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Over seven months between 2020 and 2021, I lived in Samani, Hokkaido in Japan. Learning indigenous Samani Ainu cooking across different seasons from Ms Kane Kumagai, I questioned how an art practice can explore 'felt knowledge' of the more-than-human world. My everyday presence with local people's lived experiences and multi-species encounters in Samani was an act of artistic experimentation that could acquire a different way of exchanging knowledge. Across these relationships I learned how our sensory knowledge-based engagement with both people and nature can contribute to a diverse ecosystem. This book is a record of my time in Samani and is itself a form of art, which documents and shares the process of making and translating intangibles into tangibles. In it, I seek to show how the practice of art can observe, unfold, work with, and share in a compassionate way a felt knowledge that is part of the human world. Documenting this way of living and working can unpack social, historical, political, and economic backgrounds to reveal reasons why Ms Kumagai and natural species are facing a critical moment in Samani. Recording the Samani Ainu cooking that Ms Kumagai wishes to share with future generations also resists forgetting a facet of Samaini Ainu community. Here, I offer values askance from social norms shaped by colonial, imperialistic, misogynistic, and capitalist modes of society. Through this body of works, I practise knowledge production supporting a compassionate, inclusive, and value diverse approach for people, non-human species, and culture.

My doctoral dissertation aims to study the Tukkhā songs of North Bengal composed by the Rājbaṃśī community in the Rājbaṃśī lect, a living tradition largely unexplored by the academic community in Bengal and beyond. My paper analyses language and practice, combining literary criticism with anthropological research. These songs were influenced by the esoteric devotional traditions such as the Buddhist Sahajayāna, Śaiva, Śākta and Vaiṣṇava traditions of north-eastern India. I have conducted extensive fieldwork in North Bengal (2017-2020) and documented and archived a number of songs (close to one hundred), interviews and audio-visual performances. My work focuses on the oral tradition (songs) and performative art and on the direct connections between the Rājbaṃśī living traditions, rituals and cosmology depicted in Tantric medieval literature. My work explores mysticism and language, politics of an alternative imaginative space, which I examine as an expression of esoteric devotionalism in the context of the socio-historical and religious evolution of the Rājbaṃśī community. I assess the artistic and political implications of this literature through a close assessment of how it is performed in the present day. I have translated a corpus of these songs into English for the first time and majority of these songs have not been published before. These songs have created a powerful medium of their self-assertion of the historical consciousness of the Rājbaṃśī community, which has been subjected to political and cultural marginalization. This community has produced diverse genres of songs including Tukkhā, Bhāwaiyā, Tistābuṛir gān (songs for Tista river), songs for Satya- Pīr and Maynāmatī (related to the Nāth cult in Bengal), which are important documents of the cultural traditions of this community, thematically and historically in terms of content, literary value and performance traditions. My thesis also explores notions of identity, marginality, subjectivity, and constructs a critical history 'from below' through the medium of literature of the Rājbaṃśī community. While studying the various metaphors used in the Tukkhā songs, the thesis will try to understand the various strands of heterodox religious ideas that were deeply imbricated in older Tantric traditions and how they were responded to, negotiated with, assimilated, and hybridized. The contours of Tukkhā, as a field and as a living tradition have been refigured and reinvented, while it has engaged with various socio-historical changes in historical, religious and political landscape of North Bengal. The metaphors contained in the songs reveal socio-religious and historical clues about the possible influences on these songs in the absence of substantial secondary sources of literature on the Tukkhā songs. My strategy was to connect the various strands of socio-religious traditions and their influences on the Rājbaṃśī community in constructing a preliminary history of the Tukkhā tradition.

In this thesis, I examine how the meanings and roles of museums, as a worldwide cultural phenomenon that has been initiated in Europe, are adapted and transformed according to local contexts beyond Europe. My ethnographic research explores the specific context of post-colonial Hong Kong and examines the rise of non-government museums. I argue that this phenomenon is the result of nostalgia, rising historical and cultural consciousness, increasing 'museum-mindedness' and the continuing identity dilemma experienced by residents, both young and old, of postcolonial Hong Kong. I have critically analysed five types of museum-like institutions in Hong Kong, namely: ancestral halls, governmental, independent, amateur, and school history museums. Investigating recent developments of museums in Hong Kong through the lens of Chinese ancestral halls, I argue that ancestral halls are, in effect, 'precursory museums' for those that have been created more recently. Enabled by objects, spatial experience and social interactions, Chinese ancestral halls and contemporary Hong Kong museums both aim to preserve and transmit cultural knowledge and, in the process, facilitate identity construction. Set up by all kinds of actors, ranging from independent trusts to individual amateurs, non-government museums in Hong Kong are diverse in their forms but united by the same aim and function: to preserve and interpret local heritage in their own ways and according to indigenous criteria. In a broader sense, I suggest that the non-government museums represent different points in a continuous spectrum which at one end is influenced by an indigenous museological model associated with Chinese ancestral halls, and, at the other end, by government museums, which still uphold the values of 'western' museum professionalism. I argue that the values and principles upheld by those who have created and curated ancestral halls are still influencing current museums in the postcolonial era, because the museums have inherited the traditional, social and historical functions of ancestral halls in Hong Kong as a channel for the Hong Kong public to 'retrace their roots'. Non-governmental museums in Hong Kong can also be potential sites of rejection of the official histories and representations constructed by the Beijing-influenced postcolonial Hong Kong government. They are therefore a manifestation of the postcolonial condition and a cultural arena in which Hong Kong residents could construct history, interpret culture, and shape identity.

This thesis examines the emergence and influence of the 'Pan-Pacific' idea from the 1910s-1940s. It makes the case that to a diverse demographic globally, it proved a compelling regional geo-paradigm; the institutions it inspired, significant inter-imperial spaces for representatives from the former British Dominions to consider their society's place in the world and the region's globality. Situated at the intersection of 'British' and 'Pacific' World historiographies, the thesis is organised as a multi-thematic intellectual history, demonstrating the capacious appeal and ideological multiformity of the Pan-Pacific in educational, ethnological, leftist, commercial and geopolitical contexts respectively. Chapter 1 explores the intellectual roots of the Pan-Pacific, examining the institutional archives and private papers of figures associated with the Institute of Pacific Relations and Pan-Pacific Union. It argues that a 'Honolulu nexus' in inter-imperial affairs emerged, influencing a greater appraisal of the Dominions' own interests, including a form of 'rooted regionalism', largely neglected in the extant literature. Chapter 2 examines how the Pan-Pacific proved a conduit for the examination of race relations through the ethnological research programme of Honolulu's Bishop Museum and its investigations into the 'Polynesian Question' (the then disputed origins of the peoples of Oceania). Chapter 3 examines the attractions of the 'political left' to the Pan-Pacific, exploring the affiliation of trade unions in the Dominions to the Comintern-backed Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat. Chapter 4 explores how the Pan-Pacific idea boosted a regional commercial imaginary, whilst shedding light on the emergence of the Dominions' own nascent regional trade representation in the form of regional 'Honorary Agents'. The final chapter considers the emergence of trans-Pacific aviation and its influence upon conceptions of Dominion defence from sites spread across a Pan-Pacific cartography - from the atolls of the Phoenix Islands to the Kermadecs, spaces which found renewed significance in the 'Air Age'.

My thesis seeks to reconceptualize the "safe space" metaphor at a self-described "safer space" in New York City, Pocketbooks. Typically understood as places of comfort, safe spaces are often disparaged for encouraging emotional fragility and stymying intellectual growth. However, the potential of sites like these to offer cultural critique and provoke new ways of thinking about safety (and violence) has been overlooked. Pocketbooks, a feminist bookstore in a hyper-gentrifying neighborhood of Manhattan, is one such place. Although Mayor Giuliani's "quality of life" laws are often credited for making NYC the safest it has ever been, Pocketbooks positions itself as a "safer space" from a city (and society) that has become increasingly unsafe. With a view to (re)conceptualizing safe spaces and interrogating the meaning(s) of safety in neoliberal America, my thesis posits the following ethnographic question: How does the Pocketbooks community (re)imagine, negotiate, and enact notions of safety to build a micro-society that is, in their words, "equitable, cooperative, and free?" Integrating fifteen months of fieldwork with a variety of literatures-including but not limited to the anthropologies of violence and counterpublics-I attempt to reconceptualize the safe space metaphor. I argue that Pocketbooks act as a feminist counterpublic whereby people of subordinated and sociospatially-excluded populations can find community and self-expression, acquire skills to reduce the extent of their marginalization elsewhere, develop language to articulate their identities and experiences, and even unlearn violent habitus. Moreover, in an attempt to translate utopian imaginaries into practice, Pocketbooks becomes a place to think from and about safety, and a place to consider how to forge justice in an unequal world. My research challenges the dominant discourse that neglects the structural nature of violence and overlooks safe spaces as creative sites of cultural critique and production, contestation, and hope.

This study focuses on the collection and interpretation of English material magic by English museums in the modern era. Based on a survey of English amulets in English museums, the thesis addresses the question 'how have museum collections of English popular magic materialised relations between people and things in practice?' Melding two academic perspectives - historical interpretations of English magic and analyses of ethnographic collections - it contributes to both fields of study. Theoretical approaches from material culture studies, museology, anthropology and history are used. Building on four areas of current academic concern - magic, modernity, materiality and museums - the thesis explores four themes: changing attitudes to magic, shifting attitudes to the material world, the growth and definition of academic disciplines, and relationships between amateurism and professionalism. The thesis' temporal scope extends from 1850 to the present, with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when most of the collections were amassed, and on their re-interpretation in the second half of the twentieth century. Taking English amulets as its starting point, the thesis examines why and how these have been juxtaposed with artefacts from the rest of Britain, Europe and the world. It investigates networks of institutions, people, objects and ideas which formed and were formed by the collections. The study pivots around a number of key case studies, both of people who collected and interpreted amulets and of institutions that assembled them. Institutions encompass the Pitt Rivers Museum, Folklore Society, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Brighton Museum, and Museum of Witchcraft and Magic; individuals include General Pitt-Rivers, Edward Burnett Tylor, Frederick Elworthy, Edward Lovett, Henry Balfour, Alfred Cort Haddon, Herbert Toms, Beatrice Blackwood and Cecil Williamson. The thesis concludes that collections of English material magic have materialised relations between people and things in specific and significant ways.

This thesis is an anthropological inquiry into questions of identity on the White Sea coast in the northwest of Russia. The case of Pomory provides a curious case to think about contested identities due to the diversity of issues around the question “Who are the Pomory?” The chapters presented in this thesis deal with the diverse dimensions of Pomor identity touching upon lived experience and belonging, ethnographic conceptualisations, recent indigeneity claims, as well as current identity negotiations. This thesis explores various historical and contemporary contexts, which have led to certain identity claims, concepts, and self-identifications. In doing so, my aim is to contribute to anthropological studies of identity in general and the research of contested identities in particular. I argue that Pomor identity is both formal and performed. Pomor identity emerged in the process of expansion of Slavic people to the north. Pomory acquired the knowledge of the river systems in the north and developed remarkable seagoing qualities. Similarly to the Cossack identity, their identity was based not on ethnic but rather on occupational as well as social and legal categories. Pomor identity became rooted in practices of promysly, such as fisheries and seal hunting. The recent economic decline and tightening of fishing regulations have posed new challenges to the White Sea coast dwellers, who often point out the discrepancy between them being Pomory and not being allowed to fish. Pomor identity has been formalised in ethnographic descriptions as well as within the Soviet etnos theory. Early ethnographic accounts of the nineteenth century, partially driven by a humanistic mission and curiosity, described Pomory as a special group within the Russian population due to their unique livelihoods and seagoing qualities. Soviet ethnographers, who tried to capture Pomor identity within etnos theory introduced a special category of a subetnos for which Pomory became the prime example. While on the one hand there are clear images and understandings of who the Pomory are – “Russian seafarers, fishermen, and seal hunters”, the recent debates on Pomor indigeneity claims and people’s self perceptions in the villages reveal a far more differentiated picture.

Based on a long-term ethnography inside a block of flats in Piatra-Neamt, Romania, this thesis explores how individuals, through everyday creative engagements with their apartments, try to come to terms with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing society - one caught between the vulnerabilities of both socialism and capitalism. It examines the inhabitants' capacity for self-organization, with a focus on the daily life of a block administrator overseeing the maintenance and repair of his ageing building. By paying close attention to a range of infrastructural elements often taken for granted - from water taps and boilers, to balconies and windows - my research offers new insights into how people negotiate complex relationships of trust and suspicion in the light of degrading infrastructure. Within the context of increasingly decentralized resources, I also demonstrate various difficulties involved in sustaining day-to-day practices of energy-saving, and discuss the block inhabitants' multifaceted understanding of the 'common good'. Finally, I emphasize how apartment renovations are fuelled by motivations that are at once aesthetic and functional, and thus problematize the distinction between these two categories that has dominated anthropological studies of the built environment to this day. My thesis contrasts the well-established literature about the home - that pays attention to aesthetics and identity at the micro-scale of the domestic space - with recent studies about infrastructure that typically examine macro-scale, functional reasons for urban transformations. Overall, I argue for a more prominent role for the study of home infrastructures in anthropology, while also contributing to debates about housing and energy policies.

Contemporary scholarship of neoliberalism tends to emphasize its ubiquity, underscoring capitalism's permeation into life's most intimate spheres. However, I show through careful ethnographic description that even within the paradigmatically capitalist conditions of New Brunswick, Canada - popularly christened a 'company province' - marginalized communities continue to maintain anti-capitalist moralities. Based on eighteen months of participant observation, this ethnography examines how an Acadian forest community in northwestern New Brunswick cultivates an alternative regime of values and also how those values are contained, eroded, and politically disarmed. I explain how a moral system based in the division between insiders and outsiders emerged to ensure the survival of rural Acadian communities throughout longstanding historical conditions of material precarity. This moral dualism serves to maintain fierce egalitarianism between insiders while justifying underhanded and illegal techniques for appropriating resources from the outsider sphere. While the persistence of this communitarian, egalitarian, anti-materialist insider moral order and the sharing economy it sustains is notable, especially given prevalent scholarly assessments about neoliberalism's colonization of our very imaginations, I show that maintaining the insider moral order in the face of community members' increasing material engagements with capitalism produces compromises, contradictions, and violences. The Acadians' dualist moral system absorbs hierarchies such as race and gender in ways that ultimately violate insider aspirations to egalitarianism and obstruct the development of insider moral persistence into more politically transformative resistance. Preservation of the insider sphere also demands periodic renegotiation of its boundaries under the pressures of new forms of precarity, such that the cost of maintaining the insider community is the expulsion of some of its members. This dissertation is thus a study of how capitalism comes to accommodate dissident moralities in its midst in ways that defuse their political threat, and the mechanisms by which compliance with capitalism is coaxed and coerced even in contexts of ideological opposition.

This is the story of how four people invented a whole new world and way of life - and how they attempted to establish it across the globe. Copass, a Parisian startup consisting of four cofounders, aimed to connect hundreds of the world's shared workspaces under their new global federation. But the main objective of this startup, in contrast to most, was not to build capital. It was to build a universe: a future where white-collar workers would be liberated from the shackles of office life to work anywhere in the world, to meet exciting people and to have amazing experiences. Here, workdays were permanently mixed with holidays. Work was fun, workplaces were play-places and workers were adventurers. The ambition of these four cofounders was to turn the way they wanted things to be for them into the way things ought to be for everyone else. To turn their desired lifestyle into a global social movement that enrolled, as they saw it, hundreds of cities and thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of people. In short, they created a company to fulfil a dream. This is an ethnography of that one startup's dream, analysed at length to demonstrate innovative ways of worldmaking employed by an ambitious tech company seeking success. A company dissatisfied with the world that, instead of changing it, decided to create a new one.

This dissertation is looking at quilombo grassroots land and identity politics as they transpire in a compound of Black rural communities in the north of the state of Maranhão, Brazil. One of the main questions this thesis asks is: How do communities mobilise resources in defence of their territories when formal means of establishing land claims have been exhausted? Based on ethnographic research conducted over fifteen months my analysis delves into strategies employed by peasant groups for the assertion of their collective land ownership. This assertion taps into specific ethno-racial legislation and it is especially directed towards Evangelical Christians, whom the majority of Catholic quilombola residents regard as their territorial and religious antagonists. This thesis's broadest argument is that this territorial defence mainly materialises through two streams of action: religious and cultural grassroots activism. It is argued that creative uses and articulations of cultural and religious practices, and the creation of a network of alliances, transpire as the most relevant means of 'informal' community politics. More specifically, I argue that local ceramic production (intrinsically attached to notions of a 'quilombo heritage') and religious festivities in honour of the local patron saint contribute to the preservation of a specific quilombo territoriality. In the ethnographic context examined, this territoriality is inherently attached to popular Catholicism and notions of quilombola cultural identity. Employing approaches from agrarian, peasant politics, quilombo, and heritage studies, this dissertation seeks to illuminate the dynamic relation between local perceptions of land and territoriality in the 'lands of Santa Teresa'. Overall, this thesis aims at contributing to those studies that explore the diversity and creativity of politics 'from below'.

This thesis ethnographically examines the globalising of the Japanese animation (anime) business in the context of the creative industries, of Japan's politico-economic position in Asia, and of brokerage. Influencing the world's entertainment, creators, and youth culture, anime is one of the crucial lenses through which one can examine Japan's presence in the world. Despite the prevalent assumption that anime is globally popular, this thesis highlights the precarious performance of the anime business overseas, and examines it through an entrepreneurial anime business project trying to bridge the Japanese anime business into the Indian market. The ethnography of the project centres on its founding entrepreneur, focusing on how he tried to ally with insiders in the Japanese anime sector and the Indian market. The thesis's 12-month fieldwork accompanied his business in Japan (Tokyo) and India (Delhi), revealing a perspective of the entrepreneur as a broker who intermediates between the discrepant positions of his stakeholders to keep his business afloat. It also highlights the two most critical discrepancies: the dichotomies of art versus commerce (one of the central topics in creative industries studies) and the 'Japanese' versus 'Indian' ways of doing business (one of the prominent topics in Japan's political economy vis-à-vis the Asian region). The ethnography found the entrepreneur's liminal dual agency in bridging, blurring and reorienting the dichotomies was a driving force carrying his business forward. This thesis counterbalances previous anthropological studies on the creative industries (including anime) that tend to advocate the centrality of creators and fans, by focusing on the businessperson in a creative project. It also suggests that the broker is a crucial point of reference when examining how to create workable compromises between art and commerce, and allowing Japanese and Asian businesspeople to get along. The thesis also enhances our understanding of entrepreneurship by revealing most of its function as brokerage.

Discussions of hope and the imagined future have thus far focussed on grand ambitions at the expense of the more mundane, modest wants that are the preoccupation of everyday life. Studies of the home have demonstrated the role of material culture in embodying memory and household pasts but little has been said of household futures and their impact on household presents. This ethnographic study of the lives of three middle class households in south-east London addresses these gaps through an exploration of the role of imagined futures in orienting everyday life in the household. The ways in which householders work to make household life what they want it to be, and to secure the longer-term futures they imagine for their children, are explored through the frustrations, disappointments and anxieties that stem from the frequent failures of these efforts. Objects are demonstrated to be both the means through which householders attempt to make household life what they want it to be - their potentiality shaping and enabling imagined futures - and the means through which these imagined futures are reconfigured or derailed. The period of maternity leave, that all three of my women participants were in the midst of, is shown to be one in which the work of bringing the household's imagined futures, and children's imagined futures to fruition falls disproportionately to mothers, often at the expense of their own wants. Finally, a broader lens is used to explore how middle class householders' efforts to live the life they want contributes to and shapes the processes of gentrification credited with bringing dramatic change to south-east London.

The subjects of ‘youth’, ‘substance use’ and ‘homelessness’ are interconnected, but only a relatively small number of studies have examined the relationships between all three components. Literature highlights how homeless substance users are constructed as ‘vulnerable’ – yet ‘deviant’. Furthermore, academics have examined how people manage the ascribed identities of ‘substance user’ and ‘homeless’ as well as that of ‘youth’. According to sociologists, people’s self-identities and actions develop as a consequence of interactions with their socio-spatial worlds. Therefore, it is useful to contextualise the act of substance use within these complex interactions. This thesis explores the meanings and contexts of young, homeless people’s substance use. Data were obtained through an ethnographic study conducted in a homeless hostel over a seven month period in 2013 in which twenty-two young people (aged 16-21) and twenty-seven staff members participated. The majority of data were derived from participant-observation encompassing 200-250 informal interactions with the young people and 100-120 interactions with staff along with observations of people’s actions and descriptions of events and appearances. The field-notes were supplemented by four semi-structured interviews and a focus group, involving a total of eleven young people. Drawing on theories underpinned by symbolic interactionist and phenomenological philosophies, three overarching dimensions of the young people’s experiences were identified as important to their substance use and wider lives. First, the young people engaged in ‘place-making’ actions (including substance use) to personalise spaces within the tightly controlled environment of the hostel. Secondly, substance use was interwoven with the relationships that the young people held with their families, friends and the staff. The ‘pro-drug’ voices of their friends and relatives were arguably stronger than the ‘anti-drug’ voices of the staff. Thirdly, the categories of ‘youth’ and ‘substance user’ were recognised by the participants as pertaining to them, whereas the ‘homeless’ label was relatively meaningless. The thesis concludes that to understand people’s substance use experiences, it is important to consider the socio-spatial contexts within which they are located, particularly when these are temporary.

This dissertation draws upon local aesthetic attitudes held by members of the elder generation of first-language Scottish Gaelic speakers in Cape Breton Island, Canada towards various forms of communally-based cultural expression as conceived through metaphor. Through such engagement one begins to sense the central role of emplaced identity alongside embodied experience in describing these forms. In many ways, to the ethnographic fieldworker, this is uncharted territory. Here fieldwork functions within emic models of the cèilidh (visit) through collective social engagement in seanchas, an intracultural form of metalinguistic and metacultural discourse. Such a methodological approach facilitates in unveiling an intersubjective understanding of past, present and future acts, the forging of collective identity in the social world and finding meaning in cultural expression. In the context of this dissertation, what began as a seanchas-based exploration into local ethnoaesthetic attitudes revealed a wealth of metaphor in various abstractions arising out of our shared discourse. Such organically yet creatively conceived metaphors function between that which is symbolic and habitual, capable of crossing the boundaries of genre and breaking-down the partitions of that which is at once deemed abstract and concrete. Through the conceptual metaphor theories of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson among others, this works employs a dynamic system of interpretation that, when working in this ethnolinguistic context, makes full use of the available body of cultural and linguistic knowledge both synchronically and diachronically. This ethnography of metaphor, therefore, follows a pathway arising out of a sequential understanding of sensory experience in interpreting both identity and aesthetic thought as expressed by these Scottish Gaels. Beginning with individual orientation in time and space through cultural, social and emotional engagement with both the physical and cognitive landscape, the ethnography goes on to explore both a synaesthetic and kinaesthetic awareness of the various ways in which we conceive expressive sound in its flow. Within this conceptual metaphor framework a system is unveiled in which the expression of communal tradition is seen as emanating from a shared cridhe (heart/centre). Subsequently, the transmission of this knowledge is conceptualised among encultured individuals as capable of being metaphorically eaten and, therefore, (re)internalised in the body. Such an understanding is intrinsically linked to the mutual aesthetic appreciation of language and music through their blas (taste). Ultimately, these metaphors are rooted in an integrated system oriented towards the collective attainment of social wellbeing and a principal desire to sustain that which they serve to describe.

Through close textual analysis of 20th century Czech anthropological texts from the Revivalist and Socialist periods and contemporary social research conducted after the Velvet Revolution, I demonstrate certain prominent discourses of identity developed in early Bohemian anthropology and their continuities in present day popular discourses. In each period, identity is deeply intertwined with teleological theories of history with Czech populations at the apex of cultural evolutionary development. In the Revivalist period this apex was believed to be the democratic nation state, transitioning to a Marxist nation state in the Socialist period, and in the contemporary period is conceived of as a neoliberal nation state. A major function of anthropology in the Revivalist and Socialist periods was to legitimate either period’s respective teleological theory and Czech possession of relevant values as 'objective' and 'natural' fact, a general mode of discourse which continued in the contemporary period in numerous editorials in the 1990s on the advantages of capitalism. The contemporary manifestation has particularly noteworthy consequences for the Roma minority, which I argue has provided Czech discourses with an ethnic category 'anti-thetical' to their own identity, providing a 'repository' for negative Czech self-stereotypes emerging from collaboration in the Socialist period.

This thesis is primarily based on ethnographic fieldwork that lasted fifteen months, between 2010 and 2012, in Keqiao, a municipal county in eastern Zhejiang Province, China. Despite its inferior administrative status and rather inland location, Keqiao is China's trading frontier for fabrics, which are the semifinished textiles that are industrially weaved, knitted, dyed, and printed in bulk before being exported. Contributing to the turnover of more than one-third of all fabric produced in China, the county's fabric wholesale market is not only the mainstay of Keqiao's economy. It is also the world's centre for fabric supplies, and where around 10,000 Indians have flocked to start their intermediary trading businesses. The major aim of this thesis is to examine the everyday encounters between Indians and Chinese in the local fabric market. It begins by exploring how Keqiao emerged as the global distribution centre for a wide variety of cheap fabrics. It also shows how Keqiao becomes characterized by the growing importance of low-end fabric sales and the influx of Indian traders, who specialize in exporting these fabrics. The thesis then describes the encounters between Indians and local Chinese in the fabric market, addressing the challenges and difficulties that these Indians, especially the newcomers, confront when dealing with the Chinese suppliers. Focusing on novice traders, the thesis turns to investigate the internal dynamics of Indian trading companies. Remarkably, novice Indian traders successfully learn several strategies to counteract their precarious position in the workplace. These strategies leverage the accumulation of work experience and expanding social networks. These insights bring the thesis to chapters that highlight other strategies, particularly those created from encounters between Indian traders and Chinese clerks, as well as those between Indian traders and Chinese salespersons. Taken together, this thesis illustrates how transnational and local actors team up to create their own, locally based, intermediary economy within a small Chinese county, and how such a collaborative economy, which I term a 'global fabric bazaar', sustains these actors. Without this collaborative economy, these players would otherwise be vulnerable within the fabric wholesale industry because this supply chain is increasingly polarized and weakened by today's global capitalism.

This thesis examines shifting relations of labour, creativity, and political economy in the context of commercial animation production in contemporary Tokyo. Based on 12 months of fieldwork in the Japanese animation industry (2009-2010), the ethnography of the thesis is centred on young animation makers whose lives are fraught with persistent job insecurity and socio-economic precariousness. Contrary to celebratory narratives of the global success of anime, found in both Japanese media discourses and the literature of Japanese studies, these professional young workers live on the socio-economic fringe of mainstream Japanese society. Despite such instability, labour discourses in the animation industry are notable for their highly aspirational quality, which appears to be based on global liberal discourses of self-realisation through the pursuit of dreams in the labour market. Commercial animation production in the Japanese industry entails a complex division of labour in which animation makers are, at the root, divided between managers and creators. This management-creative relation structures the primary context of commercial production. Thematically, the thesis engages mainly with three research literatures in anthropology: the anthropology of creativity, the anthropology of work, and Japanese ethnography. The analytical locus is built on the perspective of young entry-level managers, with whom I worked during fieldwork and who were on the lowest strata of the workplace hierarchy. Through the detailed ethnography of animation production - one of Japan's premier creative industries - the thesis examines creative processes of animation making within the terms of work and labour. In so doing, it engages critically with the social and economic structures of commercial animation production, and explores the lived dimension of labour on the production floor. Methodologically, this means combining the perspectives of political economy and phenomenology by situating the micro-processes of animation making firmly in the industry's social and economic relations of production. I pay particular attention to the ways in which shifting social and cultural discourses of labour in Japan intersect with global liberal ideologies, such as creativity and self-realisation, in the context of commercial animation production. The major focus of the thesis is therefore to explicate what it is that makes these young animation makers, despite adverse conditions of labour, retain their aspirations to pursue the profession of animation making.

The focus of this dissertation is the Sakha language (Sakha tyla) and ways of speaking in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District. Following Hanks’ (1996) approach to communicative practice that unites ideology, activity and formal structure, I explore the maintenance of Sakha ways of speaking among Sakha-Russian bilinguals. The past Tsarist and Soviet regimes are analysed according to how their language policies and plans have shaped the current Sakha communicative practices in urban and rural locales. Through the analysis of discourse surrounding language ideologies and the examination of how language ideologies are reflected in, or challenged by daily communicative practices, I show how both ideologies and practices have been reinforced or transformed due to the shifting socio-political situation of the past two post-Soviet decades. Bilingual speakers also move toward, or away from, different languages, following language trajectories. Factors such as social groups, educational history and migration patterns all shape language socialization over a speaker’s lifetime, illustrating how the development of a linguistic repertoire is a dynamic process. Examining patterns of mobility among Sakha-Russian speakers, I trace how Sakha communicative practices are relocalized within urban and rural spaces; speakers’ movement between these spaces affects both the practices and shifting indexical fields attached to linguistic features. Through investigating Sakha-Russian code-switching and code-mixing, I concentrate on how speakers ‘move’ within and between languages and discuss what communicative choices may index for different interlocutors. When examining both speakers’ connections between village and city as well as the movement between Sakha and Russian ways of speaking, boundaries are blurred. Examining how ways of speaking Sakha might be conceived of as existing along a spectrum, the divisions between languages are challenged. The first chapter of this thesis provides an introduction to the Sakha language, its speakers, and the Sakha Republic, as well as an overview of the central research questions and the theory in which this work is grounded. Chapter Two presents further information on the fieldsites, while also introducing the research approach and the types of data gathered and examining the researcher’s position and ethical considerations. Chapter Three is focuses on the history of Sakha language policy and planning, and how it has shaped current communicative norms and language ideologies in urban and rural environments. Chapter Four is concerned with the changes in language policy and planning in the Republic of Sakha in the post-Soviet era (from the early 1990s until the time of research in 2010-2011). The effect of shifts in both of population and politics on both language policies and practices are described. Language ideologies that gained purchase in the post-Soviet era are described, along with the implications of these ideologies for language practices. Chapter Five presents an approach to understanding mobility and movement and its relationship to Sakha communicative practices, examining how relationships based on zemliachestvo (the sense of being compatriots, people of one land) support village people in the city while also playing a crucial role in maintaining Sakha language practices. New spaces and fields for Sakha communicative practices are also mentioned, in particular mobile telephony and the internet. In Chapter Six, issues of Sakha language acquisition and socialization are discussed, as speakers move toward or away from the Sakha language throughout their lifetimes. Factors, in particular interpersonal relationships, are described in terms of how they shape language socialization; both ideological and infrastructural factors connected to language acquisition are investigated in order to ascertain the difficulties new learners of the Sakha language might face. Chapter Seven is an in-depth look at Sakha-Russian language contact and the code-mixing and code-switching practices that occur among bilinguals, focusing on what mixing language ‘features’ can index for village-identifying and city-identifying speakers. Finally, Chapter Eight concludes the dissertation by revisiting its main themes, as well as identifying gaps that arose during this research in order to identify areas for further exploration.

Lamaholot is a population found on Flores and in the Solor Archipelago of Eastern Indonesia. The population is village-based and divided into patrilineal descent groups. Marriage is coupled with bridewealth and follows a pattern of asymmetric marriage alliance between descent groups. This thesis shows that a small group of Lamaholot in the administrative regency of East Flores shares certain traditions with a neighbouring population called Ata Tana ‘Ai. Ata Tana ‘Ai are a sub-group of the Sikka population in the administrative regency of Sikka. Descent group among Ata Tana ‘Ai are matrilineal and households were traditionally based in scattered gardens. Marriage is not coupled with bridewealth and instances of asymmetric marriage alliance between descent groups are here a consequence rather than a cause of marriage. The current fieldsite seems to have been part of the ceremonial system of Ata Tana ‘Ai and also to have shared a tradition of dispersed settlement in the gardens. The descent groups might initially have been matrilineal, but in the recent past there was also a habit of dividing children between the parental descent groups. Recent traditions of dividing children can be found throughout central-east Flores, but seemingly not to same extent as at the fieldsite. The payment of elephant’s tusks was a central feature in the acquisition of group members at the fieldsite and could be paid by both men and women. These payments were not necessarily tied to marriage and did not serve as bridewealth. In the last century outer social factors, such as the Catholic mission and the creation of the Dutch colonial state, have resulted in that many of the traditional practices at the fieldsite have been replaced with traditions from Lamaholot elsewhere. The residence pattern is now village-based, but gardens retain a central social and ritual position. The role of the elephant’s tusks has taken different expressions throughout this period of social change, and alongside the changing role of tusks, the traditional social and material authority of women at the fieldsite has declined, whereas that of men has increased. This thesis examines the current and the traditional practices in and around the fieldsite, and focuses on local definitions of descent group, kinship, and inheritance, looking at both biological and social perspectives.

Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken at sea in north-west Scotland, this thesis builds a labour and class analysis of human-environment and human-machine relations. Fishing 'grounds' are constituted through metabolisms of labour as fishermen develop the affordances of their environments to make them productive. Places are constituted as fishermen transform them through their labour, judge them as significant through their productivity, and name them through the social process of collectively developing their affordances. Fishermen have developed complex techniques for extending their bodily senses far beneath the sea and working there. Tension is manipulated in these extended working practices, and control over these processes must be maintained in order for them to be carried out safely. However, social relations can affect the exercise of control and the practice of maintenance to shape tools and machines around one's body and according to one's intentions. Techniques for moving through the land and seascape include tools and electronic devices such as the GPS, and market and class relations affect what tools are developed and how skippers and crew relate to them. Market pressures are incorporated into the daily lives and subjectivities of commercial fishermen, and can determine the species that are targeted and what techniques are used. They have also affected the relation between fishing boat owners, skippers, and crew as a transition from shared ownership and shared payment to casual labour and low-waged migrant labour has taken place. Class relations affect fishing techniques, subjectivities, their exposure to violence and danger in their work, their control over their own practices and skills, the balance between their work and the rest of their lives, the cosmopolitainisation of their workplaces, and their ability to develop affordances according to their own interests. Work under capitalism is regularly experienced both as an alienating and as a relational, and people develop multiple subjectivities which they draw on as they decide how to act. An 'ideology of nature' has developed with capitalist class relations and division of labour which contributes to mainstream conceptions of the sea as a wilderness where human labour is only destructive.