Dissertation Abstracts

Middle East:

TITLE: The case of Egypt: A national liberation movement and a colonially created government
AUTHOR: Al Barghouti, Tamim
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: BOSTON UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 313
ADVISER: Gendzier, Irene
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); POLITICAL SCIENCE, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND RELATIONS (0616)

This dissertation is an attempt to understand the mechanism and assess the outcome of the interaction between national liberation movements and powers of occupation in the Middle East. With a special focus on the Egyptian national liberation movement, led by the Wafd party from 1919 to 1952, this dissertation explores the dilemma of national liberation movements turning into governments under occupation; the main argument is that such governments are unable to fulfill their functions either as national liberation movements or as governments. The authority is transferred from the colonial power to the national liberation movement on the condition that the latter guarantee the fulfillment of colonial interests. Independence then becomes a form of occupation by proxy. This results in the national liberation movement's loss of support among its native constituencies, who turn to other rejectionist and more violent resistance groups. This, in turn, reduces the movement's ability to secure colonial interests, and causes its loss of credibility - the colonial power. By examining the major documents that defined Egypt's independence, such as the 1922 declaration of independence, the 1923 constitution, the 1936 treaty and its numerous drafts, as well as the records of the negotiations between the Wafd and Great Britain, the argument is made that the Egyptian independence was conditioned by national liberation movement's commitment to perform the functions of occupation. By examining the Wafd party's discourse to its native constituencies and its discourse to the colonial power, as expressed in the speeches of the party leaders and the party programs, the structural contradiction in the Wafd's agenda is revealed. Finally, by the analysis of the programs of the rival rejectionist movements, the correlation between the compromises of the mainstream movement and its loss of followers to its rivals is shown. The thesis also investigates the socio-economic background of the national leadership and their constituencies. It finds that, while the socio-economic interests of the leadership may have led them to compromise, the decision of the constituencies to turn to other rejectionist movements was not strictly correlated to their economic interests.

TITLE: Women's power and ritual politics in the Maldives
AUTHOR: Baksi-Lahiri, Sudeshna
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: CORNELL UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 324
ADVISER: March, Kathryn S.
SUBJECT: ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326); WOMEN'S STUDIES (0453)

My dissertation contributes to the genre of analysis that focuses on Muslim women's alternative expressions of power through their separate associations and activities. These analyses ask the question "Is separation inherently unequal? I address this issue by examining women's participation, both in institutional Islam as well as in indigenous religious celebrations in a northern atoll-based Maldivian community. By exploring female-centered religious practices conducted separately as well as jointly with men, I show that the ritual arena is crucial for locating women's power and politics in Duafaru (a pseudonym) society. My study thus provides a counterpoint to the lives of Muslim women in South Asia and the Middle East, where, for the most part, women continue to experience societal restrictions that limit their options for exercising meaningful autonomy. My research addresses two key questions: (1) How was Maldivian women's power constituted and culturally articulated? And (2) what were the structural components of their power? In order to investigate these topics and provide a cultural model of female power in Duafaru, I concentrate on community-sponsored ritual practices as visible extensions of the religious belief system. The belief system was conceptually derived from interpretations of the scriptural texts and wedded to a practical understanding of Maldivian cultural traditions. I call this "Maldivian Islam." Duafaru exhibited a unique feature of Maldivian Islam - the gender-based dual mosque system in which women had their own, separate institutional structure of worship which they administered independently of men. Except in this arena of quotidian worship, men and women did not exhibit functional and spatial segregation. In the intra- and inter-island visitation rituals that I describe in the dissertation, women's autonomous actions were inspired by the sentiments underlying institutional Islam, like hospitality, piety, honor, and religiosity. In these publicly executed observances, women's contributions in the shaping of societal discourses marked their high standing in Duafaru sociocultural life. By thus exploring the ritual avenue to women's power, I describe how female power was culturally constructed in a Maldivian island community in the 1980's, thereby expanding our anthropological understanding of women's participation in this exceptional Islamic society.

TITLE: Israel, 'a light unto the nations'? Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem and the founding of the Jewish state (Israel)
AUTHOR: Eddon, Raluca M.
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: YALE UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 282
ADVISER: Benhabib, Seyla; Smith, Steven B.
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); HISTORY, EUROPEAN (0335)

Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, two of the 20^th century's greatest German Jewish thinkers, are commonly regarded as antagonists. This perception reflects their diverging views on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, but represents a fundamental misreading of their political thought. While important ideological differences did indeed divide Arendt and Scholem, both shared a commitment to political radicalism and specifically regarded the Zionist movement as a revolutionary movement par excellence whose national-revolutionary potential could not, and, indeed, should not be exhausted in the creation of a state. In emphasizing the revolutionary dimension of Zionism, Arendt and Scholem thus both defined Zionism as a transformative form of politics, and consequently challenged both the liberal emphasis on individual rights and the nationalist emphasis on sovereignty. The task of Zionism, Arendt and Scholem argued against both paradigms, was not to adapt Jewish liberalism to its new transplanted surroundings in the Middle East, but to fundamentally transform the Jewish people from a victim of failed liberal assimilation in Europe into a "nation." While Scholem eventually accepted the idea of a Jewish state as a practical necessity, Arendt opposed it as a goal that was incongruous with the revolutionary mission of Zionism. Notwithstanding these differences, however, Arendt and Scholem's radically transformative understanding of Zionism represents a groundbreaking common effort to articulate a new theory of nationalism, and ultimately a new theory of politics.

TITLE: Border guards and high states: Toward a theory of boundary regimes
AUTHOR: Gavrilis, George
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 202
ADVISER: Snyder, Jack; Tilly, Charles
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); POLITICAL SCIENCE, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND RELATIONS (0616)

This project aims to explain why, in the face of otherwise similar types of threats and disputes, some borders become well-organized institutions that provide security to contiguous states and populations living in border areas while other boundaries remain sites of escalation, tension, and mal-administration. Border conflict today is less about affixing the location of sovereign territory and more about preventing the movement of armed rebels, contraband, and terrorists. Many recently independent and post-conflict states face the difficult task of securing their borders but only some manage to create stable, well-controlled boundary regimes. The dissertation begins at the micro-level to argue that the local organization of border management accounts for stability and efficient control along many boundaries. Border guards solve disputes and innovate solutions to boundary management relying on their foreign counterparts rather than escalating disputes and crises to their own administrative centers. Such escalation-resistant boundary regimes require three conditions: an arena for guards to communicate with their foreign counterparts to discuss problems and pose solutions to border control; a locally embedded monitoring mechanism; and a shared understanding of the cooperative dilemma. The project examines these micro-level conditions along the 19th century Greek-Ottoman border. Documents from three archives are assembled to explain how the above conditions enabled a ragtag team of former bandits and mercenaries to become efficient managers of an international boundary that was formerly the site of protracted conflict. Yet states often forego such efficient forms of border management for top-down, escalation-prone policies of unilateral control. The project goes on to examine border control along newly created international boundaries in the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, and Africa. It establishes a causal link between state-building policies and border management. High states (central states) use border control to further their preferred state-building strategies, rather than targeting threats and problems specific to their borders. The project concludes with a series of prescriptions designed to promote stable borders in sites such as the emerging Israeli-Palestinian boundary.

TITLE: Posttraumatic stress disorder, emotional intelligence, and gender differences among refugee children from the Middle East (Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine)
AUTHOR: Ghazali, Siti Raudzah
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNION INSTITUTE AND UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 168
ADVISER: DeLoach, Joseph
SUBJECT: PSYCHOLOGY, CLINICAL (0622); EDUCATION, EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY (0525); PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL (0451)

This study investigated relationships among the severity of symptoms of PTSD, emotional intelligence, and gender differences in refugee children from the Middle East after their exposure to war in their native countries (Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine). Participants were 17 male and 13 female children, aged 12-17. Fifty percent of the participants were recruited from the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services Community Mental Health Clinic (ACCESS) in Dearborn, Michigan. The remaining respondents volunteered to participate in this study after being contacted by leaders of their communities. Pearson product-moment correlation was used to determine relationships among variables. A t -test of independent means was used to analyze mean differences between groups. Findings suggested that as the severity of PTSD increased, emotional intelligence decreased. There were no significance differences between female and male children on the PTSD severity scale. Results also revealed that male children generally scored higher on the emotional intelligence test. A significant difference was found between male and female children in using emotion subscales. Correlation coefficients showed that the PTSD symptom severity score was negatively correlated with all Adolescents Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale (AMEIS) subscales. Two significant negative correlations were found. PTSD symptom severity scores were significantly correlated with using emotion and understanding emotional tasks. It was expected that the findings will be useful in identifying factors that may decrease or contribute to decreasing the severity of PTSD symptoms of these children. Implications of the findings were discussed, and recommendations for practice and future research were presented.

TITLE: Constructing modern Copts: The production of Coptic Christian identity in contemporary Egypt
AUTHOR: Oram, Elizabeth E.
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 271
ADVISER: Rosen, Lawrence
SUBJECT: ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326); RELIGION, GENERAL (0318)

This dissertation examines the process which I have called the "production of modern Coptic identity." I have chosen the term "production" in order to evoke the complex effect that various forces and institutions have had on the creation of modern "Copticness." My research aims to demonstrate that both public and private expressions of Coptic identity have been deeply affected by discourses of Coptic identity under colonialism, current struggles by the Church and the Egyptian State to define and control Coptic identity as well as the daily interaction between Copts and Muslims. The dissertation is broken into two parts. The first explores the casting of Copts as a dangerous or ambiguous "other." I show that the colonial moment has been critical in the development of the tensions and ambiguities that surround the place of the Copts, both in the Western imagination and in the eyes of the State. The development of a contemporary State discourse of Coptic identity has tried to claim Copts for the nation by emphasizing their Pharaonic heritage as well as the "oneness" of the nation, thus neutralizing the potential divisiveness of their Christian identity. The second part of the dissertation examines the effects of three critical spaces on the development of modern Coptic identity: the urban neighborhood, the church and the newly opened monasteries. In the lived space of the neighborhood, relations between Copts and Muslims are being worked out on a daily basis. The Church, by encouraging a "renaissance" of Coptic identity, is also enforcing new kinds of discipline and standardization of Coptic Christianity. Finally, during the newly popular pilgrimage outings to monasteries, Copts are experiencing a different sense of group identity. This work seeks to contribute to discussions on religious minorities in the Middle East and more particularly to present ethnography which works against the notion that religious identity is "fixed" or "essential."

TITLE: Glocal dialectics in the production and reproduction of the Palestinian space
AUTHOR: Qassoum, Mufid
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 666
ADVISER: Nanetti, Raffaella
SUBJECT: URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING (0999); SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT (0700)

This dissertation traces how the rise and expansion of capitalism – from mercantilism to liberalism to neo-liberalism – have affected the Palestinian space from the 16^th century until the late 1990s. The facilitation of global capitalism in the Middle East brought with it the initial round of destruction of the Palestinian space in 1948. The second round of destruction has been unfolding since the last quarter of the 20^th Century. Chapters 1-4 address research methodology, theoretical argumentation and the literature of development/underdevelopment. Chapter 5 addresses the trialectical relationships between economic restructuring, political liberalization and social re-engineering at the global levels in the current phase of globalization. This chapter discusses civil and political society and the extended state; organic crisis and organic intellectuals; passive revolution, democracy promotion, human rights, free and fair elections and polyarchy; transnational civil society, networks and NGOs; and deregulation, privatization, de-industrialization, disinvestment, structural adjustment and the new transnational division of labor. Chapters 6-10 address the production and reproduction of the Palestinian space – i.e. the dramatic socio-economic and socio-political changes taking place in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the neo-liberal era. Henri Lefebvre's "production of space" theory serves as the theoretical foundation. Three case studies – Palestinian civil society and NGOs, the Bethlehem 2000 tourism project and proposed industrial zones – illustrate the impact of the interaction between local and global forces on the development process.

TITLE: Prophet sharing: Strategic interaction between Islamic clerics and Middle Eastern regimes (Egypt, Iran)
AUTHOR: Taylor, Julie Elaine
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 200
ADVISER: Binder, Leonard
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); RELIGION, CLERGY (0319); HISTORY, MIDDLE EASTERN (0333)

Islamic clerics have both supported and undermined regimes in the Middle East. Egyptian clerics, in the 1980s and 1990s, discredited Islamic extremists intent on overthrowing the government. In contrast, Iran's ayatollahs helped depose the Shah in 1979. The disparity in clerical behavior raises the question: What determines the likelihood of cooperation or conflict between Islamic clerics and Middle Eastern regimes? The dominant hypothesis suggests that clerical support for the regime derives from the doctrine of political authority endorsed by its sect. With regard to the two countries forming the basis of this study, such a hypothesis predicts passivity from Egypt's Sunni clerics who maintain that tyranny is preferable to civil strife, and defiance from Iran's Shi'i clerics who proclaim worldly government to be illegitimate. Yet, the historical record of both countries includes numerous examples that contradict the doctrinal thesis. Egypt's Sunni clerics at times led protests against the regime and Iran's history includes long periods of regime-clerical cooperation. My research demonstrates that patterns of conflict and cooperation are not determined by the clerics' ideological disposition, but rather, by the interaction between the clerics and the regime as each pursues their independent interests. Three considerations strongly influence the strategy selection of regimes and the clerics: (1) the agenda of the opposition; (2) the level of popular opposition; and (3) the clerics' responsiveness to public opinion. My research demonstrates that conflict between clerics and regimes is rare because the factors promoting clerical opposition to the regime are the same factors that increase the regime's need to draw on clerical support. For the clerics, an increase in the level of popular opposition enhances the potential benefits of opposition to the regime. Yet, this shift also intensifies the utility of public support to the regime, and thus raises the value of the clergy's endorsement. Upon provision of a side-payment, clerics do not defect. In sum, my dissertation explains when regime-clerical conflict occurs, when clerics posses the greatest influence over the regime, and when the clerical establishment is likely to splinter.

TITLE: The Alexandria archive: An archaeology of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism (Egypt)
AUTHOR: Youssef, Hala Youssef Halim
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 419
ADVISER: Pecora, Vincent P.
SUBJECT: LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE (0295); LITERATURE, ENGLISH (0593); LITERATURE, MIDDLE EASTERN (0315)

This dissertation brings to bear current debates about cosmopolitanism and hybridity on the overlooked area of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism, through the representative case study of Alexandria. Comparing discourses of cultural identity associated with the city, I identify two central problems with the dominant paradigm of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism: a Eurocentric approach to historiography and canon formation that elides Arab elements, and an insufficient attention to the materiality of the city as it features in writings about Alexandria. In re-appraising this cosmopolitan archive, the study deconstructs the perceived consistency of "canonical" Alexandrian texts, sets western modernity against alternative modernities, analyzes genre in relation to the representation of hybridity, and maps in non-complicit, popular paradigms of cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 deals with the ambivalence in Constantine Cavafy's texts effected by the tension between a binary of Greek and Barbarian and a far more cosmopolitan attitude attuned to otherness and other textualities. The discussion then turns to E. M. Forster's Egyptian writings in Chapter 2 where I analyze a colonial complicity in the historiography and representation of space in his account of the city and its cosmopolitanism, and contrast this against his simultaneous sympathy with subalternity. In chapter 3, I dwell on the hybridity in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and bring out underlying patterns that make for what the text construes as Alexandria's threatening space, witnessed in the representation of topography and myths. Broaching the question what place cosmopolitanism has in the postcolonial Egyptian period, the study takes up, in Chapter 4, novelist Edwar al-Kharrat's texts, which address radically different imperatives through the Alexandria archive. My analysis of al-Kharrat charts it "contrapuntally" as articulates modes of inter-ethnic and inter-religious affiliation that subvert Eurocentric canonical texts, as well as taps into resources, such as orality, elided in earlier representations. It is hoped that this study will make a contribution to two sets of debates: discussions of cosmopolitanism in the west where the Middle East nevertheless remains the "other" and of Middle Eastern bids for inter-cultural dialogue where the reclamations of Alexandria's archive are perplexed by its colonial freighting.

TITLE: The politics of Islamic social movements: Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait: A comparative study
AUTHOR: AL-Mekaimi, Haila Hamad
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: BOSTON COLLEGE
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 427
ADVISER: Easter, Gerald
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/02, p. 689, Aug 2004
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND RELATIONS (0616); POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); POLITICAL SCIENCE, PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION (0617)

This thesis examines the politics of social movements in three different contexts: Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. These modern Islamic movements advocate radical ideology as a way to reach power following the Western revolutionary model. They invented ostensible "Islamic Ideology" in order to compete with local regimes and Western hegemony. They advocate a restrictive interpretation of Islamic law (Sharia) such as the implementation of criminal law (hudud), enforcement of complete segregation between men and women; they call for a full revival of the Islamic caliphate. Despite their similar ideologies, these groups tend to differ in their political forms. They run the spectrum from political parties, dissident groups, separatist movements and other political structures. This thesis is an investigation of the main reasons behind the multiple forms of Islamic movements. It adopts least similar comparison as research design and structuralism as school of thought to explain this newly emerging social phenomenon. Three case studies were chosen to demonstrate the interplay of different kinds of regime types and the political forms of several Islamic movements. While such movements constitute part of the democratic process in semi-democratic Kuwait, Islamic groups are dissidents in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and separatists under the authoritarian presidential rule of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan. This study argues that global and local structural ties help shape the different forms of Islamic groups. Their political contours have been fashioned by American policies in the Middle East, oppressive regimes and their own totalitarian ideologies and structures. Therefore, this study concludes that regime types are significant in shaping the structure of Islamic movements. However, the totalitarian tendency is a substantial component of the ideology and constitution of Islamic organizations. Instead of suppressing others, the participation of Islamic groups with other forces is recommended to fight local authoritarianism and to help create an autonomous and vibrant civil society.

TITLE: The military enclave: Islam and state in Egypt, Turkey and Algeria
AUTHOR: Cook, Steven A.
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 359
ADVISER: Lustick, Ian S.
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/10, p. 3825, Apr 2004
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); HISTORY, MIDDLE EASTERN (0333)

Why do Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria-three states that are different in a number of analytically important respects-manifest strikingly similar political syndromes? This line of inquiry is part of an overall endeavor to explore the idea of political performance. I posit that the complex and dynamic relationship among what this study calls "the military enclave;" the institutional settings of the Egyptian, Turkish, and Algerian states; and dedicated opposition (in the present cases Islamist) movements produces a persistent pattern of political inclusion and exclusion that is strikingly common to all three cases. Unlike previous work on civil-military relations in the Middle East, Latin America, or South Asia, the study uncovers the complex and nuanced character of the military's interest in both a fáade of democracy and in direct control of certain key aspects of rule- i.e., to rule, but not to govern. Moreover, the dissertation explores the dangers that lurk in this strategy for both the militaries and societies involved.

TITLE: Le melodrame en Egypte. Deterritorialisation. Intermedialite (French text, Baz Luhrmann, Mohamed Karim, Giuseppe Verdi, Italy)
AUTHOR: El Khachab, Walid Ahmed Mohamed
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL (CANADA)
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 362
ADVISER: Mariniello, Silvestra
ISBN: 0-612-84978-3
LANGUAGE: FRENCH
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/10, p. 3675, Apr 2004
SUBJECT: LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE (0295); MUSIC (0413); LITERATURE, MIDDLE EASTERN (0315); CINEMA (0900); THEATER (0465)

More than a genre related to a particular media, melodrama is an image of thought and a model for the construction of self and other, the good and the evil. This dissertation focuses on cinema in Egypt, but its epistemological preoccupations join several cultural products and study melodrama's social agency -in the Middle East and elsewhere- engaged in a continuous process of deterritorialization-reterritorialization. The first chapter deals with poetics and rhetoric of melodrama. The effects of music, excess, pathos, realism and contingency are studied in connection with the relationship between the individual destabilized by modernity and societal transcendences. "Technical" elements prove to be political because the affect resulting from a close-up or of the voice's tone produces an effect, establishes power relations and locates bodies in history. The second chapter analyzes the debate over modernity in Egypt. Melodrama functions as a means of relief, conjuration and appropriation of the new, and produces new individual and collective models of subjectivity. Agent and site of the negotiation of modernity in Egypt, melodrama plays analogue roles in several European and American contexts. The politics of love is more than an escapist way to bear social injustice. It negotiates the secular and the divine, the individual and the state matters. The analysis of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and of Mohamed Karim's Happy Day shows that love in melodrama fulfills this task in both North and South. The third chapter focuses on the production of collective modes of modern subjectivation in melodrama. Nationalism and its epistemological base shared with imperialism and fascism are studied in the first "Egyptian" opera, Verdi's Ăda. In Europe as in Egypt, these three "-isms" offer hegemonic models of the self's relationship to the other -for example the male conquering the colonized female- implementing allegories (the Leader, the Mother-land). The last chapter explores the "Islamic" roots of melodrama in the Sufis' culture of middle eastern mysticism. Their refusal of the law's mediation between the human and the divine and their writings about shadow theatre offer traditional basis for an alternative theory, of cinema and politics, that is non mimetic, critical about the principle of representation, and confirming the autonomy of culture. In this theory, intermediality is more than interaction between media: it defies the mediation of the transcendental orders of state and law.

TITLE: The Arab American population: Alternative definitions
AUTHOR: Hammad, Fayez Yousef
DEGREE: MS
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 67
ADVISER: Biblarz, Timothy
SOURCE: MAI 42/03, p. 831, Jun 2004
SUBJECT: SOCIOLOGY, DEMOGRAPHY (0938); SOCIOLOGY, ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES (0631)

The Arab American community has been the subject of many misconceptions and the focus of attention during Middle East-related crises, which often expose it to prejudice and violence. This heightened climate gave rise to the development of an "Arab American" identity, and thus calls for a clear and dynamic definition of the Arab American population. This thesis first examines the two waves of Arab immigration to America (1890-WWI and post-WWII) and analyzes their historical context in relation to this ethnic identification. Accounting for changing sociopolitical conditions and utilizing the 1980 and 1990 PUMS census data, the thesis considers three alternative definitions -Arabic language, Arab World-born, and Arab ancestry; demonstrates the relative accuracy of the self-identification based definition of the latter; and calls for the inclusion of a separate Arab-American/Middle Eastern category in the "long form" of the decennial census to remedy the chronic undercount of this scrutinized community.

TITLE: The path to indivisibility: The role of ideas in the resolution of intractable territorial disputes
AUTHOR: Hassner, Ron Eduard
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: STANFORD UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 327
ADVISER: Krasner, Stephen D.
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/09, p. 3469, Mar 2004
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND RELATIONS (0616); RELIGION, HISTORY OF (0320)

How can states resolve intractable territorial disputes? Contrary to conventional wisdom, this dissertation argues against gradualist or reciprocal measures to resolve these disputes. Empirical analysis demonstrates that territorial disputes tend to become more difficult to resolve over time because perceptions of the disputed territory come to approximate indivisibility. This suggests the need for a radical conflict resolution approach. International relations scholars and practitioners have frequently assumed that the best means of addressing these disputes are conventional techniques of negotiation, arbitration or compromise that address the material issues at their core. In a series of case studies I show that the power to resolve intractable disputes is often in the hands of idea entrepreneurs who are capable of redefining the immaterial value of the disputed territory as perceived by their constituents. To demonstrate the power of charismatic leaders in resolving the most difficult category of territorial disputes, I examine conflict over sacred space in South Asia and the Middle East. Although disputes over sacred space are characterized by indivisibility, resolution or mitigation was possible where political leaders cooperated with religious actors capable of redefining the meaning of the disputed space. The study of disputes over sacred space conforms with the findings on "secular" territorial disputes and contributes to research on religion and international security.

TITLE: Al-Mu'ayyad fi al'Din al-Shirazi and the Fatimid religious propaganda organization in the age of al-Mustansir (427--487 A.H./1036--1094 C.E.)
AUTHOR: Howes, Rachel Tranquility
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 347
ADVISER: Humphreys, R. Stephen
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/11, p. 4172, May 2004
SUBJECT: HISTORY, MIDDLE EASTERN (0333)

My dissertation project examines the political relationship between the individual, the organization, and the state in the mid-eleventh century Middle East. The mid-eleventh century saw a series of crises that destroyed the independent power of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mustansir in the 1070s. Included in these changes was the religious propaganda organization of the Fatimids, the Dawa. The Dawa had been an active organization in the early period of Fatimid rule, but, when the Caliphate and Fatimid power decline, the Dawa also became impotent. The individual who was the head of this organization during the mid-eleventh century was al-Mu'ayyad al-Din al-Shirazi; (1000-1078, Head of the Dawa 1058& ndash; 1078). By putting his autobiography into the context of other historical works of the period, I gain a more nuanced picture both of the political structure of the Fatimid state and the tensions within it and those of the Buyid court of Shiraz in which he spent the early part of his life. Since the Fatimid religious propaganda organization also operated on an international scale, I also get a sense of the political relations between the Fatimid state and the states around it during this time of change. The dissertation is divided into three segments. The first examines sectarian relations within the Buyid court of Shiraz. The second examines the political factions within the court of Cairo. The third looks at the preparation, launch and failure of the Fatimid supported invasion of Baghdad against the Seljuks by an ex-Buyid general. In the end the reader gets a picture of the extremely personal nature of politics in the courts of this period, and it was this very personality that leads to the difficulties that the Fatimid state faces in the later eleventh century.

TITLE: Framing of Arabs and Muslims after September 11th: A close reading of network news
AUTHOR: Ibrahim, Dina A.
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 235
ADVISER: Jensen, Robert
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/12, p. 4250, Jun 2004
SUBJECT: JOURNALISM (0391); SOCIOLOGY, ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES (0631); LANGUAGE, RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION (0681)

Through a close reading and ideological critique of network news reports with particular attention to their use of sources, this study investigates the characteristics of Arabs and Muslims that network television highlighted and obscured in their coverage of the September 11^th attacks. It analyzes how network news visual and rhetorical discourse framed Arabs and Muslims, to determine whether this case study indicates a departure from dominant trends in media coverage of those communities. By analyzing the types of sources used after 9/11 by the networks and what those sources said, the study illuminates patterns of ideological influence on media content about Arabs and Muslims established by scholars of the Middle East and American news.

TITLE: Integrating traditional institutions in international development: Revitalizing zakat to reduce poverty in Muslim societies
AUTHOR: Ishaq, Khaled Ahmed
DEGREE: MA
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 181
ADVISER: Weiss, Anita M.
SOURCE: MAI 42/04, p. 1174, Aug 2004
SUBJECT: SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT (0700); POLITICAL SCIENCE, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND RELATIONS (0616); POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615)

Major international development agencies have had limited success in poverty reduction globally and they must figure out how to incorporate locally-embedded institutions to become more effective. The traditional Islamic institution of zakat has the potential to play a major role in poverty reduction in the Middle East/North Africa region but it also needs to become more efficient and transparent. International organizations -particularly the UNDP and the World Bank- must re-examine their inherent biases and reverse past strategies that marginalized traditional institutions so as to become more effective and responsive to local needs. Incorporating revitalized zakat institutions will create space for local voices and empower a broad-based coalition of local actors to take responsibility in funding, designing and implementing poverty reduction programs to substitute for culturally inappropriate, coercive interventions. This will increase the level of trust and cooperation between local and international partners in development while decrease dependence on external assistance.

TITLE: Karo kari (honor killing) in Pakistan: A hermeneutic study of various discourses
AUTHOR: Jafri, Amir Hamid
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 189
ADVISER: Kramer, Eric
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/03, p. 720, Sep 2003
SUBJECT: SPEECH COMMUNICATION (0459); ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326)

Honor killing is one form of extreme violence perpetrated on women by men. In Pakistan it is called karo kari (literally: blackened man, blackened woman). It most commonly is a premeditated killing of a girl or woman, committed by her brother, father, or combination of male agnates in the name of restoring what they consider their family's honor by her behavior. The genesis of honor killing in human societies is deeply sedimented in history but has been linked by various scholars with ascendant patriarchal structures. A large number of honor killings are reported from Mediterranean, Latin American, and certain Muslim societies, but research suggests that it would be an error to view it as being peculiar to a certain geographical area or belief system. Pakistan is one of the countries where the incidents of honor killing are among the highest in the contemporary world. There have been important scholarly contributions on the concept of honor and how it is behaviorally expressed and understood in various societies -particularly in the Middle East and around the Mediteranean- but little such work has been done in Pakistan. As a hermeneutic study, and borrowing from theorists and philosophers as diverse as Gebser, Foucault, Barthes, Riceour, Kramer, Gramsci, and Spivak, this dissertation contextualizes and analyses the various representative discourses in Pakistan in order to come to an understanding of the possible cultural, religious, and historical reasons that create the exigency for men to kill a female member of their own family. This work looks at this kind of killing as a message, a vivid rhetorical move, in several contexts of Pakistani national life and analyzes how these messages are communicated, and toward what rhetorical ends.

TITLE: Power resources, preferences, and influence at the United Nations General Assembly
AUTHOR: Jo, Dong-Joon
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 305
ADVISER: Palmer, Glenn
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/09, p. 3470, Mar 2004
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND RELATIONS (0616)

This dissertation examines how power resources, preferences, and issue-area affect the United States influence to change its counterparts' voting behavior at the United Nations General Assembly. Classical definitions of power imply that power and preferences should be combined to study political phenomena. When they do not share similar preferences, countries involved in important issues come to be involved in a relationship where power plays a key role. Power definitions lead to an expectation that states try to influence their counterparts' voting behavior on issues important to them at the General Assembly, while they let their counterparts behave freely on issues of less importance. Being negligent of the interaction between preferences and power at the international forum, empirical studies have overrepresented either the effect of preferences or power upon the voting record. In the first stage, this dissertation tests whether United States power resources help the United States influence its counterpart's voting behavior on important issues, while controlling for the effect of the dyadic preference similarity. In the second stage, this dissertation examines whether the effect of US power resources upon the US influence is dependent on issue-area. After grouping all roll-call votes from 1950 to 1992 into four issue-clusters (military-political, social-economic, colonial-the Middle East, and UN internal-legal), it assesses the effect of power resources and dimensions of preferences upon the dyadic voting coincidence for each issue-cluster. This dissertation concludes that (1) power and preferences interact together to determine votes in the General Assembly; (2) the conversion process from power resources into influence is contingent upon issue-area: (3) domestic factors affect interstate interactions at the international organization. This dissertation provides a general implication that studies of political phenomena should combine power and preferences simultaneously. In addition, this dissertation provides a couple of policy implications. First, it may be unlikely that direct uses of power resources (e.g., curtailments of foreign aid) increase the influence at international interactions associated with issues of low intensity. Second, pre-consultations may countervail the lack of power resources that are directly available for the influence on international issues of low intensity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

TITLE: Agricultural sustainability and conflict in the Middle East: The question of desertification and its institutional arrangements for the region
AUTHOR: Johnson, Michael Dewaun
DEGREE: MA
SCHOOL: THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 106
ADVISER: Levinson, Nanette; Ahmed, Akbar
SOURCE: MAI 42/03, p. 815, Jun 2004
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT (0700); ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES (0768); ECONOMICS, AGRICULTURAL (0503)

Agriculture is a productive activity not typically associated with urban areas, where it is often seen as a marginal use for land awaiting future development. Yet research indicates that agricultural production within urban and peri-urban regions may be very significant in terms of meeting household nutritional requirements and food security, as well as offering income-generating opportunities and global environmental enhancements. Urban agriculture and urban food systems are receiving growing attention, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, little such attention has been directed toward the cities in the Middle East. While basic constraints, opportunities, and interactions are shared throughout the world, agriculture in Middle Eastern cities and peri-urban area present important contrasts to other region on several counts. There are political, religious, historical, and cultural "isms" which have influence agriculture in the Middle East. Given its geo-ecological position on earth, the Middle East suffers from severe levels of land degradation, water insecurity, and deforestation. Desertification not only has negative effects on urban and peri-urban zones, and on rural development in the Middle East. With the high levels of urbanization, fragility of agricultural lands, and great propensity for conflict in the Middle East, the development of urban agriculture can make sustainable contributions to improving the quality of life of populations in the region.

TITLE: Culture and power asymmetry in resource negotiations: Implications for self-interested behavior in social dilemmas
AUTHOR: Kopelman, Shirli
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 103
ADVISER: Brett, Jeanne
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/01, p. 214, Jul 2004
SUBJECT: BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, MANAGEMENT (0454); PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL (0451)

This dissertation proposed a model relating culture to self-interested behavior in resource negotiations. Participants from four economic regions -North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia- made resource allocation decisions prior to a discussion in culturally mixed groups. Cultural differences were confirmed along two cultural values that shape implicit theories invoked in negotiations, self-direction and hierarchy. Results, based on an experimental commons dilemma simulation, supported a contextual model in which culture interacts with economic power asymmetry. Decision-makers from groups that scored high on the cultural value of hierarchy reacted to economic power cues, whereas, those low on hierarchy did not. Decision-makers from hierarchical groups that also scored high on the cultural value of self-direction were more self-interested in positions of high economic power, and relatively less so in positions of low economic power, suggesting they applied an equity norm. In contrast, decision-makers from groups high on hierarchy and low on self-direction were less self-interested and more socially responsible (cooperative) in positions of high economic power, suggesting they applied an inverse equity norm. Results also indicated that the interaction effect of cultural profile and economic power on self-interested behavior was fully mediated by social motives, egocentrism, and expectations. Implications for the impact of culture on social dilemmas are discussed.

South Asia:

TITLE: Negombo fishermen's Tamil: A case of contact-induced language change from Sri Lanka
AUTHOR: Bonta, Steven C.
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: CORNELL UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 255
ADVISER: Gair, James
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/12, p. 4439, Jun 2004
SUBJECT: LANGUAGE, LINGUISTICS (0290)

Negombo Fishermen's Tamil (NFT) is a dialect of Tamil spoken by bilingual fishermen living along Sri Lanka's west coast between Negombo and Chilaw, who speak Sinhala as well as Tamil. NFT has many distinctive traits, some of which may have arisen as a consequence of contact with Sinhala. This dissertation presents the results of research seeking to establish the relationship between NFT and other dialects of Tamil, and to determine which features of NFT grammar have arisen as a result of contact with Sinhala, as well as the causes of this contact-induced change. An evaluation of NFT in terms of traits shared with other Tamil dialects suggests that NFT probably originated in India, but has subsequently adopted, and is still adopting, Sri Lankan Tamil traits. An evaluation of NFT grammatical traits that appear to be plausibly connected to Sinhala influence does suggest that NFT speakers have imported a number of Sinhala grammatical structures, in addition to lexical items. In general, changes involving verb morphology and grammatical meaning are the most pervasive, suggesting that, in this contact situation, verb morphology and functions are more transparent than other grammatical domains to influence from Sinhala. Finally, the case of NFT is compared with other instances of contact-induced grammatical change, both in South Asia and elsewhere. It is concluded that both sociological and structural factors likely play strong roles in determining the outcome of contact-induced language change. It is also proposed that, in order to account for certain types of "structural diffusion" a third mechanism for contact induced change, in addition to shift and borrowing, must be posited: realignment. This term refers to the reconfiguration of paradigms and syntactic structures under the influence of a competing model or models. The evidence suggests that realignment is responsible for much of the contact-induced change found in South Asian languages, including NFT.

TITLE: In the crosscurrents of empire: A moving geography of global British modernism, 1900--1940
AUTHOR: Cohen, Scott Allen
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 221
ADVISER: Wicke, Jennifer; Levenson, Michael
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/04, p. 1378, Oct 2004
SUBJECT: LITERATURE, ENGLISH (0593); LITERATURE, MODERN (0298); LITERATURE, CARIBBEAN (0360)

"In the Crosscurrents of Empire" is a study of the complicated relationship between modernism and the British Empire. Reading a range of fiction written in English from London, the Caribbean, and South Asia, this study combines close textual readings, material history, and cultural analysis to chart the global dimensions of modernism. While expansion was the dominant form of spatial experience during the "Age of Empire" the first half of the twentieth century saw this spatial logic yield to other modes of experiencing global and local spaces. During the modernist period, literature and other cultural discourses as well as specific historical and political events endowed physical and psychic movement with new meaning. The resulting spatial crises and disconcerting mobilities informed the structure of modern fiction and the administration of empire alike. Taking up the challenge posed by Raymond Williams to explore the emergence of modernism from the "hinterlands" as well as the city, this dissertation charts real and imagined movement, both outward to points on the imperial periphery and inward toward the metropolis. Drawing on postcolonial and critical theory, I pursue a comparative approach to explore novels by colonial authors, including Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand; the metropolitan modernist Virginia Woolf; as well as writers, such as Jean Rhys and Joseph Conrad, who found themselves in between the currents of empire. By exploring these literary figures together with cultural materials, from maps and mass-cultural texts to imperialist exhibitions and colonial advertising, the project shows how movement and mobility shaped both anti-colonial writing and the practical politics of empire. Within this framework I examine how what has come to be called modernism's spatialization of form intimately relates to imperialist notions of space and mobility. By remaining committed to understanding both modernism and empire as contemporaneous cultural formations that overlapped and dialectically informed each other, this survey of modernist terrain offers a much-needed account of how physical and psychic movement cut through and across the spaces of metropolitan modernism and global imperialism, radically shaping both enterprises.

TITLE: A theory of international intervention in a secessionist war: A test of the dynamics of secession in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka)
AUTHOR: Dos Santos, Anne Noronha
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 206
ADVISER: Kydd, Andrew; Allison, Juliann Emmons
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/01, p. 273, Jul 2004
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); POLITICAL SCIENCE, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND RELATIONS (0616)

Major secessionist movements are currently ongoing in Russia, Spain, Canada, Nigeria, India, and Sri Lanka, among others, and these movements have had a strong impact on international security. The ongoing secessionist movement in Kashmir, for example, is a major threat to security in South Asia and may eventually bring about international military intervention. Despite the importance of this issue, theories of international relations have not adequately addressed the causal dynamics that bring about military intervention in a secessionist war. Exploring this link raises the following research question: How, when, and why do secessionist movements become secessionist wars and increase the risk of international military intervention? This study develops a conceptual framework that identifies the conditions that make international military intervention more or less likely. The model presented here consists of generalizations based on hypotheses, which are tested by historical evidence. In other words, patterns of behavior associated with secession have been analyzed in order to build a theory of international military intervention in a secessionist war with a view toward guiding future policy choices. The theory is then tested by an in-depth historical analysis of four case studies of secessionist war drawn from South Asia: East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Sri Lanka, Kashmir, and Punjab. The findings of the study did identify the conditions that make international military intervention in a secessionist war more or less likely. Broadly, the study suggests that a strong alliance between the secessionists and an external power bring on international military intervention. The findings indicate that a strong alliance is formed when "rivalry between the host state and an external power" and "ethnic kinship between the secessionists and an external power" are both present.

TITLE: Imperial vistas: New Delhi's role as a symbol of British Constitutional Reform in India and the cultural politics of colonial space, 1911--1931
AUTHOR: Johnson, David Andrew
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 261
ADVISER: Haynes, Douglas
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/04, p. 1502, Oct 2004
SUBJECT: HISTORY, EUROPEAN (0335); HISTORY, ASIA, AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA (0332); HISTORY, MODERN (0582)

The building of New Delhi between 1912 and 1931 occurred during a moment of profound political and social change in India. As an ambitious colonial building project, the city was originally meant to symbolize the strength and vitality of the British Empire, its progressive institutions, and its imperial legitimacy in South Asia. It did this by erecting large government buildings in the neo-classical style and by interweaving the new city within the ruins of past Hindu and Moslem empires deemed static and despotic in comparison to the benevolent and progressive British Raj. Yet by the time of the city's inauguration in February 1931 it was evident that the new city now represented Britain's weakened imperial stature and its need to negotiate with the emerging power of the Indian independence movement. Many scholars have remarked on the city's transformation from a symbol of power to a symbol of weakness, but few have analyzed this ironic moment in detail. This study places the building of New Delhi within the context of constitutional reforms passed during the first three decades of the 20^th century in India. Understood in this way, New Delhi loses much of its irony and becomes, instead, a reflection of imperial policies designed to silence or undermine the Indian independence movement. Hence, I argue that the city should not be necessarily seen as a sign of imperial weakness but rather as a dialogue between the Government of India and Indian nationalists. British policy-makers and town-planners used New Delhi to portray an imperial vision that offered Indians a greater voice in their own governance while simultaneously locating ultimate authority within the British colonial administration. Yet this new discourse of conciliation and partnership was ultimately undermined by Britain's inability to break from the racial and social assumptions deeply embedded in the imperial project. By reading New Delhi against British-India's political context, I show why the new capital failed to help solidify the position of the British Raj in South Asia, the original intention of the project, and why British constitutional reforms symbolized by New Delhi were not successful in silencing the Indian independence movement.

TITLE: Unfinished histories: Gendered violence and national identity in women's writings (Joyotirmoyee Devi, Mahasweta Devi, India, Jahanara Imam, Taslima Nasreen, Bangladesh)
AUTHOR: Mookerjea-Leonard, Debali
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 295
ADVISER: Seely, Clinton
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/12, p. 4471, Jun 2004
SUBJECT: LITERATURE, ASIAN (0305); WOMEN'S STUDIES (0453); LITERATURE, MODERN (0298)

The dissertation studies literary writings by women -Jyotirmoyee Devi and Mahasweta Devi from India and Jahanara Imam and Taslima Nasreen from Bangladesh- and through these texts examines four instances of catastrophic political violence in South Asia. These are the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, 1947; the Naxalite Movement 1967-72; the liberation struggle in Bangladesh, 1971; and the violence following the razing of the Babri Masjid, 1992. The dissertation examines how in every incident of political violence, the human body has been subjected to culturally specific but emphatically modern gender pathologies. By investigating literary representations of these political developments it seeks to isolate gender as a recurrent, if suppressed, subtext at issue in different ways in these very different political struggles and interrogates the recruitment of violent and oppressive gender ideals to dominant macrosociological identities of nationality and religious community. The dissertation examines how political violence is shot through with an irreducible dimension of gendered violence, so that acts of political violence reveal key aspects of gender relations, and that gender pathology is at the core of political struggles. The analysis cuts against the emphasis of many investigations of inequality and oppressive social relations dominated by caste-focused or class and interest focused preoccupations by seeing these as so many forms of reproducing a vulnerability and terror at the heart of gender relations per se in South Asia. Also, the dissertation endeavors to bring out the longue dure continuities and disjunctures between the colonial and postcolonial periods. Addressing the issue of the experience of violence through the writings in South Asian languages by novelists, poets, journalists, and activists, it analyzes questions of representation, and relatedly, the attempts by women to inhabit, if not to come to terms with, the scarred histories of their various presents.

TITLE: Exploration of the language of violence in South Asian partition fiction in English (India, Saadat Hasan Manto)
AUTHOR: Pandey, Beerendra
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT STONY BROOK
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 119
ADVISER: Cooper, Helen
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/04, p. 1376, Oct 2004
SUBJECT: LITERATURE, ASIAN (0305); LITERATURE, ENGLISH (0593)

The dissertation unravels the politics of the language of violence in South Asian English partition fiction. It contends that partition literature written between 1947 and the 1980s, with the exception of the short stories of Urdu writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, follows along the lines of nationalist historiography and fails to rise above the prose of otherness in its representation of the brutal violence that constituted the partition of India. By highlighting Manto's subalternist humanism through a discussion of his metairony, which locates and relives the relentless partition violence in the trauma of the ironic subjects, the dissertation proposes that the focus must shift from remembering partition as a mode of resistance to victimhood to remembering it as a trauma that has be confronted in order to come to grips with the realities of communal and neighborly tensions in South Asia.

TITLE: Defying borders: Contemporary Sindhi Hindu constructions of practices and identifications (India, Pakistan)
AUTHOR: Ramey, Steven Wesley
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 306
ADVISER: Ernst, Carl W.
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/04, p. 1403, Oct 2004
SUBJECT: RELIGION, GENERAL (0318); RELIGION, HISTORY OF (0320)

While religious borders separate communities and contribute to inter-religious violence, the definitions of those borders frequently arouse intense debate. In South Asia, religious borders led to the Partition of India and Pakistan, which pressured Sindhi Hindus, like other communities, to flee their homes in Sindh, which became a part of Pakistan. In India, however, the predominant understanding of Hinduism differed from Sindhi practices, which concentrated on the Guru Granth Sahib, deities, and Sufi saints, and identified those activities with three separate religions, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Sufi Islam. Some non-Sindhis even questioned the Hindu identification of the Sindhis, the central reason for their migration. To analyze the legal, social, and political implications of hegemonic definitions on this minority community, I focus on the experiences of contemporary Sindhi Hindus in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, as they recreate their lives and form Sindhi traditions in a diasporic context. Through analysis of the two main Sindhi institutions in Lucknow, three Sindhi guru movements, the celebration of the Sindhi New Year in the city, and the practices and representations of various Sindhi Hindus, I discuss the struggles that Sindhis face because of the different definitions of Hinduism. In Lucknow, Sindhis struggled with conflicting interests between asserting the distinctiveness of their heritage and connecting with the majority Hindu community by conforming to the predominant definitions. To meet both concerns, Sindhis frequently presented their own understandings of the borders of Hinduism, placing their traditions within Hinduism. However, being immersed in this diasporic context, Sindhis frequently undermined their own redefinitions. Sindhi participation at non-Sindhi sites reinforced the predominant definitions, and the common terminology available to Sindhis often held connotations of the distinctions between the three religions. Sindhi representations also reflected their ambivalence towards Islam as they honored Sufi Muslims but blamed Muslims in general for their losses during Partition. While Sindhi traditions maintained a unique vitality in Lucknow, the negative impact of hegemonic definitions challenges scholars to avoid the uncritical acceptance of narrow definitions of religious borders that create problems for communities like the Sindhis.

TITLE: Negotiating the modern: Orientalism and 'Indianess' in the Anglophone world
AUTHOR: Ray, Amit
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DATE: 2004
PAGES: 235
ADVISER: Gikandi, Simon E.
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/02, p. 504, Aug 2004
SUBJECT: LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE (0295); LITERATURE, ASIAN (0305); LITERATURE, ENGLISH (0593)

India and Indians feature prominently in contemporary Anglophone fiction. The last quarter of a century has seen a boom in English language writing from and about Britain's Empire in South Asia. The Booker and Pulitzer prizes for prose fiction frequently consider and reward both writers and topics whose ethnic and cultural histories travel through South Asia. Yet, this is not the first time that India appears prominently in the literary world of English-language readers. Another literary "boom" involving India and Indian writers occurred in the early years of the twentieth century. In this project, I seek to explicate a long-standing literary celebration of "India" and "Indian-ness" by charting a cultural history of India in Great Britain and the United States. I locate moments (in intellectual, religious and cultural history) where India and Indianess are offered up as solutions to modern moral, ethical and political questions. Beginning in the early 1800's, South Asians actively sought to occupy and modify discourses nurtured and sustained by scholarly Orientalism: the study of the East (Asia Minor and Major) via Western (European) epistemological frameworks. Tracing the varying fortunes of Orientalist scholars from the inception of British rule in East India, my study charts some of the key Indologists - scholars of India, and particularly of Indian "texts" - of the nineteenth century. I note that the rhetorical constructions of East and West deployed by both colonizer and colonized, as well as attempts to synthesize or transcend such constructions, are crucial to delineating and defining conceptions of the "modern" Examining the impact of these confluences in religious, intellectual and political discourse in India and Great Britain, I contend that an increasing desire amongst Indians for political sovereignty, in conjunction with the deeply racialized formations of imperialism, produces a shift in a dialogic relationship between South Asia and Europe that had been initiated and sustained by orientalists. This impetus pushed scholarly discourse about India in Europe, North America and elsewhere, out of what had been a role in the politics and theology of Europe and into high "Literary" culture.

TITLE: One day the girl will return: Feminism, nation, and poetry in South Asia (India, Pakistan)
AUTHOR: Anantharam, Anita
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 258
ADVISER: Ray, Raka; Dalmia, Vasudha
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/02, p. 523, Aug 2004
SUBJECT: LITERATURE, ASIAN (0305); WOMEN'S STUDIES (0453); SOCIOLOGY, ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES (0631)

This dissertation, "One Day the Girl Will Return: Feminism, Nation, and Poetry in South Asia," seeks to embed the poems of four women writers, two from India and two from Pakistan, within the nationalist movements of their respective countries. One crucial question with which this dissertation engages is: How do genres of poetry enable these four women, from vastly different periods of social history, and from different geographical places, to write feminist conscious, anti-state poetry? In answering this question, this project raises important theoretical issues about the relationship between gender, voice, nation, and sexuality. By crossing boundaries, both geographic as well as linguistic, this project provides a more nuanced and complicated understanding of nationalism in India and Pakistan, and how women's resistance to it has taken on a multiplicity of forms and voices. In theoretical terms, this study connects Hindi and Urdu literature, which have remained two distinct areas of study since India's independence from British colonial power in 1947 and the subsequent partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and points to the places and moments in which they speak to each other. To date, no scholarly work has successfully accomplished this goal of reading women's voices in both Hindi and Urdu, embedded in the literary public sphere. In nationalist debates about the role that women would play in the development of the nation and a national identity, women's bodies, and not their voices, was of primary concern. But women's voices did exist and women did articulate resistance to the ways in which they were being imagined by the state. As my dissertation shows, these periods of nationalism in pre-partition India and later on in an independent India and Pakistan, coincide with women's resistance movements. This dissertation reveals that while working within masculine constructs of femininity, women used the poetic genre in these critical historical moments to discuss intimate issues of self, emotionality, and sexuality that could not, in their socio-historical contexts, be otherwise expressed. Poetry uniquely facilitates such expression, as it allows an author to explore these sensitive issues under the protective blankets of metaphor, symbolism, and literary convention. This project challenges the idea that only men are active participants in the public sphere, by showing that precisely when their identities are most vulnerable, and their sexualities publicly contested, women writing the self, sexuality, and the body came out into the public sphere. This dissertation suggests that sexuality, as a category of analysis, is crucial to unraveling the mechanism of nationalism in South Asia. It also serves as a powerful conceptual metaphor of resistance.

TITLE: The religious and philosophical basis of Bhasani's political leadership (India, Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, Pakistan, Bangladesh)
AUTHOR: Bahar, Abid S.
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY (CANADA)
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 349
ADVISER: Bird, Fred
ISBN: 0-612-85265-2
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/10, p. 3723, Apr 2004
SUBJECT: RELIGION, HISTORY OF (0320); BIOGRAPHY (0304); HISTORY, ASIA, AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA (0332)

Bhasani was born in 1885, two decades after the famous Indian revolt of 1857. Following the revolt, in the tumultuous political arena of South Asia many notable politicians emerged. One of these was Mawlana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasani, best known as Bhasani. As a religious seer-wise person and holy person, with a number of loyal followers and devotees, he had two over-lapping groups of followers - those who responded to him as a pir (a religious mystic) and those who responded to his political positions. Political observers and academicians in the South Asian subcontinent have repeatedly claimed that Bhasani was a "Communist," a "fundamentalist," and that he had "no direction in politics." This research examines the socio-political contexts of Assam, Pakistan and Bangladesh within which Bhasani worked, and discovers that, contrary to the claims, Bhasani used a model of Islamic liberal ideas. The research findings suggest that Bhasani's religious perspective is present in several ways: (a) in his sense of calling-as a kind of mystic; (b) in his vision of a human community not rent by divisions and oppression; (c) in the Islamic rhetoric of his discourse; and (d) in his sense of being called upon to respond to contemporary exigencies. This latter feature seems especially important. He acted in ways that were principled and consistent with rubābiyah: the Sufi-inspired views of the unity of being, simple living, and serving humanity as a religious duty. As a political leader, his lifestyle of a Bengali peasant was not a result of his destiny, but of his choice and his use of religion in politics suggests that he was a complex figure.

TITLE: The conjurer unmasked: Literary and theatrical magicians, 1840--1925 (Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Browning, Mark Twain)
AUTHOR: Claxton, Michael Jay
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 424
ADVISER: Life, Allan
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/03, p. 913, Sep 2003
SUBJECT: LITERATURE, ENGLISH (0593); LITERATURE, AMERICAN (0591); THEATER (0465); BIOGRAPHY (0304); LITERATURE, MODERN (0298)

This dissertation examines representations of the magician in literature and theater, in England and America from 1840 to 1925. It focuses especially upon the tension between the real-life conjurers' attempts at positive self-representation in their autobiographical writings and the usually negative treatments of magicians in artistic texts. This tension is explored in a variety of contexts - imperial, political, and literary - in order to demonstrate the pervasiveness of conjuring as a symbol of the tastes and anxieties of the age. The most disturbing depictions of the magician appear in autobiographical accounts of Western magicians who traveled overseas on missions with either overt or implicit colonial aims, and in the writings of Western conjurers criticizing their Eastern counterparts. The magicians' efforts at positive self-representation often depended upon a strongly asserted superiority to and competition with the street magic particularly of South Asia. Rejecting the perceived status of India as the birthplace of magic, Western magicians shaped their travel narratives and stage personas to demonstrate a consistent superiority to Indian magic, yet examination of selected texts reveals a conflicted medley of racism, condescension, admiration, one-upmanship, and appropriation, between Victorian magicians (who designed Eastern-themed acts to delight novelty-starved Western audiences) and their Eastern counterparts. The Victorian magician's literal and metaphorical connections to Empire are further complicated by depictions of conjuring in the humor magazine Punch, which treats the figure of the magician as a potent metaphor for political and diplomatic deception. Most importantly, this dissertation argues that literary works express a much more complex skepticism towards magicians, as these texts repeatedly unmask, convert, or disempower the conjurer, even as they confirm his or her enduring appeal. Close readings of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1854), Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge, the "Medium" (1864), and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) place these three works more firmly in the context of Victorian magic, to show how writers wrestle with the same questions that drew audiences to the magic show or seance: the difference between illusion and truth, the place of the supernatural in an increasingly materialistic world, and the contest between civilized technology and "uncivilized" hocus pocus.

TITLE: Stayin' Alive: The constitution of subjectivity among Western women in Gilgit, Pakistan
AUTHOR: Cook, Nancy E.
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: YORK UNIVERSITY (CANADA)
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 358
ADVISER: Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba
ISBN: 0-612-86335-2
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/01, p. 291, Jul 2004
SUBJECT: SOCIOLOGY, GENERAL (0626); WOMEN'S STUDIES (0453)

My objective in this dissertation is to theorise processes of subjectivity formation among English-speaking Western women living in Gilgit, the largest town and international development headquarters in Pakistan's Northern Areas. I draw on various poststructural, postcolonial, and feminist theories to explain in general terms the processes through which subjects, their practices, and their agency are constituted in postcolonial and transcultural space. Michel Foucault's theories of power, discourse, subjectivation, and resistance are central. I use this combination of theories to argue that Western women's subjectivities are relationally, ambivalently, and multiply constituted through various discourses operating cross-culturally in Gilgit. Three main research questions guide the study. First, I am interested in how the subjectivities of Western women are (re)constituted in this transcultural field of power through particular discourses that organise their self-imaginings and socio-spatial practices of inclusion and exclusion. And within these processes, how do Western women perpetuate, legitimate, and resist and transform relations of domination as they employ discourses to imagine themselves in relation to the people among whom they live, construct communities and homes, and build careers and relationships in Gilgit? Finally, I aim to explain why it is important to study these dynamics at this particular time, in this place, and among these subjects. To answer these questions, I employed an ethnographic methodology and gathered a combination of multiple intensive interviews, nine months of participant observation, and autobiographical narrative data that describe Western women's perceptions about themselves, their behaviours and daily routines, their representations and interactions with Gilgiti people, their experiences of local people's behaviours, and their understanding of the social context of Gilgit. I employ discourse analysis to ascertain what discourses comprise, animate, and arrange this data and consequently to explain the discursive processes and consequences of Western women's subjectivity formation. By investigating how Western women in contemporary Gilgit enact various discourses and practices of domination, and thus how they incite or resist social change, I aspire to contribute to a contemporary and empirically grounded understanding of transcultural power relations in South Asia, as well as to provide ideas about how those relations can be changed.

TITLE: Raven augury in Tibet, northwest Yunnan, Inner Asia, and circumpolar regions: A study in comparative folklore and religion (China, Corvus corax)
AUTHOR: Mortensen, Eric David
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: HARVARD UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 220
ADVISER: van der Kuijp, Leonard W. J.; Witzel, Michael; NO, Kimberley C.; Patton
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/09, p. 3302, Mar 2004
SUBJECT: LITERATURE, ASIAN (0305); RELIGION, HISTORY OF (0320); FOLKLORE (0358)

Ravens (Corvus corax), through their speech and behavior, serve as divinatory messengers in the folklore traditions of peoples throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The raven is a bird of augury in Tibet and Mongolia, and among the Naxi of Northwest Yunnan. In Inner Asia and across Siberia to Circumpolar regions the significance of the raven transforms from a messenger into trickster and creator god. This thesis examines how, why, and when the raven came to be seen and heard, religiously, in such differing ways. Historical migration of peoples and the transmission of folklore and prognostication texts are examined. Ornithological research on raven language is addressed in conjunction with a discussion of raven dialects and the demography of corvid species. In particular, it is the speech of the raven (and its cousin the crow) that lends the bird such religious and mythical intrigue. The question of how scientific inquiry can incorporate non-empirical possibility into its investigative discourse is also investigated. Data on the role of ravens is also presented from the folkloric compendia of various religious traditions. Methodological issues surrounding morphological causality are examined in light of evidence of divinatory practices in South Asia, Europe, Inner Asia, Circumpolar regions, and northwestern North America. This thesis explores the bounds of such categories as trickster, messenger, and divinity, and asks why particular archetypes of the raven were manifest in different human religious traditions; did it depend on the archaic religious echoes from generations of intimate association with the bird, i.e. folkloric augury? Did it depend on the mood of the culturally refracted or historically transmuted raven? Or did it depend on intentional communication via the speech and behavior of actual living prescient ravens? The central argument of the thesis hinges on the original translation of several Tibetan texts and Naxi pictographic manuscripts about the divinatory nature of raven speech. These translations are presented alongside my fieldwork in Tibet, Yunnan, Bhutan, Tuva, and Mongolia. I then survey the published scholarship on the subject, and propose a model for a way in which a comparative methodology can be developed to reconstruct currents of diffusion of archaic folklore across large geographic areas. With detailed augury texts from Asia, folkloric data from throughout the Northern Hemisphere, ornithological and ethological information about the lives and sounds of the birds, and a methodology for comparing this information, we are closer to understanding the language of ravens.

TITLE: Traffic in the diaspora: Pakistan, modernity and labor migration
AUTHOR: Rana, Junaid Akram
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 233
ADVISER: Visweswaran, Kamala
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/01, p. 196, Jul 2004
SUBJECT: ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326)

This dissertation is an ethnography of transnationalism in recent working-class migration from Pakistan. Using multi-sited research, I track the state-subject relationship present in the process of transnational migration. This study focuses on Pakistan as a sending country and examines the movement of its labor diasporas. The Middle East, Europe and North America (primarily the United States) are the main sites of destination for the transnational labor investigated. Since the 1970s transnational labor migration has created significant economic and cultural changes in Pakistan. To understand these changes I conducted ethnographic research of the migration industry primarily in Lahore and the province of Punjab, Pakistan. This research centered on migrant narratives, the formation of transnational subjectivities and the role of the state in transnational migration. The experience of working class labor migration is structured by the labor-capital relationship. The state mediates this process through material controls and the discursive conception of a citizen-subject. In Pakistan, the particular modernity present between the state and transnational labor migration manifests itself in the formation of migrant subjectivity. This subjectivity is shaped through secular and religious categories that frame transnational conceptions of class and race. Chapter One, explores the place of the secular in the experience of modernity and Islam. This is important in situating the place of labor migrant narratives and the possibilities of secular and religious imaginaries. Chapter Two sets the stage for the ethnographic work of this dissertation through an examination of development literature in South Asia as it relates to labor history and labor migration. Chapter Three is an extensive ethnography of the system of the migration industry as it produces labor migrations and an exploration of the racial and class implications of these labor flows. Chapter Four begins an ethnographic study of the state through the issue of subject formation and the concept of the production of legality and illegality. Chapter Five explores the role of moral panics and racism as forms of representations of labor and migrants. Chapter Six explores two narratives of transnational labor migration, one secular and the other religious, in contemplating the use of utopias in labor migrant imaginaries.

TITLE: Islamic Sufism unbound: Tracing contemporary Chishti Sabiri identity (Pakistan, Malaysia)
AUTHOR: Rozehnal, Robert Thomas
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: DUKE UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 485
ADVISER: Lawrence, Bruce B.
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/12, p. 4501, Jun 2004
SUBJECT: RELIGION, GENERAL (0318); ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326)

This dissertation is a case study of contemporary Sufism in practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and manuscript research, I trace the private experience and public expression of institutional Sufism in postcolonial Pakistan and Malaysia. With attention to both texts and contexts, I explore the use of ritual, sacred space and mass media by a particular Sufi lineage: the Chishti Sabiri order (silsila). The analysis focuses on the lives and legacy of three twentieth century Chishti Sabiri spiritual masters (shaykhs): Muhammad Zauqi Shah (d. 1951) and his two principal successors, Shahidullah Faridi (d. 1978) and Wahid Bakhsh Siyal Rabbani (d. 1995). These Sufi exemplars embodied the complexity of their times. They were each acquainted by education and experience with the institutions and ideology of the colonial state. As writers and ideologues, they defended the orthodoxy of Sufism in Pakistan's contested public sphere. As spiritual guides, they transmitted the disciplinary techniques of ritual praxis (suluk) to their loyal followers. Collectively, their teachings aimed to cultivate a modern, virtuous self through interpersonal networks of knowledge and practice. Today this legacy is perpetuated by a new generation of Chishti Sabiri disciples (murids) in both Pakistan and Malaysia. These Sufi adepts preserve a Muslim identity that is rooted in spiritual genealogy, inscribed in texts, communicated in the intimate exchange between master and disciple, and performed in embodied ritual practices. Though connected to a sacralized past, contemporary murids are fully enmeshed in the living present. In response to shifts in the social, ideological and technological landscape, the silsila has embraced a series of practical strategies designed to accommodate Sufism to the contingencies and complexities of twenty-first century life. Contemporary Chishti Sabiri Sufism is therefore simultaneously paradigmatic and protean. This study employs a range of methodological and interpretive paradigms in order to document these changes and continuities. I argue that Sufism is not merely enshrined in the tomb complexes of long dead saints, and preserved in the literary archive of premodern shaykhs. Beyond these public manifestations - echoes of a long and storied past - Sufism remains a dynamic and adaptive teaching tradition in South Asia and beyond.

TITLE: 'Reviving religion': The Qadiri Sufi order, popular devotion to Sufi Saint Muhyiuddin `Abdul Qadir al-Gilani, and processes of 'Islamization' in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka (India)
AUTHOR: Schomburg, Susan Elizabeth
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: HARVARD UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 700
ADVISER: Asani, Ali S.
SOURCE: DAI-A 64/09, p. 3336, Mar 2004
SUBJECT: RELIGION, HISTORY OF (0320)

Through a multi-faceted research strategy incorporating ethnographic, literary, and historical exploration, the dissertation documents living and literary Qdir traditions and popular traditions of devotion to Sufi saint Muhyuddn `Abdul Qdir al-Gan in the Tamil-speaking region of South Asia. Part I, the ethnographic portion of the dissertation, describes the special characteristics and annual `urs (saint's death anniversary) celebrations at four regional shrine-like sites devoted to the saint, and presents an indepth description of Qdir traditions in the Tamil Nadu coastal maraikk (Arab-settled) town of Kyalpatanam. Part II presents profiles of important Kyalpatanam Qdiriyyat from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, as well as Qdir literary traditions of devotion to Saint Muhyuddn. Part III, "Analyzing Islamization," first highlights the theoretical contributions of Catherine Bell on ritual theory and Paul Connerton on social memory, in an attempt to shed new light on the relationship of ritual practice to historical processes of Islamization. Research findings suggest that commemorative ceremonies, bodily habit, and ritual creativity have played critical roles in "Islamizing" processes. Next, the important role of Tamil Qdir literary traditions in the Islamization of the Tamil region is analyzed with reference to other South Asian regions. Evidence suggests that Qdir scholars engaged whole-heartedly in well-established Tamil literary traditions, emulating and adapting extant literary works and genres to fit their own devotional and didactic agendas. Lives of the Kyalpatanam Qdir community leaders suggest that basic Islamic scholarship and educational efforts - integrated with a Qdir Sufi worldview - and an emphasis on Islamic reform, especially reform agendas directed toward Muslim women, preoccupied Qdir scholars from at least the seventeenth century. Interest in "conversion" of non-Muslims is only faintly discernible in our sources. Finally, a critique of Susan Bayly's 1989 Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700-1900 suggests that scholar's pioneering study of conversion to Islam in Tamil Nadu presents a valuable, but incomplete explanation of "Islamization" in the region.

TITLE: The Anglo-Indians were the gatekeepers: Intimate Lucknowi musical histories (India)
AUTHOR: Shope, Bradley
DEGREE: PhD
SCHOOL: INDIANA UNIVERSITY
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 230
ADVISER: Stone, Ruth
SOURCE: DAI-A 65/02, p. 344, Aug 2004
SUBJECT: MUSIC (0413); FOLKLORE (0358); HISTORY, ASIA, AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA (0332)

This dissertation focuses on the growth of western popular music in North India during the early- and mid-twentieth century, and addresses the social circumstances under which this globalized process developed. By concentrating on field-based interviews and research materials, I develop the notion that the presence of European and American music in Lucknow Uttar Pradesh was an important element in the construction of a sense of identity within the Anglo-Indian population, defined as those of both European and South Asian descent. I draw from interviews with and personal history narratives from musicians, railway workers, music educators and other enthusiasts to elucidate contrasting sentiments towards the performance of the music, and the role of technology in its development and dissemination. This project highlights the significance of individual oral histories in constructing a music ethnography, and examines the role of music in the sociopolitical relationship between the British colonizers and diverse religious, ethnic, and regional communities throughout South Asia. I seek to further elucidate not only the characteristics of the presence of this music, but the manner in which contemporary individuals speak about it. Beginning in the 1910s, dance halls, auditoriums, cafs and railway social institutes were built to cater to the growing number of British nostalgically attempting to keep in touch with their music and dance aesthetic, and the development of music in Europe and America. This value for western music extended into other communities, and became integrated into unique domains of musical appreciation among many South Asians. For Anglo-Indians, it asserted their identity as distinct from other Indians, and demonstrated that their aesthetic reached out beyond the geographical boundaries of South Asia. As such, I address the concern that ethnographies examining intimate oral histories of a music culture are lacking, especially within the discourse about popular and mass-mediated music, which often focus on a larger music industry or economy, rather than its concrete effects on individuals.

TITLE: Poverty and women's empowerment: Exploring the gender-poverty nexus in South Asia
AUTHOR: Sohal, Ramanjeet
DEGREE: MA
SCHOOL: UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH (CANADA)
DATE: 2003
PAGES: 133
ADVISER: Clark, Janine
ISBN: 0-612-80198-5
SOURCE: MAI 42/01, p. 104, Feb 2004
SUBJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); SOCIOLOGY, PUBLIC AND SOCIAL WELFARE (0630); WOMEN'S STUDIES (0453)

This thesis investigates if, and how, poverty alleviation schemes are able to empower poor women. The thesis brings forth empirical evidence from a CARE India micro-finance project called Credit and Savings for Household Enterprise (CASHE). Field research for the thesis, which was carried out in three eastern Indian states, sought to identify and understand the obstacles to "mainstreaming gender" within the CASHE project. The methodology adopted for the research was comprised of qualitative research techniques. Structured interviews were conducted with the CASHE development workers and focus group interviews were carried out with poor women in the CASHE Self-Help Groups. The research fills a critical gap in the evaluative micro-finance literature by bringing forth the voices and experiences of poor women involved in the micro-finance project. The research further illuminates that the struggle to combat women's poverty cannot be divorced from the struggle to combat gender inequality, and moreover that tackling women's poverty is not the same as tackling gender inequality.

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