School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemConsuming Chance: The Ethics and Enchantments of Promotional Competitions( 2023-09)Promotional competitions are a ubiquitous form of marketing in Australia and Britain, employed to incite sales, increase brand consideration, and build market research databases. While the lure of prizes such as cash, cars, holidays, and free products encourage millions of people to enter these competitions casually and infrequently, some people, known as ‘compers’, enter regularly and diligently. This thesis explores and analyses the ethics and enchantments of compers and the broader historical, commercial, and cultural context in which this practice occurs. Based on ethnography amongst compers from Australia and Britain between late 2017 and early 2023, interviews with marketers and advertisers, and auto-ethnography, I propose that regularly entering promotions competitions is akin to ‘consuming chance’. In other words, through entering competitions compers invite possibility and magic into their lives and, in effect, ingest chance. As an omnipresent yet often unrecognised feature of contemporary capitalist life, I argue that chance is a distinctly modern construct, which can suspend, widen, and absorb ideas about how the future is made, influenced, and decided. Consuming Chance is intended as an intervention into dominant anthropological ways of understanding chance, consumerism, and capitalist life. Rather than evidence of millenarian capitalist trends of abundance without effort (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2000) I demonstrate how compers conceive of their practice in terms of vocation, duty, and responsibility. This Weberian reading is then subverted, and I argue that far from disenchantment, opportunities to consume chance can provide magico-religious experiences. Rather than an ‘iron cage’ of rationality, modernity has become re-enchanted, due to the prevalence of chance in everyday life (cf. Weber 2005 [1904]).
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ItemHere, you can live well: Pollution, rural livelihood and the hardness of place on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia( 2022-11)This thesis gives an ethnographic account of how Quehuaya, an Aymara community on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, is navigating a future circumscribed by water pollution, climate change and the policies of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) government. As rural livelihoods such as fishing and agriculture become increasingly unviable, a collective life lived in dialogue with the landscape is coming under threat. In response, community members make use of emerging opportunities presented by the MAS indigenist-developmentalist program, the burgeoning urban economy of the nearby city of El Alto, and ongoing opportunities for migration. I develop an account of the hardness of place itself – its solidity in the face of flux – to foreground the dynamics underlying its ongoing but shifting role in this turbulent and threatening context. To unravel the dynamics underlying the hardness of Quehuaya as a place, I demonstrate how the community is reproduced through an Andean collectivism built on practices of livelihood, landscape ritual and syndical political organisation. I analyse how these express Andean ontologies of place, as enmeshed with collectivity and the non-human. Central to my argument is a dialogic theory of agency, which accounts for both individual and collective forms of agency as emergent from a prior intersubjectivity. The hardness of place in Quehuaya rests on the dialogue between the collective will and authorities responsible for establishing relations with the exterior worlds of both landscape and the institutional sphere. This is key to reproducing a cosmology of circulation that constitutes the community in place. This attention to dynamics enables an analysis of ontologies of place that avoids an excessive constructivism that would elide their determining power, without collapsing into essentialism. I demonstrate how in Quehuaya, the cosmology of circulation and the modes of personhood associated with it are threatened as its constitutive relations are disrupted. This is affecting the role of place as an anchor for collective identity and the political possibilities of response to the pollution crisis. I further demonstrate how community members strive to re-establish the stability of place through innovation in livelihood and engagements with state and development actors. These efforts promise to use the material, cultural and relational resources of place to renew the circulatory flows on which it depends, and thereby re-establish the authority of landscape. However, this pursuit of increased articulation with a wider world through novel forms of engagement with the global economy – such as tourism – and the contradictions of the MAS state exacerbates fundamental tensions between individual and collective forms of agency. While the scale of changes threatens to overwhelm the community’s ability to integrate them, I argue that the techniques of Andean collectivism are fundamentally oriented towards the maintenance and steering of collective trajectories in an inherently unpredictable and dangerous world, and a recognition of the unavoidable limits of human agency. This thesis thus offers a contribution to the theorisation of collective life in the context of a shared world becoming increasingly uncertain for all of us.
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ItemRemembering wartime rape in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina( 2018)Remembering Wartime Rape explores the complicated history of rape during the Bosnian war (1992-1995) and the collective efforts of local populations to (dis)remember the painful legacies of violence over more than two decades since the close of conflict. The organised sexual assaults of more than 20,000 women and girls was a defining characteristic in the history of Bosnia’s bloody secession from the former Yugoslav federation and the memories of such violence continue to influence the post-war recovery of communities throughout the small Balkan state. The research draws on intimate accounts of women’s suffering over the four years of conflict as well as personal stories of survival in the aftermath of the violence to provide a thick description of the place of rape narratives in Bosnia’s post-conflict memoryscape. Ethnographic data was collected over an extended period of 21 months in the two key fieldwork locations of Selo and Gradić in the Republika Srpska. The distinctive political, economic, religious, and social contexts in each community produced different dominant mnemonic threads as well as many and varied ways of collectively managing the sensitive local histories of war rape. The public discourse on the subject is, thus, explored through different notional frames as they emerged organically in each site over the course of fieldwork. The dissertation specifically employs the theoretical schemata of public secrecy (Taussig, 1999) and its relevance to the sensitive task of memory making in the village of Selo, and the grey zone (Levi, 1989) and its bearing on the recollections of women concentration camp survivors in the town of Gradić. In adopting these two principal thematic frameworks, Remembering Wartime Rape focuses on the discursive processes through which memories of sexual violence from the recent conflict are selected, shaped, and institutionalised in each of the key communities. It questions the ways in which women survivors are represented or erased in the crafting of official histories and the consequences of such for fostering social solidarity and division among those with competing versions of the ‘truth’. In doing so, the research considers which elements of women’s experiences of rape are more easily remembered and which are excluded or deliberately ‘forgotten’, which are grieved, and which are valorised, what complex reality is simplified as a result, and what broader purpose these interpretations serve. The research concludes with a discussion of the importance of enhancing current methodologies to explore more thoroughly the limits and the possibilities for both collective and personal mourning and for re-imagining social worlds in the aftermath of an immense disruption such as war. In exploring the messiness of the Bosnian memoryscape two decades after the close of conflict, the dissertation refrains from any attempt to establish a singular metanarrative of war rape and, instead, seeks to evoke a sense of the ineffable experience of living alongside memories of sexual violence in their countless manifestations and of the meanings and creativity always inherent in both individual and collective approaches to suffering, survival, and post-war reconstruction.
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ItemThe youth of Panama: everyday negotiations of neoliberal development in an urban context( 2018)This thesis provides an ethnographic analysis of how young lower middle-class urban Panamanians navigate and negotiate neoliberal macro-economic transformations that have accelerated since the 1990s, from increasingly precarious and marginalised positions in society. Unlike much of Latin America which has gained global interest through the turn to centre-left and leftist governments in recent years, Panama has consistently adopted market-oriented policies following structural adjustments programs. Particularly under the administration of former right-wing president, Ricardo Martinelli, the nation has capitalised on its geographic position as a global and regional hub to market itself to the global community through economic goals that seek to attract flows of international capital and foreign investment. It has subsequently focused its attention on developing Panama as an ideal site for luxury tourism, residential migration, and for multinational corporation regional headquarters, leading it to often be described as the most cosmopolitan metropolis in Central America. In spite of this, Panama remains greatly overlooked by anthropologists as a site of study for urban neoliberal development. From within the deepening of Panama’s global market integration, young Panamanians have found themselves navigating the intricacies of everyday urban life within structural conditions that increasingly favour the interests of the international and national elite. Their experiences in this thesis thus emerge as precarious, as known certainties of everyday activities like travelling to and from work, utilising or simply having linguistic or racial autonomy, or transitioning from education into stable waged-labour, are slowly eroded in favour of free market ethics of competition, austerity, and self-responsibilisation. This thesis seeks to capture the more surprising and unexpected ways in which market-oriented policies take shape in the Panamanian context. It pays heed to many unintended consequences of these market-led reforms such as traffic congestion and growing racial divides, and it posits that young Panamanians in this study emerge as important prisms through which various neoliberally-related social ills in Panama City become apparent. At the same time, it elucidates how young Panamanians quietly resist neoliberalism from subject positions in society. It posits that Panamanian youth uphold and create particular values and cultural practices such as interdependence and togetherness, that work against the needs of the Panamanian state.
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ItemInterrupting knowledge, decolonising care: understanding mental health with a refugee-run NGO in Sydney, Australia( 2017)Any expression of medical pluralism will reflect the organisation and hierarchisation of its traditions of knowledge. My thesis attends to moments in which diverse understandings of mental affliction are negotiated, and sometimes even silenced, in the networks and relationships surrounding a Sydney NGO. Here, alongside this NGO run for and by people from Central Africa, I explore approaches to questions of what mental affliction is, various notions of who (mis)understands it, and how afflictions and their percieved misunderstanding are dealt with. In the process, the category of ‘mental health’ emerges and disappears, is challenged and negotiated, within jostling epistemological frames of understanding. To examine this therapeutic landscape, I prioritise modes of analysis that are sensitive to the fluctuating complexities of caring for community through existing, yet not always equitable, structures for such care. I draw on affect theory’s slowness and attunement to the unseen, often unarticulated forces that unfold in encounters, conversations and in what is articulated (Stewart 2017: 192). Affective scenes provide an access point to each chapter's textured study of the refugee-migrant community health assemblage, which is examined in terms of: historical context (Chapter One), NGO sector development (Chapter Two), education (Chapter Three), belief (Chapter Four), faith (Chapter Five), and care (Chapter Six). Through such attention, this thesis asks after what medical pluralism looks like when a group of people with histories of a range of healing traditions—psychiatry, cosmopolitan medicine, religious faith healing, and spiritual cleansing of curses—move to Australia? How were these different knowledge traditions treated and talked about? And how could one meaningfully study these pluralities?—what would anthropological research and ethnographic writing, as modes of knowledge creation, come up against in trying to engage with plural traditions of knowledge? Through representational sensibilities, moments of ethnographic attention and narratives that circle back and interrupt themselves, this thesis builds an argument for ambivalence towards conclusive uses of knowledge. Ambivalence is presented as a counter to the kinds of simplified understandings of diversity that are often salient in the migrant health and community development sector, and that are shown, through this ethnography to beget subtle, structurally violent effects. I frame such ambivalence as an act of care. Part examination of the tensions “between fragmentation and connectedness-in-the-making” (Biehl and McKay 2012: 1210), part portrait of the tensions held in suspense when crafting an ethnography of knowledge(s), my work seeks to contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge and care.
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ItemThe winegrowers of Geelong and their search for the things that count( 2018)In the past fifty years there has been a boom in small-scale wine production on the periphery of large cities in temperate Australia. Geelong, in the southeast of Australia, is no exception. Two things are interesting about this movement, in Geelong at least. Firstly, despite the fact that growing grapes and making wine is largely a rural enterprise, traditional farmers are conspicuous by their absence. Secondly, it is well known that vineyard and winery work is hard and the economic rewards limited, yet people continue to engage in the production of wine. In my research, I have sought to explain what it is that draws people from the city to make wine. Many of these people use the French term terroir when they talk about their wines although many find it difficult to explain exactly what it means. In my research I examine the French notion of terroir, and in particular, the problem of translating the term into English. I develop an argument that to understand what terroir means, and indeed, to understand what is at stake for small-scale wine producers around the large post-industrial city of Geelong, requires a recalibration of the mind. I argue that many of those wine producers exhibit a sensibility better spoken of in terms of poetry rather that science or economics. Having reached that conclusion, I go on to explore whether this sensibility, found in the notion of terroir might not already exist in Australia in an Aboriginal concept of Country. In the light of our current ecological crisis, I ask whether fostering this sensibility might ameliorate some of the problems emerging in the rural sector and give us all model for securing a future worth living.
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ItemReconfiguring racism: youthful dynamics of conflict and conviviality in a culturally diverse, working-class high school( 2017)Youth, diversity and disadvantage are rendered a dangerous mix in contemporary Australia, with concern focused in particular on youth living in Australia’s most multicultural and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In this milieu, young people, and schools as ‘micropublics’, are often scrutinised as indicators of the health of multicultural societies with schools targeted as sites of intervention. Yet in the shadow of such moral panic, how does racialisation and racism actually feature in the lives of young people as they negotiate culturally diverse shared spaces? Do young people’s practices call for antiracist intervention or is there evidence of transformative ways of living with difference, which unsettles and advances current understandings of racism and conviviality in young lives? Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis explores these questions in the context of peer sociality at Greendale High in Melbourne – a school located in the heartland of current social anxieties about youth, multiculturalism and divisive population growth. While racism and conflict within a social cohesion rubric are positioned as anathema to successful multicultural living, research at the intersections of youth studies and urban multiculture increasingly shows that both conviviality and conflict can co-exist relatively easily within culturally diverse youth spaces. This literature further posits that young people shift between racist and convivial modes of relationality to navigate their complex social worlds. In this thesis I argue that this racism-conviviality binary framing fails to capture some of the diverse logics and practices within a multicultural peer culture. Through tracing when, where and how racialisation emerged in schoolyard conversations, social spaces, friendship dynamics and classroom discussions, this thesis illuminates how expressions of everyday racism and conviviality can be enmeshed in complex, relational, sophisticated and uneven ways. Reconciling dichotomous conceptual frames that position young people as moving back-and-forth between practices of exclusion and openness, I propose an alternative frame – a perverse form of everyday cosmopolitanism – through which to consider young people’s intercultural relations. Evolving from sustained ethnographic attention to Greendale student life, the concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ compels engaged scrutiny of the concepts of – and relationships between – ‘racism’, ‘conviviality’ and ‘conflict’ for understanding youth sociality. In doing so, I call attention to the limitations of current youth multiculture research, which commonly assumes a racism-conviviality binary a priori. If we are to work against racism, scholars and educators require more flexible and expansive conceptual tools that engage seriously with youth perspectives and young people’s situated rules of play in high school sociality.
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ItemSocial spaces of mediation: Tunisian ethnographic museums (1881-2015)( 2016)This study presents an analysis of the evolution of ethnographic museums in Tunisia, tracing their development from the period of French colonial rule up to the present. It documents and interprets the trajectory of museography in the country over nearly a century, demonstrating changes and continuities in role, setting and architecture across shifting ideological landscapes. The display of everyday culture is generally looked down upon as being kitsch and old-fashioned. My research shows that ethnographic museums in Tunisia have been highly significant sites in the definition of social identities. It is argued that these museums, both in their processes of conception behind the scenes and in their scenography itself, are more than nation-building instruments. They have worked as antechambers of society that diffuse social, economic and political tensions through a vast array of means such as the exhibition itself, architecture, activities, tourism, and consumerism. The thesis excavates the evolution of paradigms in which Tunisian popular identity has been expressed through the ethnographic museum, from the modernist notion of 'indigenous authenticity' under colonial time, to efforts at developing a Tunisian ethnography after Independence, and more recent conceptions of cultural diversity since the revolution. Based on a combination of archival research in Tunisia and in France, participant observation and interviews with past and present protagonists in the Tunisian museum field, this research brings to light new material on an understudied area.
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ItemProducing Melbourne’s farmers’ markets: local food, farming and 'feel-good' shopping( 2015)This thesis builds upon anthropological theories of modernity, production and consumption through ethnographic research, situated in the cosmopolitan city of Melbourne, the ‘foodie’ capital of post-industrial Australia. It examines how producers sold farming, good food and ‘feel-good’ shopping to their urban customers. Through storytelling about the hard yet idyllic farming way of life, producers also sold ’the good life’, based on aspirational urban constructions of a rural idyll, including attributes of honesty, simplicity, hard work and just reward.
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ItemAwkward engagements: the embodied experience of female converts to Islam( 2015)This thesis examines the phenomena of female conversion to Islam amongst a group of middle class Australian women. Conversion is conceived of as a deeply embodied project in which female converts create a pious and moral self by adhering to Islamic beliefs and practices. Through a detailed analysis of discussions at local mosque groups, I argue that conversion is an ‘awkward engagement’ between the converts desire for a new moral self and the practical conditions of their conversion, which work through, on and in their bodies. This thesis extends existing work on gender and religious conversion by drawing on theories of embodiment and practice, bringing it together with recent anthropological work on women’s participation in religious movements and Muslim piety. Theories of embodiment and practice, bridge the gap between lived experience, practice and discourse, and help complicate notions of the secular and religious, agency and submission.