2018
This thesis investigates how Kant’s views on international war and peace fit into his political writings as a whole, with particular focus on his concepts of culture and right. Recent literature emphasizes Kant’s resistance to European colonialism; some argue that this was grounded in a respect for cultural difference. But his broader emphasis on the duty to establish a “rightful condition” seems universal and nonnegotiable. I show in my thesis, primarily through a case study on cultural minorities in Canada, how Kant thought that difference could flourish within, and through, a system of binding laws. If we take Kant’s seemingly unfamiliar views seriously, it suggests that the agency of minority individuals and groups is more important than respect for cultural traditions and practices.
This thesis engages with scholarship on social development in the context of debates over public health reform in Karachi, Pakistan. By presenting a historical and modern-day ethnographic inquiry into Karachi’s public health infrastructure, I argue that wider economic and democratic development in Karachi have little causal significance on the state of this city’s public health system. Specifically, I use primary and secondary sources to understand the history of healthcare in Karachi from 1840 to the present and couple this with interviews with patients and doctors in contemporary Karachi to understand the receiving and delivery side of healthcare for the poor. Together with further insights from policy makers and health policy experts in Karachi, I situate the public health encounters of modern-day Pakistan within a broader political economy of the city. Moreover, this thesis explains the way disease and patienthood intersect with the political lives of those I interviewed, and how the history and political economy of Karachi have cemented specific antidevelopment institutions within the city today. Finally, I find that pervasive understandings of democracy among those whom I interviewed—doctors and patients alike—may have stifled social development in Karachi.
This thesis explores how Syrian refugees living in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan brought about improvements to services and camp governance through protest. Standard academic literature on protest links resources such as formal social movement organizations, strategy, and sustained efforts over time to successful outcomes. However, marginalized and vulnerable populations, including refugees in Zaatari camp, do not necessarily have access to these resources. I argue that refugees were successful in achieving desired protest outcomes in spite of being “resource-poor” because their disruptive tactics forced camp management to take note of their demands and, in the long term, generated new modes of interaction between refugees and aid workers. These new ways of interacting, in turn, enabled refugees to better negotiate and hold camp staff accountable to service delivery. My findings draw on sixty interviews conducted in 2016 and 2017 in Jordan, including thirty interviews with Syrian refugees and thirty interviews with aid workers and UN officials.
Between 1892 and 1929 there were three Indians elected to the British parliament, all representing British constituencies. These three men were the products of the same Bombay-based Parsi milieu, and represented predominantly working class districts in London, but espoused radically different combinations of ideologies—ranging from pro-Free Trade Liberal nationalism to antinationalist Conservatism and internationalist Communism. My thesis considers this transnational political phenomenon in relation to histories of the development of Indian national identity and of the British Empire. The first chapter discusses the motivations of the three MPs in getting involved in British politics, and focuses on the dynamics of transnational politics. I argue that the MPs used their status in Britain to win respect in India, and support in India to generate authority in Britain. The second chapter concerns the ideological underpinnings of transnational and imperial politics, looking at ideas of class unity, imperial idealism, and the prehistory of development economics. In my third chapter, I use quantitative data to examine the popularity of imperialism and the prevalence of racial prejudice in British electoral politics over this period.
Nigerian sex workers form an integral demographic of the street work scene in Marseille and other European cities. These young women have come to Europe in the name of a better future for decades, but enter a thorny intercontinental politics of migration, development, and sexuality as they become human components of trafficking routes and sex industries along their journeys. A constellation of government, medical, and NGO actors regulates the movement and determines the legality of these women’s presence. In the worst cases, such infrastructure can inflict profound violence upon vulnerable individuals. At their best, these actors attempt to identify and respond to the needs of these women in patchwork fashion. I seek to understand the Nigerian female sex worker as marked for violence on institutional and informal registers, as a locus of embodied (at times traumatic) experience, and as a receptive and agentive entity woven into acts and communities of caregiving. My research demonstrates in particular how distance management can be used as an intelligent method of survival within this landscape of precarity, but is not always within individual control. Most importantly, I advocate that although care is imperfect and some distances can never be breached, the need to go towards and care for those in vulnerable circumstances is a moral imperative and must be institutionalized in an effective, compassionate, and better manner.
This thesis proposes a new way of understanding the modern crisis of Islam: as a pedagogical and epistemological conflict, rather than a political or religious one. I first explore the premodern approach to Islamic pedagogy—one of the most consistent and well-developed fields in the Islamic intellectual tradition—through medieval texts on knowledge transmission and a brief anthropological look at a traditional learning community in Mauritania. Next I approach the historical modernization and bureaucratization of this system all over the Muslim world through secondary sources and the case study of French-occupied Tunisia, relying on archival research and interviews to show the development of modern state-controlled Islamic education. Finally, I make the argument that these two approaches to the transmission of religious knowledge are based in divergent understandings of what Islam is and how it can be known and lived. I also suggest that this fundamental difference may explain many modern approaches to living Islam, most notably violent antitraditionalism. This thesis uses a variety of methods to make an historical and theoretical argument that the intervention of modernizers, colonizers, and state actors into the premodern Islamic educational system has produced a new form of Muslim subjectivity which is disembodied, bureaucratized, and functionalized, rather than organic, personal, and living.
My thesis presents a case study of secular and national values in Sweden as experienced by Swedish Muslims. Though rather than being an ethnography of Muslims through the lens of Swedish identity, it is a study of Swedish identity through the eyes of Muslims. My project is brought alive by two years of ethnographic interviews and observations; more than just a decorative frontispiece for my argument, personal stories are at their heart national stories, and religious stories—nations and religions are inevitably composed of individual persons—and thus invaluable data for a study of identity. To reflect their centrality, I have broken up my chapters with ethnographic vignettes. My thesis argues that by asserting their belonging in Sweden and Swedish culture not merely irrespective of, but as a result of their faith, Muslims disrupt the secular narrative of Swedishness, revealing in the process that how that identity rests on a fragile division of public and private spaces and remains colored by post-Lutheran connections. The encounter of religious identity with a normatively secular culture represents not an empirical threat—an assault on Sweden’s secularity—but rather an ideological threat—a challenge toward the entire project of secularism.
The Hawaiian word ‘āina translates to “that which feeds.” The word indicates fertile land where freshwater and deep soil meet. The first people to settle the Hawaiian archipelago developed sophisticated modes of sustainable agriculture and aquaculture that produced an abundance of food that satisfied a thriving island population. While Hawai‘i was once a completely self-sufficient island nation, it now imports over 90 percent of its food consumption and exports roughly the same percentage of its food production. For the most geographically isolated state in the country, the issue of food security is a serious concern. An historical understanding of how the changes in land use and agriculture came about reveals a pattern of dewatering, dispossession, and displacement of Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous people of Hawai‘i) that began with the rise of plantation agriculture in Hawai‘i and continues to this day. Despite the state’s obligation to manage water as a public trust and to protect streams to ensure the adequate flow of water for cultural and ecological purposes, the burden to uphold the state’s mandate falls on the people as streams continue to run dry throughout Hawai‘i eliminating a critical habitat of many native species. The focus of my research is on Maui where Kanaka Maoli are partnering with environmental organizations and law firms to seek restoration of streamflow to their lands to rehabilitate the island’s degraded ecosystems so that future generations can continue to sustain their way of life as Hawaiians: hunting, fishing, and growing kalo.
In the past, many terrorist groups have employed insurgent tactics in order to combat conventional organizations. Yet, recent years have seen the rise of bureaucratic structures in global terrorist organizations, mirroring those of the very institutions that they look to fight. This thesis looks to explore the question, "Why do global terrorist organizations bureaucratize?" An organizational theory approach is used to investigate tradeoffs between bureaucratic organization and tactical considerations, such as security and resource efficiency. Through treating terrorist attack patterns as a policy process, quantitative methods are used to measure the bureaucratization of a chosen set of terrorist organizations. The model is then used to draw conclusions about how terrorist organizations allocate attentional resources and prioritize agenda items. Preliminary results show that terrorist "policy" processes are affected by external conditions, such as competition, at a higher rate than conventional bureaucracies are. Subsequent work will explore how terrorist bureaucracies adapt to changing environments, as well as the extent to which bureaucratization will remain a viable option in the current global landscape. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State will be used as primary case studies. The thesis will ultimately aim to present a comprehensive model of the various constraints that terrorist bureaucracies face.
My thesis explores the governance of a geoengineering experiment that will take place later this year. The Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), run by a laboratory at Harvard, is one of the first outdoor experiments with a technology known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). SAI involves injecting aerosolized particles, such as sulfate or calcite, into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and thus counteract some of the effects of climate change. Since SCoPEx will be one of the first experiments to observe these aerosols outdoors, it is controversial.
My research involved conducting deliberative democratic discussions about SCoPEx with local community members through the Harvard Decision Science Lab. After a presentation on SAI and SCoPEx, participants worked together to make recommendations about how the experiment should be governed. My initial findings show that the vast majority of participants felt that SCoPEx should go forward, even if they had reservations about geoengineering generally or the specifics of SCoPEx’s governance. Participants generally felt that SCoPEx’s governance structure needed to include more public outreach through the media on a national level (not just through focus groups or representative samples), more coordination with international governments, and more collaboration with governmental institutes (like NOAA) and international scientists. Participants were generally satisfied with SCoPEx’s funding, transparency, and analysis of environmental, health, and safety risks.
Moving forward, I want to analyze the most common concerns participants had about SAI more broadly and write about the challenges I had in communicating the complexity of the technology so that future experimenters can avoid them.
In the study of electoral systems, voter turnout is expected to be higher overall and vary less in response to district competitiveness in more proportional systems. However, empirical support for this theory is lacking. Current studies tend to rely on cross-national data and do not adequately study the role of party mobilization efforts in mediating the relationship between electoral systems and turnout. To build on this, I studied voter turnout and party mobilization efforts in elections to the Scottish Parliament and the UK House of Commons (focusing on electoral districts in Scotland). Because the Scottish Parliament’s mixed-member proportional electoral system is more proportional than the House of Commons’ first-past-the-post system, I could use these cases to study the effect of proportionality on mobilization and turnout. I interviewed political elites from the four main parties in Scotland about mobilization efforts for both parliaments and quantitatively studied this by relating candidate expenditures to election competitiveness. Overall, candidate expenditures were more closely related to competitiveness in House of Commons elections than Scottish Parliament ones. A case study I conducted of the Labour Party further supported this claim. I also related voter turnout in both elections to overall district competitiveness and found this relationship to be much stronger in the House of Commons elections than in Scottish Parliament elections. These results provide empirical support for the theory that more proportional electoral systems encourage more even mobilization efforts and voter turnout across districts regardless of competitiveness.
This thesis considers the experiences of community health workers in the Thinking Healthy Program, an intervention in Goa, India, in which mothers train to counsel other mothers with maternal depression. In shifting away from a public health framework of program efficiency and the recent anthropological interest of bureaucratic forces, this thesis lends attention to lay-counselors as caregivers. Building from Kleinman’s 2012 theory of caregiving as “transformative” to “both the caregiver and the person receiving care,” my project considers the impact of counseling on the lay-counselors. In particular, I ask: How has providing care impacted community health workers? How has being a mother and processing her own events of motherhood deepened the theoretical exchange of caregiving? How has the program impacted the delivery agents themselves? As an intern with the Thinking Healthy Program for the past four years, I borrow from participatory observation in office meetings, conferences, and events; caregiving sessions and supervisions; and informal gatherings with the lay-counselors across my nine months in the field. In addition, I work with textual copies of the program’s manuals and materials and an accumulation of thirty-six in-depth interviews conducted with counselors and their supervisors. In shifting away from both public health concerns of cost effectiveness and program efficiency, as well as anthropological interests in program bureaucracy, I lend attention to the daily experiences of lay-counselors as they give care within a public health context. In considering the engagements of community health workers, I hope to ask new questions of their experiences: experiences critical to mental health interventions, but largely absent in mental health literature.
Motivated by globalization and technological changes, which increasingly pay dividends to a skilled workforce, Ecuador undertook a drastic reform of its university system. Starting with the elimination of tuition, the Ecuadorian government began to promote its progressive social agenda while increasing its grasp over universities. The first objective of this study is to assess how this and subsequent legislation affected enrollment, particularly across income brackets and social backgrounds. The second objective is to assess student outcomes—something not yet done in Ecuador and infrequently done in other contexts—including graduation rates, average time-to-degrees, and after-graduation earnings profiles. Considering that these reforms were misapplied in certain regions of the country, especially the largest urban center of Guayaquil, a difference-in-differences estimation is used to approximate the causal impact of the reforms on enrollment and outcomes. Preliminary results suggest that enrollment increased among lower income brackets—though not by much for the lowest brackets—and that student earnings remained roughly constant across all regions. Though more work remains to be done on graduation rates and average time-to-degrees, these results are early signs that the government’s higher education agenda, part of its broader “Citizen’s Revolution,” succeeded in progressively expanding access to higher education yet failed to provide lower income brackets with meaningful improvements in the quality and outcomes of said degree plans.
Islamic finance prohibits charging interest, requires every investment to be based on a concrete vehicle, and mandates that one’s profits cannot be gained through others’ financial losses. In this medium, Malaysia turned itself into the premier Islamic finance hub of Asia with an Islamic finance industry of $142 billion. Although more than twenty countries have established Islamic banks, Malaysia stands out as the only country that centrally regulates Islamic and conventional branches side-by-side through the Bank Negara, its central bank. In that vein, my research asks the following set of questions: How has the emergence of Islamic financial products changed Malaysians’ fiscal affairs and identity politics? What symbolic dimensions do the Islamic financial products espouse, and how? How does religious and capitalist ethics negotiate influence over contemporary fiscal practices in Malaysia? Data were collected on more than 180 hours of participant observation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; para-ethnography was conducted in shariah-advisory and business development departments of two Malaysian Islamic banks; and more than thirty-five expert interviews conducted with managing directors of Islamic banks, policymakers, and professors were analyzed to draw conclusions from. My research concludes that Islamic banking in Malaysia engineers a new conception of clean and dirty across religious and practical realms; Islamic banks cleanse any impurities associated with the source of the capital deposited to the bank. Constructivist approaches to identity formation at a national level get confirmed through the case of Malaysia; invented traditions and legitimizing discourses function as effective tools to assist identity formation mechanisms. Lastly, capitalist ethics in their Weberian formulation are systematically reinterpreted by bankers and government officials to fit to the spiritual and moral needs of the life-worlds of a given population.
Project West Ford was a satellite communications experiment sponsored the U.S. Air Force in the early 1960s. Scientists dispersed millions of copper filaments into outer space so that the filaments would disperse and encircle the Earth, forming a medium against which one could bounce radio signals. The dipole belt, as it was called, would form the basis for a secure and indestructible military communications system. The experiment caused a furor in the international scientific community. Astronomers feared that the dipoles would permanently contaminate space and interfere with optical and radio astronomy. The U.S. government and its scientific advisors, meanwhile, insisted that the dipoles were harmless and temporary.
Though relatively obscure and understudied, this incident represents a point of transition in the nature of the relationship between the scientific community and the American government. The West Ford controversy aroused such passion and distrust among scientists that it altered their perception of the nation’s commitment to peace and pure science, establishing an early precedent for oppositional scientific activism. Meanwhile, the Kennedy Administration’s use of its scientific advisors and consultants to give the project a sense of “respectability” placed those prominent scientists in a quasi-political role, contributing to what was subsequently regarded as an erosion of the integrity of science.
Historically, Japan’s national government has been resistant to foreign migration, crafting strict immigration laws instead of policies aimed at incorporating its growing long-term foreign resident population. As a result, local governments have begun to create their own, resulting in variation between these local governments. This thesis project attempts to explain that variation by focusing on two neighboring cities (Kawasaki and Yokohama) with relatively large foreign resident populations and similar economies and governance structures. In Kawasaki, foreign residents enjoy limited political participation rights via an unelected foreign residents’ council that advises the city government, and the right to vote in local referendums. However, in Yokohama, similar policies do not exist. This thesis project finds that these differences can be explained by variation in how local-level civil society interacted with local government in the 1980s and 1990s. In Kawasaki, zainichi (permanent) Korean residents formed organizations in an effort to gain rights and build connections with their community, forging a trust-based relationship with local bureaucrats in the process. However, Yokohama’s primarily Chinese foreign resident community focused its efforts toward business endeavors; in particular, development of the city’s Chinatown. As each city looked to create foreign resident incorporation regimes in the 1990s, the Kawasaki municipal government came to view foreign residents as trusted local residents, and accordingly created a foreign residents’ council to solicit their views. Yokohama’s municipal government, on the other hand, did not have a similar relationship with Chinese civil society, and so did not do similarly.
Moving forward, I’m hoping to strengthen my central argument. In particular, in Kawasaki, resident Koreans advocated for local-level voting rights, which must be granted by the national government, and which they have yet to receive. Kawasaki’s local government, unprompted by Korean civil society, created its foreign residents’ council in order to grant foreign residents a political voice. I’m having some difficulty with this theoretically, as civil society never explicitly advocated for the council, though they supported it after its creation.
This study investigates the contemporary economic relationship between Oman and East Africa, which has grown out of their shared “double diaspora.” These patterns of movement have blossomed from the centuries-old Indian Ocean trade networks and Oman’s subsequent imperial ambitions in East Africa. In turn, members of this double diaspora now inhabit multiple geographies and form their political and economic identities on the basis of diasporic movement. Today, these dynamics congeal to create conditions whereby trade, investment, and the exchange of skills can occur between Oman and East Africa. This project attempts to determine how and why the Omani-East African double diaspora impacts contemporary economic relations.
This thesis tells a modern economic story through the lens of individuals, families, and corporations in Oman and East Africa. It begins by examining how narratives on the Indian Ocean slave trade, the Omani Empire, and the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 impact modern-day actors’ identity formation and their economic activities. It then analyzes the role elite East African-born Omanis, known as “returnees,” played in Oman’s economic development in the 1970s, and their achievements at the highest levels of government and business. Finally, this thesis examines how these Swahili-speaking returnees have since leveraged their political and financial clout in Oman to launch major trade and investment projects in East Africa. Ultimately, this study uses ethnographic and historical analysis to present new modes of South-South cooperation and partnerships for economic development in Africa.
"The Land and the Law in the Llajta: Challenges in Housing Rights Advocacy in Bolivia" is an anthropological exploration of humanitarian aid and community initiatives in poor communities in the city of Cochabamba. It aims to elaborate on complicating factors that can confront those who wish to work on humanitarian projects among marginalized indigenous migrants on behalf of “human rights,” with a focus on the right to adequate housing. Such factors include experiences of marginalization, relationships between aid recipients and aid providers, and relationships between organizations that propose to provide this aid. Alongside these actors and the varying roles they play, another challenge that this thesis explores is perceptions of land and property among the community members who live in these barrios in Cochabamba. In the barrios, land conflicts between barrio leaders and purported "landowners" from beyond the barrios are rife because the people settling there do not have state-defined "legal" ownership of their lots; due to neglect from the municipal government as a result, it is up to the migrants to find their own sense of community and homeownership within the city. Where resources from the state fall short, NGOs from outside Bolivia intervene, but not without consequences that affect relationships between all the actors involved.
