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My thesis questions common assumptions that mass production and distribution diminishes the spiritual power of objects. The rice scoop (shamoji) provides a case study of a material form which functions as a vehicle of spiritual power in Japan. The shamoji is much more than a mere kitchen utensil.It is also a recognised national symbol linked with chancing ideas concerning rice, feminine gender roles and spirituality. Moreover, as an idiom the shamoji has many unrecognised consequences. Seventy percent of all Shamoj in Japan are distributed via Miyajima,a small island located Southwest of Hiroshima in the Japanese Inland Sea. An ethnographic investigation, firstly, explores the ramifications of shamoji for different groups involved in its production, distribution and consymption on the island. Secondly, an analysis of consumption of shamoji among various segments of urban Japanese provides insights into religious and social practices in the domestic and public domains of life. I argue that the commodification of shamoji and their increased distribution to major cities via multiple distribution networks does not diminish their spiritual power. Instead, this process enhances their spirituality, spreading the fame of Miyajima and its shamoji. My work addresses issues such as the impact of commercialisation upon religious form,the way spirituality is embodied in material culture and the link between formal religion and the everyday life of the household. The core contribution of this study is to rethink the embodiment of spirituality in the context of modernity and mass consumption and the role industrially produced and commercially distributed commodities play in the democratic distribution of spiritual power. Unlike previous studies, my thesis presents a more comprehensive example directly entering the world of 'the tourist trade of souvenirs' and 'the arena of women and everyday domestic consumption'. Within these contexts assumptions about the dissipation of spirituality are much more entrenched.

This thesis explores the ways in which specialty coffee is consumed in Brazil, the world's largest coffee-producing nation and a rising consumer power. A central aim of this thesis is to address how the consumption of a globalised and modern good such as specialty coffee is experienced in a culture and context that has historically been exploited for the production of that very good, and that now finds itself unevenly positioned in the global consumer market. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with specialty coffee enthusiasts and professionals in the city of São Paulo, this thesis explores how a network of individuals that I call the 'apaixonados'-those passionate about coffee-engage individual aspirations and passions to navigate the boundaries and frictions between their local coffee consumer culture and what is discursively constructed as a 'global coffee community.' To explore how global consumer inequalities are manifest in Brazil, I begin by introducing the emic idea of 'tipo exportação,' a classificatory and experiential notion used to describe goods that are produced domestically but perceived to be of exportation (i.e., high) quality, and are typically destined for foreign consumption. Through my engagement with how tipo exportação is lived, I show how echoes of Brazil's colonial past inform contemporary structural constraints that stifle apaixonados' access both to foreign specialty and Brazil's own best coffee. I examine the ways in which apaixonados work within, through, and against these trade structures to obtain the coffees they desire, and show how the consumption of specialty coffee is used to mark specific forms of cosmopolitan aspiration and local prestige. The practical adaptations my participants make to key concepts in this 'global coffee community'-namely, authenticity and origin-in response to trade regulations that prohibit the importation of green (raw) coffee into Brazil reveal possibilities for the incorporation of more forms and spaces of labour into the wider ethical consumption discourse by taking account of the 'view from the South.' By adding a hybrid producer-consumer perspective to prevailing models of coffee consumption experiences-which have historically been centred in coffee-importing nations and drawn much of their meaning from coffee's travel from its agricultural origin and subsequent exoticism-this research contributes to anthropological debates on the politics and economics of food and consumption cultures in a globalising but unequal world.

Based on twelve months of fieldwork with dyeing craftspeople on the biodiverse island of Amami Ōshima in southern Japan, this thesis explores the complex, often contradictory, intertwining of preservation practices, resource extraction, and access to land that define local relationships with the natural environment. It thereby aims to question widespread discourses about sustainability that assume that small scale ʻtraditionalʼ craft is low impact and therefore more environmentally sustainable. Using apprenticeship methodologies, I reveal that Amamian craft producers are subject to social, economic and bureaucratic pressures, precarities and hierarchies that have equivalences to those widespread in industrial settings. Against a backdrop of uncertainty and instability, my research participants navigate geographically specific practices of ecological care, foraging, cultivating, processing and dyeing and temporally specific experiences of labour migration and lifestyle aspiration. By focusing on their dynamic relationship with local ecologies in order to produce (global) commodities, I was able to study sustaining processes in practice. This in turn forced me to rethink the ideology of sustainability and argue instead for a broader understanding of the extraction, life and value of materials. Value, in this formulation, is not only concentrated on the economic but distributed in ways that benefit the health of a wider conception of community, ecology and sustainability.

Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in a luxury square and a council estate in Chelsea, London, this thesis questions widespread conceptualisations of empty homes as sites of decay and decline associated with a loss of community. I combine current debates about the transformation of homes into financial assets with the latest material culture approaches to land, belonging and the home, to offer unique insights into everyday experiences of living alongside empty homes. Through rituals and practices such as gardening, visiting the nearby cemetery, drawing family trees and carol singing, the participants in my research created strong feelings of belonging and identity amidst flows of capital and the financialisation of housing. By focusing on specific creative practices that residents engage in to battle or conceal emptiness across the two sites, the thesis extends beyond the policy-oriented approach of "solving" the problem of emptiness, while allowing for a critical interrogation of which homes fall within this problematisation in the first place. I argue that the perceived emptiness is less about absence and more about neglect towards particular forms of care. By paying close attention to practices of care and the trope of the community that is evoked across both my sites, my research transcends any simplistic binary narrative of emptiness as absence or crisis and reveals instead how the concept is linked with deeply ingrained patterns of ownership, cycles of renewal and long-lasting relationships to land.

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.

This thesis considers how households in Providence, Rhode Island in the United States negotiate uncertainty and sustain wellbeing in their everyday lives. Drawing on twelve months of participant observation and interviews in eighteen middle class households in recent states of transition, the thesis introduces the concept of 'everyday uncertainty,' which encapsulates embodied senses of not knowing and conditions with unknown outcomes. Everyday uncertainty emerges as relational and productive, mediated through social, material, and individual means, and as entangled in the desire to cultivate wellbeing or the good life. Adapting an everyday material culture approach to the home, the ethnography attends to material culture and everyday practice, participant narratives, the atmosphere of space, and the home as a part of the nation and city. For the middle class homes described,ontological security, aspiration, improvisation and creativity, and the material environment of the city emerge as core facets of everyday uncertainty and the making of the good life. I draw their experiences together to argue that the 'frontier' of new American futures can be found in the home. This study of 'everyday uncertainty' sheds light on what people have to negotiate in conditions that are not particularly precarious or insecure. The ordinariness of everyday domestic lives helps begin to untangle the nuances between innate human improvisation and the neoliberal expectation of individual adaptability, particularly in the United States context.

This thesis explores the ways in which the kimono retail industry in contemporary Japanese society is changing in response to the economic crisis of the 1990s and the declining popularity of the kimono as formal wear, leading to falling demand and sales. A central aim of this thesis is to address the lack of academic literature focused on the kimono, particularly economic aspects of the kimono such as the way it is made, sold and consumed. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Aichi prefecture, Kyoto, Tokyo and Yamagata with kimono shop owners, wholesalers, craftspeople, writers, bloggers, designers, government officials and consumers, this thesis explores how a small but influential group that I call the 'kimono fashion network' are aiming to change the industry from within by marketing the kimono as fashion and framing the kimono as a lifestyle choice. Their efforts have led to a monumental shift in manufacturing, marketing and selling strategies that have effectively aligned the kimono with global discourses about fashion. This shift has split the kimono retail industry into two camps: those who sell kimono as ceremonial wear for key ritual occasions such as weddings, funerals, tea ceremonies, coming of age ceremonies, graduation and school entrance ceremonies, and those who sell it for fashion. I begin by examining the socio-economic factors that led to falling demand and therefore falling sales in the industry, before exploring how the industry is structured in terms of production and distribution. Finally, I explore how and why the kimono fashion network have gone about changing the industry from within. Adding a different perspective to prevailing understandings of traditional culture in Japan as a vehicle for cultural nationalism, I argue that the contemporary kimono fashion movement has many similiarities with the global phenomenon of lifestyle consumer culture to be found across industrialised nations.

Despite the historical associations of shared living with economically and socially marginalised populations, contemporary sharehouses in Japan are seen and marketed as a new foreign lifestyle import that offers an alternative to living alone or in the family home. Based primarily on nine months of intensive fieldwork during residence in a sharehouse, interviews with sharehouse professionals, and discourse analysis of marketing materials, the present work discusses the gaps and consonances amongst the promises set forth in sharehouse marketing, my housemates' desires and expectations, and the realities of living with strangers for the first time and in the absent a template for social etiquette. The thesis considers the contemporary 'sharehouse boom' in the context of social and economic change. It considers what the desire for an experimental lifestyle indicates about young people's beliefs about their personal futures and the future of Japanese society, and considers the extent to which their desires and expectations are fulfilled.

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.

Aspiration has become a political buzzword, and the rhetoric surrounding 'raising aspirations' to improve futures has filtered down to primary school level. Some researchers have critiqued the rhetoric as vacuous without material investment, and at worst, detrimental to disadvantaged groups. Whilst engaging with these ideas, this research offers a radical rethink. Firstly, rather than approaching the issue from a policy-driven perspective, it presents an emic view of children's aspirations. Instead of applying a categorisation of aspirations as 'high' or 'low' (and therefore able to be 'raised'), it examines both the content and context of aspirational statements. Secondly, and more crucially, it does not just examine children's elicited representations of their futures (or presents), but engages with children's spontaneous practices occurring in time. This kind of engagement is rare, but is one of the possibilities and benefits of ethnography. My fieldwork involved almost total immersion into children's life-worlds. Using a method of 'full participation' with children, I took part in my participants' practices for the greater part of each day over 15 to 18 months. In documenting both their everyday practices and their 'in time' narratives spontaneously embarked upon, I am able to reconcile the real-time 'flow' of life with the 'fixings' of meaning people everywhere construct in order to make meaning in and of their lives. In telling futures, my participants employed the flexibility of narrative in optimistic expressions of ideal competence, ownership and autonomy that asserted the teller's personhood in the present - as able to act; effectual; recognisable by others; and worth knowing. In their telling, aspirations were not so much individually motivational, as they were an inter-subjective action in the world with productive power that could and did have 'future' effects.

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.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Seoul from July 2012 until July 2013, this dissertation offers a novel perspective on human-animal interactions and public discourses regarding livestock versus pet moral boundaries in contemporary Korea. I aim to explore how Koreans struggle to make sense of the tension between the emergence of animal welfare and the perpetuation of traditional health behaviours that involve animal processing. The focus will be on why participants in my study, whether activists or not, defended both animal ethics and cat and dog meat consumption, while including Korean animals in fluid and instrumental conceptions of Koreanness. I have analysed a variety of discourses produced by both Korean and non-Korean, academic and non-academic stakeholders, in order to reveal the on-going tension between these powerful ubiquitous ideas and the lived experience of Koreans today. Moreover, I examine how the aesthetics of cruelty and empathy is employed in order to singularize livestock into companion animals thereby transgressing cultural taboos regarding Western ethics of species separation. I also demonstrate that converging and conflicting economic, political, social and cultural agendas are responsible for making Korea’s public discourses about animal welfare very unsettled. My research thus contributes to key anthropological debates about the cross-cultural circulation and cross-fertilisation of moral values that impact the ethics of post-industrial human-animal interactions; and about the influence of policy dialogue, at both national and international levels, on applied animal ethics, cultural stigmatization and the reinforcement of national sentiment.

This thesis examines the circulation of physical music media (78rpm records, LPs, CDs, tape) in the independent music marketplace. It is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Austin, Texas, amongst the producers of goods for the independent marketplace, independent music stores and consumers of these goods and services. Against prevailing constructivist interpretations, I will argue for the value of authenticity as an analytical anthropological concept because it unites what my research participants value about materiality, technology, and marketplace relationships. In the independent marketplace for physical music media, authenticity is a multi-local, multi-vocal phenomenon. A nexus of economic rationales, design, reproduction-technologies, histories and personal conduct interact in an ongoing process that authenticates music commodities and their marketplace. This means that particular commodities are sought out over others on account of the multi-local authenticities they anchor. The thesis firstly demonstrates how the independent music scene safeguards claims to authentic identities by constructing an opposition to the mainstream, drawing on discourses of ethical production and consumption, sound technologies, spaces of consumption and cultural production. Secondly, I will uncover how physical music media and sound-reproduction technologies are assessed as effective providers of authentic musical reproductions according to their historical contingencies and performative material capacities. Thirdly, I develop the notion of the scene (Shank 1994) from its previously genre-fixed perspective to encompass multiple musical styles operating within a common social network of producers, retailers and collectors. The pluralistic scene I describe utilises multiple musical genres and nuanced notions of materiality and authenticity to establish their complex hierarchy of sonic and technological experiences.

Amidst widespread concerns about aging on several levels ranging from the personal to the societal, this dissertation examines the construction of meaning in life and older age in contemporary Japan. Based on an ethnographic account of a community salon in Southern Osaka, it explores the experiences of older people and their ideas of the good and meaningful life, while arguing that than an anthropology of the elderly can reveal a far wider scope of issues than aging alone. Drawing on a socio-narratological approach, I show how stories connect people, form a shared body of knowledge, inform our understanding of the everyday, and provide frameworks for our choices. I argue that the capacity of narratives to create coherence and make sense of seemingly random and unconnected events can help to reveal existential issues, and that narrative analysis may therefore be a powerful tool for creating an existential anthropology capable of elucidating and understanding deeply personal dilemmas in their social and cultural context. The ethnography and life stories of elderly salon goers, volunteers and others involved in a local Non-Profit Organisation raise important issues of autonomy and dependence, sociality and isolation, care and concern. People express concern for others through practices ranging from gift-giving, visiting, balanced forms of polite yet friendly discourse, the provision of information, and volunteering in the salon and beyond. I argue that older Japanese are as much providers of care as recipients of it, thereby challenging the constructed image of the elderly as frail and dependent, even though maintaining independence relies paradoxically on cultivating multiple dependencies on others. Navigating the tensions between the benefits of rich social ties and a desired level of separation in which the burden imposed is minimised, or between dependence and freedom, emerges as central to the balancing acts required for living well.

This thesis demonstrates how children challenge the boundaries adults place on them, out of concern for their safety, through child-specific cultural practises. The thesis argues that these boundaries emerge from contemporary changes in the perception of risk to children and have driven the systematic limitation of spaces that children are allowed to experience on their own. Based on data collected among elementary school-age children during twelve months of fieldwork (2008-2009), across multiple sites in the city of Vancouver, Canada, I argue that children creatively adapt to spatial and social limits imposed on them through play, consumption and exchange. Moreover, the research demonstrates that through gathering social knowledge and experimenting with self-presentation and systems of social order, children create a sophisticated peer culture. This incorporates social differentiations and hierarchies that differ from those of adult society however, are interdependent with it. My work thus challenges the position of children as objects and ‘anecdotes’ in anthropology: considered ‘works in progress’ and lacking full status as persons in society. Rather, I argue that they should be treated as competent social actors in their own right with their own social meanings and cultural practises.

This dissertation considers the place in anthropology of ‘production’ generally, and ‘engineering’ specifically, by asking the simple question: How do people make things? Scholars of material culture have until recently focused on issues of consumption, especially the consumption of commodities (Miller), and considered production only in the abstract. Other theoretical approaches are therefore drawn upon to act as a framework for the thesis, including network theory (Law and Latour), and environmental relationism (Ingold). A methodology of ‘parallel fieldwork’ was developed (from Bourdieu), to situate myself as an experienced engineer carrying out anthropological fieldwork. Work in a ‘familiar’ environment (the Didcot Railway Centre, UK) was used to provoke thoughts about engineering in my primary fieldsite (the Kelabit highlands, Borneo). Data from the UK thus helped frame my analysis of Kelabit engineering, presented here in four parts. First, using the construction of two bridges as a case study, I suggest that a design can be seen as the revelation of a potential future, rather than a complete plan, as is suggested by design researchers such as Lawson and Norman. Then, by looking at changing traditions of house-building, I demonstrate the intimate relationship between materials and environment, even as the environment becomes more industrialised (Tsing), and consider this example in the light of debates about materiality (Miller; Ingold). Personal involvement in the conception and building of a new suspension bridge allowed me to investigate in some depth the act of construction. As a communal project, this incorporated aspects of individual skill, in the way that Ingold has described, but also the organization of people, tools and materials, akin to Law’s ‘heterogenous engineering’. This leads me to conclude that a theory of engineering might come from due consideration of both these approaches to relational thinking. Finally, I describe an abandoned longhouse and trace its deconstruction, suggesting that this is an example of creative destruction (Colloredo-Mansfeld), and re-materialization (Gregson). The dissipation of the material parts of the building shows that engineered objects should be seen as an ongoing process of material creation and disposal, and not a unified whole. In conclusion, my hope is that this dissertation contributes to ideas about the place and nature of material culture, and advocates a more prominent place for ‘production’ within anthropology.