settle, but also define and repurpose Bedouin as a conceptual category. Making an intervention in the long-standing anthropological debate around the nature and analytical usage of tribalism and the role of colonial effect in its construction in the region, I consider 'asha'īr as political modalities existing in a relationship of co-(re)production with the nation-state, within a political and moral economy of hospitality, protection and encompassment, which has also come to be used to symbolise the nation of Jordan itself. In the face of postcolonial critiques and challenges over representation and Orientalism, anthropologists have rightly called for greater reflexivity and attention to positionality. Yet, more problematically, they have largely withdrawn from examinations of non-state political forms and non-national identity categories. Concepts of Bedouin and tribe, aside from their contested and critiqued construction, continue to have conceptual and political power in Jordan and elsewhere, and anthropology is at risk of leaving them to development practitioners and policy-makers. Anthropologists might formerly have explained the social setting I study as one generated by agnatic kinship and segmentary lineage. I instead reconsider 'ashā'ir as historically contingent political responses centred on certain limited projects of representational sovereignty.

The thesis offers a theoretical and empirical account of how and why ideas and practices of citizenship have changed under the impact of economic informalisation in urban Zimbabwe. This issue is critical as it sheds light on the changing relationships between individuals, who had to shift from the formal sector to the informal and political and civic actors. The thesis challenges and expands the existing literature on citizenship in Africa and Zimbabwe specifically by focusing on economic informalisation as a core transformation in the economic and political life of the country that has led to changes in people's understandings and experiences of citizenship. It does so by looking at grassroots notions of citizenship as opposed to government definitions; by considering the impact of associational life in the informal sector on the understanding and practices citizenship; and by tracking subtle changes in people's understanding of productivity, taxation, employment, and residence as key notions of citizenship under the impact of economic informalisation. It focuses on the 2013-2018 period, although it refers to economic and political developments in Zimbabwe from the colonial period onwards to explore their implications for citizenship in the urban informal sector. The thesis argues that economic informalisation in Zimbabwe has led to a great divide between the modernist thinking and survivalist reality, which has shaped politics at all levels and, accompanied by other socio-political and economic processes has significantly affected the political terrain of the country. On the individual level, the modernist thinking-survivalist reality disconnect has led to changes in political behaviours of informal sector actors. Individuals started disengaging from the state and the city and entering new debates about the nature of citizenship, engaging in associational life in the informal sector, shaping distinct notions and practices of lived citizenship relevant to their economic reality.

This thesis investigates the process of standardisation, scientisation, and diversification of Sasang medicine in contemporary South Korea, through the lens of its central concept ch'ejil (constitution 體質). Sasang medicine (sasang ŭihak 四象醫學) is a current of medical tradition which emerged from the scholarly physician Yi Chema (李濟馬) in late 19th century Chosŏn. Sasang medicine is known as ch'ejil ŭihak (constitutional medicine 體質醫學) because it assumes that human beings have different constitutions with different physiologies and pathologies as well as different psychological traits. Sasang medicine is a unique example in [traditional] Korean medicine because it has constantly been practiced for over a century and is ingrained into health practices of modern Koreans as well as the contemporary health care system in South Korea. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in a school of Korean medicine and its teaching hospital, in a national research institute, and in private clinics, this thesis meticulously explores how an established form of Sasang medicine has been situated in the institutionalised system of Korean medicine. Ethnographies from different field sites provide microscopic details which are interspersed with various issues of collaboration, confrontation, and negotiation of different values and epistemologies. Furthermore, this thesis scrutinizes 'how practitioners of Sasang medicine know what they know' in such different social settings. These attempts are fulfilled by exploring how the central concept of Sasang medicine, ch'ejil, is understood in each field site. In so doing, this thesis aims to elucidate to what extent the practice of Sasang medicine in historical and social formation diversifies concepts of ch'ejil, which have played a role as a fluid medium to raise legitimacy or "efficacy" of Sasang medicine.

In Israel, the demand for Buddhist-derived meditation practices appears to be among the highest in the world, and such practices are currently being employed by a striking variety of Israelis. This dissertation relies on over 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel and the occupied West Bank. It examines the ways in which orthodox Jews on the one hand, and non-observant Jewish activists for solidarity with Palestinians on the other hand, use meditation techniques drawn from Buddhism for pursuing objectives that are central for them, respectively, as contemporary Israelis. In the dissertation's first part, I discuss orthodox Jewish meditators. I analyse the theological justifications they provide for practising Buddhist-derived meditation, and describe retreats and classes through which they learn such techniques, including the disputes and dilemmas this generates. Specifically, the first four chapters concern the themes of arriving at proximity to God through meditation, the tension between discipline and spontaneity, strategies for managing value conflicts, and senses of failure. Taken together, these chapters illustrate the complex ways in which the values of orthodoxy, spirituality and non-renunciation intersect with orthodox Jewish meditators' self-fashioning projects. In the second part, I address Engaged Dharma Israel (EDI) activists, who attempt to show solidarity with Palestinians living under Israeli military control by providing them with practical assistance. I illustrate how among EDI members, the same practices used by orthodox Jewish meditators are employed for quite different ends: cultivating cosmopolitan sensibilities and negotiating Israeli national belonging. Specifically, I focus on the relationship between EDI members' self-cultivation project and two sets of opposing values they hold. The first set is friendliness (approaching others with a caring attitude) on the one hand, and resistance to injustice on the other. The second set is intimacy (experiencing self and other as interdependent) and autonomy (being self-directed and deciding to what extent to partake in difficult situations). My dissertation contributes to the burgeoning field of the anthropology of ethics (which analyses people's attempts to lead good lives comparatively), including to debates concerning encounters between disparate ethical traditions and the relationship between ethics and politics. It also contributes to the anthropology of religion, including to discussions of religious mediation. Primarily, however, I attempt to contribute to the anthropology of ethics by linking debates on self-cultivation with ones on values. Through addressing different types of Israeli meditators, I demonstrate that fundamental to self-fashioning projects is the complex ways in which they relate to people's value considerations. Subsequently, I argue that the dominant model anthropologists utilize for comparing ethical projects-Michel Foucault's discussion of 'forms of subjectivation'-ought to be complemented by considering the tensions people experience between their different values. Finally, in the conclusion I propose that values, instead of being analysed atomistically, can only be properly understood in relation to other values that are held simultaneously to them in a specific ethical project.

For over 300 years the Turkic-speaking Sakha of north-eastern Siberia have lived uneasily in a colonial relationship with the Russian/Soviet state. Since the 1990s, there has been a strong ethnic de-colonising backlash which has struggled to find an appropriate form, from attempts to revive shamanism to budgetary wrangles with the federal government in Moscow. The economy and identity of the Sakha people are closely bound up with cattle. I argue that cattle are now coming to be used as a metaphor for the Sakha people themselves, to create a new and powerful ethnonationalist discourse. This focuses on a distinctive local breed, which under Soviet technocratic agriculture was considered primitive, hybridised with Russian breeds, and made almost extinct –¬ just as, it is now claimed, Soviet social evolutionist policies encouraged Sakha humans to catch up with and assimilate with Russians. I analyse this as a series of parallel anxieties: not simply about the racial purity of the Sakha people, but also about the virility of Sakha men, the chastity of Sakha women when tempted by Russian and now Muslim migrant men, and their right to political self-determination within the larger Russian state. I argue that all this is displaced and projected onto the endangered breed of local cattle. By raising the native cattle in isolation from other breeds, castrating non-Sakha bulls and selectively mating native females with native males, Sakha nationalists are compensating for aspirations which they cannot realise in the human realm. I trace the connections between all the participants in this process by conducting long-term fieldwork in three sites. I start with the urban intellectuals in Yakutsk city who have no direct experience of farming but drive this movement. I then move on to two contrasting villages where rural herders are induced to slaughter their modern hybridised cattle and revert to keeping this archaic breed. One is a Sakha village near the city which has been turned into a cattle conservation farm, the other an extremely remote Arctic village in the far northeast of Yakutia, actually the point of origin of these cattle, where Sakha cattle breeders live mixed with Eveny reindeer herders. The latter villagers are intimately involved with their animals, while the former regard them as a chore and rear this breed more for the subsidies it attracts. I set my material in debates on human-animal relations and identity politics and show how the Sakha discourse about cattle lies at the heart of a wider agenda to undo other structures and attitudes both of the Soviet past and the present life of the Sakha.

My doctoral thesis is an ethnography of work in new types of jobs in the burgeoning private service economy in urban India, based on 14 months of immersive fieldwork in the capital city of New Delhi, with youth working as salespersons, optometrists and store managers in a fast-growing organised retail company, that I call Spexy, that sells budget eyewear products (sunglasses and prescription glasses). In the thesis, I examine the store staff’s everyday practices, actions and fantasies on the storefloor to study the changing social subjectivities, norms, practices and imaginaries in contemporary India, in the current moment of contested liberalisation and corporatisation, accompanied by increasing socio-economic uncertainties and individual self-responsibilisation. The site of work—so intimately linked to the individual’s sense of self and social membership—provides a rich ground for these larger explorations which, in turn, have implications for broader socio-political organisation and action. I focus on how young and aspirational men and women from low- and middleincome households attempt social mobility through participation in low-end service work in the city. The thesis demonstrates how the New Economy marshals the hopes and aspirations of people to sell to them visions of enhanced futures as possible and proximate. Alongside, it promotes as desirable the ideals of professionalism, brandednes, technical acuity, individual enterprise, and organizational excellence that is achieved following new managerial mantras of self-government. These qualities come to be linked to the image of the ‘right’ workplace and the ‘right’ worker – the new age professional. However, the cracks begin to show when the workers’ everyday experiences at the workplace prove to be a far cry from these idealized visions of progress and modernity. I highlight the multiple contradictions that the youth face working in the retail stores, with aim to understand the anxieties this creates for them and how they reconcile these contradictions or learn to cope without reconciling. To do so, I pay close attention to the youth’s subjective and everyday experiences as well as their agentive responses. Primarily, I discover how the youth come to learn about the centrality of fakery and trickery in the organization of the economy as well as socio-cultural life today. Fakery speaks to their own condition of distance from the image of ‘real’ progress promised to the ‘real’ professionals. At the same time, trickery comes to shape their understanding of how to fake to successfully navigate the economy. Through their understanding of fakery and trickery, the workers generate a critique of the New Economy, and end up creatively re-interpreting its basic terms and promoted ideals to create alternate subjectivities. Through thick descriptions of the complex realities of the young people’s working lives, I argue that the contradictions that the youth face results in disappointment arising from their thwarted hopes, but it also opens for them a window into better understanding how contemporary life is structured and the various formal and informal modes of operating within it.

During the last three decades, Turkey’s Armenian landscape witnessed an unprecedented process of diversification, triggered by developments on the national and regional levels. Whereas members of the Christian Armenian minority had traditionally been the sole representatives of Armenian identity in Turkey, they now find themselves next to two other groups of Armenians: first, officially Muslim and hence ‘non-Armenian’ citizens of the Republic of Turkey who, drawing on their Armenian ancestors Islamised or Alevised decades or centuries earlier, have recently started to publicly identify as Armenians in growing numbers and to approach the established Christian Armenian community; and second, citizens of neighbouring Armenia who engaged in a labour migration towards Turkey after the independence of their country and its sinking into a political, economic, and energy crisis in the early 1990s. Going beyond the official categorisation of Armenians in Turkey, limited in scope and imposing a particular interpretation of Armenianness, this ethnography studies the various people self-identifying as Armenians in contemporary Turkey, revealing their plurality, heterogeneity and internal divisions. It studies the often-differing meanings, interpretations, productions and experiences of Armenianness among the Christian Armenians, the Muslim/Alevi Armenians, and the migrant Armenians. Furthermore, it not only describes and illustrates, but also aims to understand and explain their segregation and internal boundary making processes. In that endeavour, it argues that the making of symbolic and social boundaries between the three Armenian factions is conditioned both by irreconcilable differences between each one’s understanding and expectations of Armenianness, and by practical factors related to interest and security. Finally, broadening its scope of analysis, the dissertation argues that the making of intra-Armenian boundaries is also influenced or conditioned by the particular Armenian factions’ relations and boundaries with third parties (e.g. the Turks, the Kurds, the Turkish state), thus advancing a theory of multilateral social boundary making.

Much has been said about the major figures and issues of the 2016 national election cycle, and yet, the bulk of what affects Americans in their everyday lives is determined by legislation and concurrent activist efforts at the state and local levels. Within these localized political structures, there are elected officials and influential activists whose work and careers examine the very relationship between the personal and the political, and embody the complicated interplay between governance, representation and civic action. In exploring the ways in and points at which female elected officials are, at times, supported and promoted, while at others, constrained and erased, this thesis will argue that gender, race and class continue to play an active role in the presentation, production and passage of public policy. Based on fieldwork carried out during 2016 and early 2017 in Raleigh, North Carolina, among progressive female elected officials, activists and community groups, and non-profit organisations, this ethnographic project seeks to analyse how women work, interact and are understood in modern, American politics. Centring itself on the intersection of race and gender in the political lives, identities and experiences of women, the thesis explores the multi-faceted ways in which these women engage in political process. Citing extensive research conducting during the highly charged atmosphere of the 2016 election season, this thesis employs a range of ethnographic techniques, interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, and draws upon visual research and presentation methods to ask these core questions: What are the ways in which women work, interact and are understood in a modern, political environment? And how is this work influenced by concepts, experiences and understandings of race and gender? In doing so, this ethnographic project provides a nuanced understanding of aspects of women's political, social and economic power that acts as a shaping force in modern, American political life.

At the beginning of the twentieth century anthropology was a discipline marked by an interest in measuring skeletons, collecting ornamental curios and speculating about the evolution of society. From the 1920s onwards, however, anthropologists were increasingly urged to leave their armchairs and enter the field. The figures leading this transformation in Britain were Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. This methodological revolution transformed anthropology. But it also rippled outwards: irrigating neighbouring disciplines with new concepts and techniques, undermining the idea of the British Empire's 'civilising mission', and inspiring readers to compare and contrast the wide range of social relations evident amongst the world's different peoples. These changes occurred amidst contemporary debates about colonial policy, discussions about marriage reform, conceptions of urban community and re-imaginings of Britain's past. The opening chapters of the thesis investigate the relationship between social anthropology and colonial rule in Africa and tell of its rise and relative decline in the policy sphere. The following chapters proceed to show how, over the same period, anthropologists' relativist ideas and ethnographic methodology were gaining ever-greater prestige in the British academy. During the 1960s anthropologically-inspired scholarship was proliferating. By 1975, an anthropologically-inflected discourse of cultural relativism had become widespread in the social sciences. The thesis thus reveals a rich tradition of inquiry that troubles divisions between histories of colonial and metropolitan social scientific research.

This thesis explores shifting ideas of the secular in Kolkata, India, through an ethnographic account of socio-political life in the city's southern suburbs. This part of the city was transformed by the arrival of Bengali Hindu refugees from East Bengal from the late 1940s onwards. The refugees achieved rehabilitation and political representation to a significant degree through an alliance with communist and socialist political parties, contributing to the election of the Left Front government from 1977 onwards. However, the political culture of the city and state is transforming in the aftermath of the electoral defeat of the Left Front in 2011. The thesis explores this post-communist conjuncture in the state's political culture, and how prevalent understandings the secular respond to this changing political landscape. The parliamentary Left in contemporary India has been defined by its commitment to the constitutional ideals of socialism, secularism and democracy. The first section argues that communism allowed the refugees to achieve rehabilitation and political representation within, rather than against, the Indian state. They also reproduced religious traditions in the city that contributed to their constructions of community and political values in ways which are inextricable from each other. The second section looks more specifically at political secularism and its relation to statecraft and democratic processes in the form of constituencies in this part of the city. The political parties struggle for control of public religious spaces, which are important for securing their influence at the grassroots, and in the process articulate distinct forms of secularist politics which co-opt public rituals. They also engage in cultural politics designed to articulate secular or non-religious public spheres. Through ethnographic evocations of public life in Kolkata's southern suburbs, I suggest that the Left Front failed to achieve ideological hegemony, and its secularism never wholly displaced religious framings of political culture in the state. I argue, secondly, that the categorical formations of religion and politics - and therefore ideas of the secular based on this conceptual distinction - are ideological constructions and therefore open to constant reinterpretation. My interlocutors, both within and outside the party, remain committed to secular futures, but they creatively search for ways to articulate secularist politics which do not necessarily rely on categorical distinctions of the past. Therefore, I search for the secular with them, disaggregating the discursive constructions on which secularist politics are founded. The elusive secular is found, in my analysis, through the ways in which residents of the city continually (re)conceptualize the contours of their public, political lives.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Esperanto speakers and Esperantists - mostly, but not only, in Paris - this thesis asks: how can the Esperanto community and movement come into being in practice if Esperanto speakers are scattered all over the world and may, at times, not share much beyond the language? Created in the late nineteenth century and alternatively supported by intellectuals and left-wing activists since its early days, Esperanto has currently also attracted the interest of young people through its online use. Coming to be more than a language, it has developed a widespread, geographically scattered speech community, a language-based social movement, and a set of cosmopolitan principles and sociabilities linked to it. I aim to contribute to debates about cosmopolitanism, globalisation, international communication, mobilities, and hopes for the future, as well as political, digital and language activism, by analysing perspectives of Esperanto speakers and Esperantists. Addressing the contrasting ideas that posit Esperanto as 'a thing of the past' and 'the language of the future', I look at the ways the language has been used in the present, through everyday practices, to mediate between people from different national backgrounds. France, particularly Paris, provides a setting in which my research questions resonate with national debates on politics and languages. This creates a fruitful environment to analyse how Esperanto is frequently seen through the lenses of either engagements with traditional social movements (such as communism, anarchism and pacifism) or as an intellectual game and tool to build sociability networks that extrapolate French territory. From these issues, my main argument is that the ephemeral nature of the enactments of the Esperanto community is what makes engagements with this language particularly appealing and productive for its speakers and supporters.

This thesis is concerned with experiences of social, political and economic change in Britain. In an era of fluctuating food prices, precarious subjectivities and environmental concerns, everyday issues such as food (a basic human need and right) become significant sites through which to offer a grounded perspective on how everyday citizens configure their social and financial worlds in relation to these changes. By focussing on two grassroots, retail food co-ops in London which were born of different eras, this thesis explores the ways in which each food co-op negotiates different visions and values relating to food-based politics, models of aids, practices of care and community building. Within this context, contradictory visions and practices can become intertwined - some more closely aligned with the co-operative ideal of mutual aid, others with less egalitarian models of charitable giving, or individualised practices and values of politics, aid and care. While this country has been going through processes of reform (often characterised as neoliberal reform) since the 1970s, the financial crisis of 2008 and resultant period of austerity had a significant impact on the nature of politics, the economy and the lives of everyday citizens in Britain. These political economic shifts have done much to inform and adjust the ideals, practices and structures of these two food co-ops. The social histories presented here, therefore, help to contextualise how each food co-op has been structured and informed by the social worlds around them; how their foundations were moulded by a particular moment in time; and, how they sit within the present, at times a little uncomfortably. This social, cultural, political economic and historical context is, therefore, fundamental to how food co-ops operate, and how they operationalise the basic principles of co-operativism.