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1

Mu¨hlan, Eberhard. "Family structures among Adivasis in India : a description and comparison of family structures and lives within the patrilineal tribe of Saoras in Orissa and the matrilineal tribe of Khasis in Meghalaya, India." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683361.

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2

Prag, Hanita T. "The coping resources and subjective well-being of dual-career Hindu mothers." Thesis, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/593.

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With the increasing number of women entering the labour force internationally, the role of women is changing. Consequently, researchers are pressed to investigate how females of all cultures balance their work and family responsibilities. Amongst Hindu couples, this issue can either be a source of tension or positive support. An overview of literature indicates that the psychological aspects of dual-career Hindu women have received little attention in South Africa. The current study aimed to explore and describe coping resources and the subjective well-being of full-time employed Hindu mothers. The study took the form of a non-experimental exploratory-descriptive design. Participants were selected through nonprobability convenience sampling. The sample of the study consisted of sixty full-time employed Hindu mothers between the ages of 25 and 45 years of age who had at least one dependent primary school child aged between 7 to 12 years. Various questionnaires were used to collect data for this study. These included a Biographical Questionnaire, The Coping Resources Inventory (CRI), The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), and The Affectometer 2 (AFM2). Data was analysed by means of descriptive statistics. Cronbach’s coefficient alphas were utilised to calculate the reliability of the scores of each questionnaire. A multivariate technique was used to determine the amount of clusters formed. A non-hierarchical partitioning technique known as K-means cluster analysis was utilised in this study. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was utilised in order to compare the mean scores of the various clusters. A post-hoc analysis using the Scheffé test was computed to test for significant differences. Cohen’s d statistics was subsequently used to determine the practical significance of the differences found between the cluster means on each of the measures. The cluster analysis indicated three clusters that differed significantly from one another on all three measures. The results of the CRI indicated that the participants used cognitive and spiritual resources to assist them to cope with the transition from traditional to modern contemporary roles. It was also found that the participants with low coping resources had inferior subjective well-being compared to those who had average and high CRI scores. The findings indicated that the participants were generally satisfied with their lives and experienced high levels of positive affect and low levels of negative affect. However, as a group there was a trend for the participants to have experienced slightly lower levels of global happiness or slightly negative affect. The results of this study broadens the knowledge base of positive psychology with respect to the diverse cultures and gender roles within South Africa. Overall, this study highlighted the value and the need for South African research on the coping resources and subjective well-being of dual-career Hindu mothers.
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3

Pellissery, Sony. "The politics of social protection in rural India : a case study of two villages." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:89acdf33-794a-4dde-b112-3800fc716fd8.

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Social protection should ideally create a framework of 'welfare rights' for the vulnerable individuals and households. The state, through a set of policies of promotive and protective measures, sets out to achieve this. However, gaining these welfare rights in a decentralised democratic framework could be a function of the bargaining power that each individual, household and social group may possess. Therefore the micro-level interactions involving claimant, bureaucrat and local elites constitute the key policy process. Study of the process itself can reveal why some households gain formal social protection and other fail. This study argues that the local practices and informal rules underlying these public policy processes are purposively guided by the private interests of the local elites. At the heart of this dissertation is a comparative case-study of two villages in the Indian state of Maharashtra, based on eight months ethnographic fieldwork. Bottomup evaluation of two social protection programmes, public works (promotive) and social assistance (protective) programmes shows that 60 per cent of eligible persons are excluded from welfare rights. The mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion in these programmes are studied. The study reveals that both eligibility and entitlement to 'welfare rights' are contested within the power structure of the local community. The social identity of the claimant, and the ability to build a relationship with the local leaders or labour market managers act as key routes to access welfare rights. The precedence of informal rules at the stage of implementation of social protection programmes reproduced the existing social and economic power structures. As a result, the welfare rights of individuals and households are affected by the competing forces in the non-state sectors. These non-state actors, through their network, were able to weaken the administration and fair allocation of welfare benefits. Through this analysis the thesis contributes to the understanding of the local state, and decision-making practices over welfare rights in a decentralised context.
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4

Kumar, Karunambika. "Cultural factors in housing : building a conceptual model for reference in the Indian context." Virtual Press, 1996. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1033632.

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This paper presents a conceptual framework of important cultural values, activity patterns and environmental patterns in the home environment of a typical middle-income family in Madras a South Indian City. The position of this paper is that cultural variables should play an important part in determining the form of housing; they should be explicitly accounted for and values should be related to the different components of the built environment. This framework is intended to serve as a guide suggesting programmatic criteria for design of culturally-responsive housing. As it relates abstract values to components of the built environment, and design patterns, the framework includes descriptive graphics and images.The main body of the framework is a summary of societal and activity patterns, and elements of design. A descriptive analysis of societal and family patterns looks at the interactions between society, family and the individual. Activity patterns in and around the home with their symbolic associations are examined in detail. Implications for the home environment are drawn from the observations made in these sections. This is followed by a look at the elements of design that have been manipulated in existing house forms to create culturally appropriate environments.The concluding part of the framework presents a way in which the earlier observations can be assimilated into the design process. A sample set of environmental patterns are presented using images, with their cultural purpose, design descriptions and variants. This is followed by a matrix where family types, individual roles and activities are related to the environmental qualities and in some cases to sample environmental patterns.The research involved anthropological studies for an understanding of the cultural elements like family and kinship structure, myths and beliefs, values and priorities, etc., in the Indian context. Analysis of changing house forms in response to social and cultural changes in history, and designs of culture sensitive architects, helped to identify the environmental components that relate to specific values. Christopher Alexander's idea of `patterns' was used as a tool to translate abstract cultural criteria into recognizable environmental settings.<br>Department of Architecture
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5

Menon, P. Balakrishna. "Matriliny and domestic morphology : a study of the Nair tarawads of Malabar." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape10/PQDD_0023/MQ50688.pdf.

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6

Grønseth, Kristian Bøe. "A little piece of Denmark in India : the space and places of a South Indian town, and the narratives of its peoples /." Oslo : Department of Social Anthropology, Universitetet i Oslo, 2007. http://www.duo.uio.no/publ/sai/2007/61608/Completexxversionx6.1xxmedxinnholdsfortegnelse.pdf.

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7

Angelova, Iliyana. "Baptist Christianity and the politics of identity among the Sumi Naga of Nagaland, northeast India." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:653e1bad-b11b-42be-994c-b4e7c396d12c.

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This doctoral thesis explores the entanglement of religion and identity politics in the Indo-Burma borderlands and the indigenisation of Christianity there through grassroots processes of cultural revivalism. The ethnographic focus is on the Sumi Naga from the state of Nagaland in Northeast India. While the Sumi started converting to Baptist Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century, conversion rates accelerated especially in the 1950s and again in the 1970s when two evangelical revivals swept across the lands of the Sumi and resulted in their conversion en masse. Significantly, these Great Revivals coincided in time with the most turbulent political history of this borderland region, as the Sumi, alongside all other Naga, were waging an armed struggle against the Indian nation-state for their right to self-determination and independence. While this struggle is now largely being fought with political rather than military means, it remains ideologically motivated by Naga perceptions of their distinct ethnic identity, history and culture compared to the rest of India. Baptist Christianity has played a central role in shaping and sustaining these perceptions. Over the past several decades following the Second Great Revival in the 1970s there has been a movement from within Sumi society to reconstruct and redefine their identity by drawing heavily on both their contemporary religion (Baptist Christianity) and their 'good' pre-Christian culture, which had been demonised and rejected in the course of earlier conversions. Discourses have been circulating in public space on the urgent need to reconceptualise collective Sumi identity by reviving, or preserving, those aspects of pre-Christian Sumi culture that are perceived as 'good' and constitutive of Sumi-ness but are currently 'under threat' of being gradually lost to modernity and foreign influences. These discourses are directly linked to processes of cultural revivalism across Nagaland, which have been motivated by a sense of the perceived loss of 'good' cultural heritage and cultural roots. This thesis is an ethnographic study of these processes of identity (re)construction within a Sumi Naga community. It sets out to examine the ways in which Baptist Christianity is central to everyday life in a Sumi village and how it plays an important role in forging group cohesion and solidarity through ritual practice and various forms of fellowship. The thesis then proceeds to study the phenomenon of cultural revivalism in both its discursive and practical manifestations. The thesis argues that the cultural revival has not reduced the centrality of Baptist Christianity to Sumi self-ascriptions and perceptions of identity, but is rather thought to have enriched it and given it a stronger cultural foundation. Hence, a Sumi Naga Christianity is being created which is perceived as unique, indigenous and distinct in its own right. The thesis attempts to explore the essence of this vernacular Christianity against the backdrop of its specific historical, economic, political and spiritual context and the all-encompassing Naga struggle against the Indian nation-state. In pursuing these issues, the thesis locates itself within debates on the intersection between religion and identity politics, which prevail in many contemporary contributions to the anthropology of Christianity.
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8

Moran, Arik. "Permutations of Rajput identity in the West Himalayas, c. 1790-1840." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a5436935-3a87-4702-8b0a-471643633c46.

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The sustained interaction of local elites and British administrators in the West Himalayas over the decades that surrounded the early colonial encounter (c. 1790-1840) saw the emergence of a distinctly new understanding of communal identity among the leaders of the region. This eventful period saw the mountain ('Pahari') kingdoms transform from fragmented, autonomous polities on the fringes of the Indian subcontinent to subjects of indigenous (Nepali, Sikh) and, ultimately, foreign (British) empires, and dramatically altered the ways Pahari leaders chose to remember and represent themselves. Using a wide array of sources from different locales in the hills (e.g., oral epics, archival records and local histories), this thesis traces the Pahari elite's transition from a nebulous group of lineage-based leaders to a cohesive unitary milieu modelled after contemporary interpretations of Hindu kingship. This nascent ideal of kingship is shown to have fed into concurrent understandings of Rajput society in the West Himalayas and ultimately to have sustained the alliance between indigenous rulers and British administrators.
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9

Saniotis, Arthur. "Sacred worlds : an analysis of mystical mastery of North Indian Faqirs." Title page, contents and abstract only, 2002. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phs227.pdf.

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10

Singh, Karmjit. "Post-positivist study exploring the resettlement experience of professional Asian Indian women." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1997. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1329.

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11

Andrews, Robyn. "Being Anglo-Indian : practices and stories from Calcutta : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University." Massey University, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/959.

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This thesis is an ethnography of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta. All ethnographies are accounts arising out of the experience of a particular kind of encounter between the people being written about and the person doing the writing. This thesis, amongst other things, reflects my changing views of how that experience should be recounted. I begin by outlining briefly who Anglo-Indians are, a topic which in itself alerts one to complexities of trying to get an ethnographic grip on a shifting subject. I then look at some crucial elements that are necessary for an “understanding” of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the work that has already been done in relation to Anglo-Indians, the urban context of the lives of my research participants and I discuss the methodological issues that I had to deal with in constructing this account. In the second part of my thesis I explore some crucial elements of the lives of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the place of Christianity in their lives, education not just as an aspect of socialisation but as part of their very being and, finally, the public rituals that now give them another way of giving expression to new forms of Anglo-Indian becoming. In all of my work I was driven by a desire to keep close to the experience of the people themselves and I have tried to write a “peopled” ethnography. This ambition is most fully realised in the final part of my thesis where I recount the lives of three key participants.
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12

Thiruppugazh, V. "Post-disaster reconstruction : policies, performance and politics ; a comparative study of three states in India." Phd thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/150774.

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The study compares evidence from the major reconstruction programs undertaken in three states in India after catastrophic disasters: Maharashtra earthquake (1993), Gujarat earthquake (2001) and Asian tsunami in Tamil Nadu (2004). It poses the central question: why, within the same broad political, social, economic and cultural framework, did some reconstruction programs go beyond pre-impact restoration to build back better? I argue that post-disaster reconstruction is a political process in which vision, political leadership, political will and political culture are key ingredients. Reconstruction prescriptions must, therefore, go beyond the technical and embrace the political realm. One of the basic policy dilemmas is the choice between restoration status quo ante and betterment reconstruction. Discussions on the factors that contribute to effective use of post-disaster opportunity have remained largely normative with very little validation through intensive empirical research, particularly in the Indian context. This study has attempted to bridge this gap. This research has identified some of the key factors behind success in "building back better." This has been accomplished using extensive primary data (compiled from household-level surveys, village meetings and interviews), rigorous field visits, archival research, international comparison and personal experience. The study has identified, analyzed and categorized the myriad factors driving the reconstruction programs. The findings emphasize that disaster reconstruction cannot be depoliticized. It finds that the commitment of the State is a critical variable determining the leap forward after a disaster and that vision and political leadership define the scope and role of the State. Since betterment reconstruction is a long-drawn-out process, continued political commitment is needed to go beyond short-term objectives. The evidence indicates that the determinants of political will are not confined to the narrow domain of leadership, but are inseparable from the specific political cultures. The research finds that political culture is an over-arching determinant of policy choices, program implementation and the nature of stakeholder engagement. The study demonstrates that in a country like India, besides the national ethos, the political cultures of different states or even sub-cultures within them shape the larger contours of the reconstruction. This finding underscores the importance of understanding political culture while formulating policy prescriptions and designing programs. The thesis is in three parts. The first examines the recovery after the three disasters in three areas: housing reconstruction, economic transformation and disaster management. The second isolates and analyses key factors behind differential outcomes from the perspective of stakeholders and global literature. The third dwells on reconstruction as a political process.
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13

Maharaj, Vedhant. "Yantra: infrastructures of the sacred and profane in Varanasi, India." Thesis, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10539/20567.

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Thesis (M.Arch (Professional)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, 2016.<br>India is currently undergoing a rapid transformation economically, consciously and spatially. A layout of national infrastructure is happening at a pace which may be ungovernable, in its current state and India’s historical and natural landscapes are in jeopardy. One such ecological resource is the Ganga (colonialised as the Ganges), which through continued pollution is reaching a point of irreversible damage. There is, however, still hope. Accordingly, this thesis moves from an overview of India in the globalised world, through a rephrasing of how “development” is understood and manifests itself to the suggestion of an overall plan to understand and implement it in a way that is co-ordinated in intention but regionally and contextually responsive in application. Through Homi Bhabha’s theoretical perspective of cultural hybridisation the discourse of creating a new infrastructural identity for India is introduced. The current political focus on the Ganga, created by India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, through a renewed and trending agenda for cleaning the holy river, acts as a platform to explore the possibilities of infrastructure within this context . The Ganga River has been a religious symbol for millennia and the life force to approximately 500 million people. Through continued and increased pollution the quality of its water now radically exceeds the minimum requirements for safe drinking, bathing or even agricultural use. The Ganga River symbolises a cosmological relationship between people and the ecological environment, which requires that pollution be approached from a holistic viewpoint responding to the weight of its cultural value. This contextualized approach has the potential to become a catalyst for new innovative approaches to the integration of infrastructure throughout the river network . By using the political momentum created in the city, by the national project, this thesis is realised through a multiplicity of conflicting lenses inherent to Varanasi, one of India’s holiest cities. The city itself is growing economically but at the price of its prized ancient heritage. It possesses a cosmological value unparalleled by any other city in the country thus making it an emotionally powerful tool to mobilise a cleaning project for the river. If infrastructure is not implemented correctly the threat to the city’s unique character becomes real. This challenge created the Meta question for my research: How do you implement infrastructure into the sacred landscape? Through various degrees of research, both intuitive and informed, a system to clean water is designed in a way that truly integrates into a cultural landscape. The proposed design establishes itself as the first intervention in a national network for cleaning the River. By taking into account the infrastructural, ecological and sociological requirements of the city and its daily life the water purification sanctuary mediates the conflicting programmatic requirements between spirituality and science. Through an understanding that purity of water has a number of connotations within the site context the building utilises various treatment methods to reinforce the sanctity ABSTRACT of water through a hybrid mediation of heritage, nature, science and infrastructures (both vernacular and modern). This new typology enables the interaction of people with water cleaning infrastructure at a local scale and offers a way forward in redefining a national identity that is bound up in these currently conflicting imperatives.
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Sushama, Pilakudi Narayan. "Marital fertility control in a Kerala village : a microdemographic study." Phd thesis, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/116920.

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Rapid fertility decline in Kerala did not conform with demographic transition theory, as the decline occurred in a still predominantly rural setting. This thesis employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the motivation and processes of rapid fertility decline in a Kerala village. Fertility has declined in the village during the 1970s and 1980s and current fertility has reached replacement level. Though the proximate determinants are postponement of marriage and extensive use of contraceptives, the changes in these factors were the result of changing socio-economic conditions. At the time of study the singulate mean age at marriage was 29 years for males and 23 years for females, higher than elsewhere in India. Postponement of marriage was a combined effect of favourable attitudes towards higher marriage age, the expansion of education, and economic changes. Higher use of contraceptives is attributed to their availability, but seems to reflect changes in attitude that in turn reflect social and economic changes, as a result of these changes smaller families became advantageous. The factors influencing fertility decline are decreasing agricultural opportunities, expanded education and mortality decline. These changes were taking place in Kerala at the beginning of the century, but when the family planning program was implemented, there were favourable conditions for a rapid fertility decline.
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15

Ganguly, Debjani. "Hierarchy and its discontents : caste, postcoloniality and the new humanities." Phd thesis, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/146075.

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16

Blunt, Alison Mary. "Travelling home and empire British women in India, 1857-1939." Thesis, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6722.

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This study focuses on the British wives of civil servants and army officers who lived in India from 1857 to 1939 to examine the translation of feminine discourses of bourgeois domesticity over imperial space. Three questions form the subject of this research. First, how were cultures of domesticity and imperialism intertwined in complex and often contradicatory ways over space? Second, did imperial rule, and the travel that it necessarily implied, challenge or reinforce the claim that 'there's no place like home'? Third, how and why were places both like and yet unlike 'home' produced by British women living in India? I start by examining the 'mutiny' of 1857-1858 as a period of domestic and imperial crisis, focusing on representations of and by British women at Cawnpore and Lucknow. Then, considering the place of British women in the post-'mutiny' reconstruction of imperial domesticity in India, I focus on two scales: first, home and empire-making on a household scale; and, second, seasonal travels by British women to hill stations in North India. In their travels both to and within India, British women embodied contested discourses of imperial domesticity. Throughout, I focus on the mobile, embodied subjectivities of memsahibs. While imperial histories have often neglected the roles played by British women in India, revisionist accounts have often reproduced stereotypical and / or celebratory accounts of memsahibs. In contrast, I examine the ambivalent basis of imperial and gendered stereotypes and conceptualise spatialised subjectivities in terms of embodiment, critical mobility, and material performativity. As members of an official elite, the British wives of civil servants and army officers came to embody many of the connections and tensions between domesticity and imperialism. Both during and after the 'mutiny,' the place of British women and British homes in India was contested. The place of British women and British homes in India reveal contradictions at the heart of imperial rule by reproducing and yet destabilizing imperial rule on a domestic scale
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17

Zhimomi, Salome. "Christianity and politics in Nagaland : an ethnographic study in Lazami village." Phd thesis, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/151717.

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18

Pillay, Govindamma. "An investigation into the caste attitudes that prevail amongst Hindus in the Durban metropolitan area." Thesis, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/6827.

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19

Dhaske, Govind Ganpati. "The lived experience of women affected wtih matted hair in southwestern India." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/6230.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)<br>Descriptions about the matting of hair given by medical practitioners show a significant commonality indicating it as a historic health problem prevalent across the globe, however with less clarity about its etiopathogenesis. In southwestern India, the emergence of matting of hair is considered a deific phenomenon; consequently, people worship the emerged matted hair and restrict its removal. Superstitious beliefs impose a ritualistic lifestyle on affected women depriving them of health and well-being, further leading to stigma, social isolation, and marginalization. For unmarried females, the matting of hair can result in dedication to the coercive devadasi custom whereby women end up marrying a god or goddess. To date, the state, academia, and disciplines such as medicine and psychology have paid far too little attention to the social, cultural, and health concerns of the women affected by matted hair. A Heideggerian interpretive phenomenological study was conducted to document the lived experience of women affected by the phenomenon of matting of hair. The subjective accounts of 13 jata-affected women selected through purposive sampling were documented to understand their health and human rights marginalization through harmful cultural practices surrounding matting of hair. Seven distinct thematic areas emerged from the study exemplified their lived experience as jata-affected women. The prevalent gender-based inequity revealed substantial vulnerability of women to health and human rights marginalization through harmful cultural practices. The ontological structure of the lived experience of matting of hair highlighted the unreflective internalization of religious-based discourse of matting of hair. The hermeneutic exploration revealed events that exemplified jata-affected women’s compromised religiosity, and control of their well-being, human development, and ontological security. The religious-based interpretation of matting of hair and associated practices marginalize the health and human rights of affected women through family members, institutions, society, and religious-based systems. The study demonstrates the need for collaborative, evidence-based interventions and for effective domestic as well as global policies to prevent the health and human rights violations of women through cultural practices. The study offered foundational evidential documentation of the phenomenon of matting of hair as a harmful cultural practice that compromises women’s right to health and well-being.
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Si, Aung. "The traditional ecological knowledge of the Solega : a linguistic perspective." Phd thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/149874.

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The traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of a language community is not only a repository of that community's cultural and intellectual heritage, but also a rich source of detailed information with the potential to inform conservation policies and basic scientific research. In this thesis, I present some key aspects of Solega TEK, which is shown to be a complex, inter-related network of detailed observations of natural phenomena, well-reasoned and often highly accurate theorising, as well as a belief system, derived from cultural norms, regarding the relationships between humans and other species on the one hand, and between non-human species on the other. In addition, the appendices to the thesis contain a sketch grammar of Solega and a small lexicon of around 2,300 entries. The thesis begins with a brief survey of the types of research usually carried out under the heading of ethnobiology, and shows that language-based studies are stongly biased towards investigations of ethno-taxonomy and nomenclature. I then argue the importance of studying TEK in its proper context, and that making context and encyclopaedic knowledge the objects of study are essential for a proper understanding of TEK. In Chapter 2, I provide a further critique of the acontextualised approach to uncovering 'universals' in ethno-taxonomy and nomenclature, and suggest that some basic assumptions implicit in this enterprise are seriously flawed. Chapter 3 develops this theme further by investigating Solega ways of naming and classifying birds, and provides an alternative approach - one that takes into account not only linguistic context and variation, but also Solega knowledge of the behaviour and ecology of these birds. Moving away from classifications, in Chapter 4, I describe the manner in which the Solega perceive various named landscapes. These, along with the plants and animals that inhabit them, form a mental map - a three dimensional mosaic - that is constantly updated in sync with the annual cycling of the seasons, the life cycles of plants and the migrations of culturally significant animals. Further details of these seasonal cycles, as well as other forest 'signs' that Solega people can detect and use to their advantage, are to be found in Chapter 5, along with Solega perspectives on the place of humans in the natural environment. Chapter 6 focuses in some detail on the Solega's knowledge of the behaviour, reproductive biology and ecology of one very important group of animals, the honeybees. Comparing Solega observations with those of a pre-industrial beekeeping society, I show that the former's knowledge of certain hard-to-observe honeybee behaviours rivals, and in some cases exceeds, that of the latter. Finally, in the last chapter, I reiterate the need to develop novel approaches to carrying out ethnobiological research from a linguistic perspective - approaches that acknowledge the fact that classifications are but a small part of a language community's TEK, and that contextualised studies, which take into account variation, diachrony and encyclopaedic knowledge, are required to obtain an unbiased picture of people's understanding of the natural world. -- provided by Candidate.
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