Social Anthropology
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Browsing Social Anthropology by Subject "Anthropology"
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Item Open Access Bean There, Grind That: Queer Coffee Culture and the Politics of Place, Belonging and Representation(2016-09-20) Faranda, Daniel; Murray, David A. B.The gay village located in Toronto, Ontario, is generally thought by mainstream society to be excessively determined by the establishments, individuals and normative LGBTQ identity representations located in the area i.e. mostly white, middle/upper class. Based on this and the interviews with my informants, I assert how the dominance of normative LGBTQ identity makes the area over-determined. However, I will attempt to highlight the importance of alternative queer places along the strip in the Church and Wellesley Street area. My thesis will explore the relationship between place formations, LGBTQ identity construction, and coffee consumption. I aim to create a richer understanding of the various ways in which queer identities are understood, created, and negotiated within coffee shops. I highlight how, at times, queer coffee shops are open and dynamic, and allow for new and old meanings to become generated in and out of these places. Queer coffee shops shed light on how my research informants grapple and work with or against these complex sites of negotiations. Ultimately, queer coffee shops in the Church and Wellesley Street area are microcosms of the larger LGBTQ community in the same neighbourhood. These processes help to shape LGBTQ identity, membership, place, rootedness, and belonging while simultaneously encouraging misunderstanding, tension, conflict, and estrangement.Item Open Access "God Willing, I Will Do Something Else": Affective Intensities in Cruise Ship Tourism Encounters in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic(2022-03-03) Yusuf, Sarah Rubeyah; Little, William KennethBased on 7 months of fieldwork conducted in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, this dissertation explores the affective intensities that emerge from an ever-changing, unstable tourism imaginary of a paradisiacal Puerto Plata, a frame into which Carnival Cruises sails. Located in the Bay of Maimn, just west of Puerto Plata, Amber Cove is the first cruise ship venture in the area since the last cruise ship sailed away in the 1980s, a venture meant to reinvent and reinvigorate the tourism industry in the province. Touted as an "incredible project" by tourism officials, this research traces the tensions, the frustrations, the disappointments and the hopes that overspill from the tourism encounters that unfold in this new project that promised so many things. Drawing on Gordon's (1997) notion of haunting, this research contributes a unique perspective to important work in tourism studies already examining the historical and contemporary socioeconomic and political consequences of the tourism industry. It is a way to explore the particularities of individual experience without disconnecting them from the political economy (ibid., xvii), throwing into stark relief the structures of power that reach across time and space to make themselves known, felt and sensed in the present. By informing this project using theoretical work on affect, I consider the things that "don't add up" (Stewart 2008, 72), the things that provoke and compel, the "something more" (Stewart 1996, 5-6) that efforts to codify would "[strip] of the dense and deeply mortal flesh of life" (Pandian and McLean 2017, 4). In so doing, this dissertation addresses two questions: 1) How does the cruise ship tourism industry shape tourist-local interactions and the expectations, desires, confusions and disappointments on which these relationships are fashioned? 2) How do locals frame, understand and experience these new kinds of encounters given the shift from enclave resort tourism to cruise ship tourism? By exploring how the cruise ship tourism industry animates and enlivens the tourism frame in Puerto Plata, my research contributes to our understanding of what tourism encounters in a cruise ship tourism context can look and feel like, moving beyond a representational or "critical" theory approach to the industry (Stewart 2008).Item Open Access Pulp Friction: Nature, Politics and Plantation Forestry in Soriano, Uruguay(2016-09-20) Switzer, Michelle Barbara; McAllister, CarlotaBased on 14 months of fieldwork carried out in the capital of Montevideo and interior department of Soriano, Uruguay, this dissertation analyzes the growing tension between supporters and resisters of the countrys expanding pulp and exotic tree plantation industry. Since the creation of the Forestry Law in 1987, monoculture plantation forestry has grown, currently covering 1 million hectares of land. The ruling left-wing coalition, the Frente Amplio, has continued to support the large-scale, foreign-owned pulp/plantation industry despite its founding principles of carrying out agrarian reform and supporting the rural worker. Drawing from the theoretical work on boundary objects in science and technology studies (STS) as well as writings on the dialectical relationship between the state and civil society, this dissertation is broadly framed by three thematic concerns: 1) How do processes of state formation and market logics rearrange the natural environment? 2) How do such processes impact the relationships between local populations, their physical environment, and the state? 3) What does neo-extractivism do? Is neo-extractivism under the direction of a progressive state different from the kinds of extractivist projects that dominated in Latin America during the 20th century? Exploring how and why local populations respond to these entanglements in the ways that they do, I note that anti-industry activists make logical arguments based on their particular interpretations of economic development, natural production, and progressive politics, which clash with the states technical and reformed approach. As such, my research contributes to our understanding of the ways that social and political relationships and state formation projects form within in the context of large-scale neo-extractivist projects.Item Open Access Rights and Rescue: Ethical World Making in the Anti-Trafficking and Sex Worker Rights Movements in Canada(2019-03-05) McFadyen, Nicole Diane; Murray, David A. B.Grounded in ethnographic research on the anti-trafficking and sex worker rights movements in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with additional insights gathered from the migrant worker rights movement, and rooted in activist anthropology research methodologies, this dissertation explores social movements, interactions within and between them, and how human rights frameworks are differentially imagined, produced, and interpreted by them. Drawing on the anthropologies of humanitarianism, ethics, and human rights, as well as the interdisciplinary scholarship on social movements and critical feminist anti-trafficking studies, social movements are conceptualized as ethical worlds wherein the individual ethical orientations and ideological beliefs of movement members contribute to the movements guiding framework, with implications for how tensions and conflict are navigated, the activities of movement members, and discursive and in-person encounters between different social movements. With implications for how human rights are conceptualized, deployed, and engaged with by both privileged and differentially marginalized populations in Canada, this dissertation identifies and unpacks the hierarchies of suffering and compassion that sustain them and presents a valuable theoretical framework for investigating the privileging of some over others.Item Open Access Spiritual Economies of Evangelical Worship: Technology, Stewardship and Experience(2016-09-20) Baker, Laurie Mae; Schrauwers, AlbertThe present work explores how American evangelicals have learned to use and think about performance technology, such as professional audio, video and lighting technologies as they endeavour to craft worship environments. I track the discourses from trade publications, like Technologies for Worship Magazine (TFWM) and Worship Facilities Magazine and Church Production, in their devotion to bridge the divide between religion and technology to create a house of worship market. Both TFWM and Church Production participate in conferences where they offer education on technology use. Technologies for Worship Magazine is the educational basis for the TFW Pavilion and Worship Facilities and Church Production for an event called Worship Facilities Expo (WFX). Ethnographic research at these events reveals that evangelical worship technicians learn to cultivate dispositions towards stewardship and technical mastery through attending these technology exhibitions and conferences, by taking offered educational seminars. Training at the TFW Pavilion and WFX focussed on two main areas: first, how to use professional performance technologies, like audio amplification and control devices, lighting configurations, and video capture, production and broadcast systems. Second, training addressed the importance for church technicians to use technologies to create excellent and relevant worship experiences. By excellent, trainers meant worship practice that uses performance technologies seamlessly to create immersive experiences. Churches who strive for technological excellence embody the belief that the relevance of the church and its message among believers and non-believers is coupled with the use of technology to enhance the affective potential of the message delivered by the pastor. Yet, as church technicianslike audio or lighting engineersreflect on technology use, they reveal the ways that technology troubles contemporary worship practice as much as it augments the creation of poignant, immersive experiences.