This dissertation examines the making and un-making of expertise as it unfolds over the socio-economic geographies in India that grow Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco. Specifically, the dissertation studies the work of agrarian experts of the Tobacco Board who work to improve the quality of this lucrative cash crop used in the manufacturing of cigarettes. Agrarian experts at the Tobacco Board have to take into account the layered topography that includes farmers’ costs of production and livelihoods, volatile international markets, and unpredictable agro-climatic patterns, in their research and development. Backed by the authority of the state, the experts’ tendency to render technical masks the structural inequalities that undergird agrarian relations in India.This dissertation argues that experts have to put tremendous amounts of work into sustaining capitalist markets for a cash crop that increasingly benefits fewer and fewer numbers of people. An ethnography of technical interventions, this dissertation studies the role of expertise in maintaining the delicate balance of this market ecology at a historical moment when the Indian government is gradually withdrawing its significant infrastructural investments in the cultivation of the crop.

In disparate contexts, urban agriculture has been heralded as the solution to many perceived social ills: community food insecurity, corporatization of the food system, and the food deserts in which many underserved populations reside. The urban agriculture movement is therefore not only an ecological or environmental one—it is also resoundingly social, political, and ethical. This dissertation therefore investigates the relationship between urban food production, race and class, political economy, and the formation of place-based community in the San Diego-Tijuana metropolitan region. Grounded in thirty-six months of ethnographic and mixed methods fieldwork in San Diego and Tijuana, I analyze the complexities, contradictions, and nuances of what it means to be a food producer situated in a larger social movement pushed forward from multiple angles, including community-based organizations, non-profits, and regional government. To do this, I emphasize four main values that govern food producers’ engagement with their work, especially as they push against mainstream neoliberal market values—those are self-determination, connection to land, community, and hope through prefigurative politics. In uplifting these counter-hegemonic values embodied by urban agriculturalists, I deliver three main propositions about the use of urban agriculture in this area: (1) the culture of urban agriculture aims to produce ethical subjects ready for an alternative politico-economic future; (2) urban agriculture has the potential to be both a radical, liberatory countermovement as well as a neoliberal enterprise that reengages capitalist logics; and (3) urban food producers struggle with competing forms of valuation derived from this radical versus neoliberal tension. This account of urban agriculture reveals that urban food production in underserved areas is a significant act in a growing borderland foodscape, where understandings of where food is sourced and what it means to eat and grow ethically shape local communities. Within these communities, practitioners and residents debate, define, and transform contemporary values around food production, social equity, and belonging. This work focuses a critical lens on capitalist modes of production and unequal food distribution models, furthering the anthropological study of how the retraction of governmental social services in light of neoliberal policies most negatively affects the poor and marginalized.

In the face of the disaster and devastation wrought by both the tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown of March 11, 2011, everything from organizing to theorizing appears unable to go on as usual, encapsulated by the recurrence of the descriptor ‘shinsai-go.’ But for those living according to the macrobiotic health lifestyle philosophy, the crisis is fomented by this concept. Drawing upon my ethnographic fieldwork with macrobiotic practitioners, I present that a macrobiotic narration of March 11, 2011, contrasts with a dominant one. Macrobiotic adherents cast the normality with which Fukushima would break as conditioning Fukushima-as-crisis – and the unwellness that results as endemic. The normality that is presumed by an idea of Fukushima as sudden crisis thus obfuscates, from a macrobiotic viewpoint, a larger, longer crisis.

In this thesis, I demonstrate that wellness determines the timing and spacing of crisis in both dominant and macrobiotic narrations – but that the timing and spacing of a crisis changes with different definitions of wellness. Specifically, those living macrobiotically practice a pointed critique of dominant society’s wellness as about the capacity to be productive. I argue herein that the timing and spacing for a macrobiotically imagined crisis is the nation-state, precisely because the means by which the nation-state is continually produced through bodies are figured as causal of unwellness. I contend that a macrobiotic narration of the state as produced through ideas and practices of productivity – ones which are making people unwell from a macrobiotic perspective – informs a set of practices that seek (macrobiotically imagined) wellness as a refusal to be productive under a dominant rubric.

This dissertation examines the relationship between compassion and alienation in contemporary Japan. That relationship is poignantly expressed in the experience of religious professionals working to "get close to the hearts of others." For those professionals, as for many scholars, sharing suffering is meant to overcome isolation in a society characterized by suicide, economic stagnation, and an aging population. However, after twenty-four months of intensive fieldwork with religious people working to provide "care for the heart" in order to overcome the anomie and alienation that plague contemporary Japan, I have found that sharing suffering hurts on multiple scales. Hearing stories from disaster victims exhausts my informants. Working to empathize with the suffering of others ties compassionate workers to depopulated and aging areas, making it difficult to find marriage partners or friends, and my informants' religious organizations are strained as they bear the financial costs of this work without proselytizing. In this dissertation, then, I argue that the pain of sharing suffering isolates compassionate workers and exhausts the forms of belonging, such as religious organizations, that support them. Using the examples of a new religion working to maintain community, a training program for interfaith chaplains working with people facing death, and a Christian volunteer center in a city devastated by the 2011 tsunami in Tohoku, Japan, I argue that compassion spreads the pain of social suffering while breaking down non- liberal forms of belonging, thus ironically creating an alienated society of isolated individuals.

By provisioning materials things such as water, power, information, and waste disposal, infrastructures have been instrumental in materializing the promise of modernity and development on a global scale (Larkin 2013; Anand 2017; von Schnitzler 2016; Mitchell 2002; Prakash 1999; Khan 2006; Anwar 2014). Waste infrastructures are the socio-technical assemblages through which Lahore’s modernity and development have been imagined across historical moments. The city’s daily waste generation is disposed of by either sanitation workers who are almost entirely Christian or waste workers from the informal sector that are drawn from lower status groups such as khānah badosh (nomad or "gypsy" groups), changar, and others. My dissertation argues that, despite being an elementary aspect of urban life, this form of caste labor – waste work – comes to be viewed, along with those who perform it, as non-valuable. In exploring these paradoxical logics, I develop the theory of “essential waste” to argue that waste, something often viewed as mere excess, is foundational to Lahore’s reproduction in multiple ways.

Based on fieldwork with a variety of actors and archival research, I explore the work, institutions, and infrastructures by which waste, in a variety of forms, is disposed of and/or circulated. Drawing on anthropological theories that prioritize how actions represent forms of value within a dispensation of social and political life (Turner 1979; Munn 1986; Graeber 2001; Pedersen 2013), disposal and circulation of these materials are crucial to how value in different forms is materialized out of what is deemed to be non-value. I thus examine how the notion of essential waste plays itself out across the state, which materializes value out of waste through infrastructures of disposability, and the informal economy, which marketizes these materials through infrastructures of circulation. Moreover, as subaltern groups have situated themselves within these infrastructures, this dissertation sheds light on the relationship that these groups have to political power in contemporary Pakistan. This dissertation argues that waste comes to be transformed into different forms of value, which then reproduce the city and its population in highly uneven, though deeply enmeshed ways.

“Hallyu,” a term meaning “Korean Wave,” refers to the ever-expanding cache of exportdriven

Korean cultural products that, since the 1990s, has primarily included dramas, pop music,

film, and animation (Yong 2016, 3). As an industry that generated 6 billion USD in 2016

(Korea.net 2019), and that commands roughly 35 million fans worldwide (The Korea Herald

2016), Hallyu has become a formidable economic force that other domestic industries have

found lucrative alliances with (Choi 2015, 37-38). Further, the substantial direct support that

Hallyu has received from the South Korean government since 2008 and that which has led to the

broadening of the Hallyu repertoire to include new forms such as games, food, electronics, and

language (Yong 2016, 5; Choi 2015, 44) makes South Korea and its cultural industry a

compelling case study for observing how cultural forms become naturalized as they converge

with economics and government agendas. This thesis is an investigation into the categories of

“popular culture” and “subculture” as viable sociological frameworks for understanding the

mechanics of how particular cultural forms become privileged while others become neglected.

Utilizing interviews and observations that I collected during my one month stay at a Korean

language university in Seoul, I demonstrate how Hallyu has been able to achieve hegemonic

status as Korea’s granted cultural expression, and how this achievement has occasioned other

Korean cultural industries to align themselves with Hallyu. I also explore the possibilities for

marginalized actors within this hegemonic arrangement to manipulate elements of the dominant

culture in order to meet their own needs.