Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, People's Republic of China, I offer a reading of Reform and Opening (Gaige Kaifang) in terms of how individuals recognized, manipulated, avoided, and responded to the Chinese state apparatus during the Deng...

Economic anthropologists studying craft commercialization have typically focused on changes in work organization associated with new international commodity chains linking artisans, development organizations, wholesalers, and store owners. Few researchers, however, have carefully examined the...

Many products consumed on college campuses such as coffee and chocolate come from developing countries where producers are often paid insufficiently and exploited. Fair Trade certification of products guarantees producers a fair price and other social benefits. The objective of my CE/T project...

Life history theory postulates tradeoffs of current versus future reproduction; today women face evolutionarily novel versions of these tradeoffs. Optimal age at first birth is the result of tradeoffs in fertility and mortality; ceteris paribus , early reproduction is advantageous. Yet modern...

Using the dynamic social world of tournament bass fishing as a backdrop, this research combined qualitative and quantitative research methods in a grounded theory approach for the study of commodification, serious leisure and the relationship between these two important social phenomena....

One surprisingly unstudied and little documented aspect of the present-day African market system– almost impossible to ignore when one is walking the streets of Kampala and bombarded by its presence– is second-hand clothing. This study investigates the history, systems, and perceptions of...

The credibility of bite mark analysis as a forensic science is under fire in our legal system. The basis of opinions regarding the probability of a dental pattern observed in bite mark evidence matching a suspect's dentition has not been objectively substantiated. Though guidelines and standards...

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of small business entrepreneurship and developing capitalism in the Russian Republic of Karelia. The entrepreneurial-minded individuals at the heart of my research began organizing labor and production in the mid 1990s to create businesses that are now...

This dissertation is based on fifteen months of field research in Shanghai and Beijing conducted in 2002 and 2004. The central question with which this dissertation is concerned is how clothing and the clothing industry is constituted by and constitutive of the phenomenal changes that have taken...

This work is about the restructuring of industry in a New England community and the reactions to that restructuring by various segments of the community's population. Specifically, the work concerns the community's attempts to adapt to the restructuring and to "redevelop" the area. It maintains...