This paper proposes a four-part schema for categorizing and analyzing meaningful acts with respect to their properties of consequentiality and stylization. Defined by these parameters, I suggest that we can analytically distinguish four distinct modes of meaning: play, game, work, and ritual. The salient attributes of each, but particularly the former two, are discussed, as well as the systemic relations of each to the other. Play is conceived primarily in terms of "going meta", a process by which humans exit the explicit systems of meaning in which they operate and open the terms of that system for problematization. Game, conversely, is defined by a reverse operation in which arbitrary constraints are treated as binding and absolute within a bounded sphere. I conclude with an application of this construct to ethnographic material provided by Jean Briggs studies of Inuit pedagogical practices.

In a highland Maya divination ritual called pajooneem (Tz’utujil, “weighing” or “balancing”), the bright red seeds of the tz’ite’ tree (Erythrina corallodendron) are utilized in conjunction with the 260-day calendar known as the Cholq’iij in order to involve revered “other-than-human persons” (Hallowell 2002) in a decision-making activity. The tz’ite’ seeds serve as “mediating artifacts” (Hutchins 1995:292) that help to coordinate various elements in an “ecology of mind” (Bateson 2000). In particular, the tz’ite’ seeds serve as “material anchors” (Hutchins 2005) when, during the divination, they are grouped into clusters to stand-in for the days of the Cholq’iij calendar. In this “conceptual blend” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) the clusters of seeds come to embody the days of the Cholq’iij. Since there are twenty distinct days in this calendar, each of which pairs with the numbers one through thirteen in the course of the 260-day cycle, the combinatorial possibilities present a clear challenge to working memory. The use of material anchors facilitates the manipulation of representations in a complex “traffic of signs” (Peirce, et al. 1982) or “semiotic ecology” (Lang 1993).

The use of objects in this ritual also helps to make the decision-making activity public and visible; this public status, coupled with a “suppression of intention” typical of the divination process itself (Du Bois 1993), further distributes the agency of the decision among the interacting elements coordinated by the ritual. This distribution of agency lessens the “normative load” on the individuals involved and invests the decision with institutional authority.

Using interview transcripts, photos, and video analysis, I consider the ways that tz’ite’ seeds mediate cognition with a spotlight on their role in decision-making practices. Ultimately, this represents a cultural practice that is far more typical than commonly appreciated: People involve themselves in each other’s decision-making and judgment via an assemblage of intersubjective and interobjective structuration processes fostered by material objects. This investigation has relevance for discussions of materiality in anthropology, distributed cognition in cognitive science, active externalism in philosophy, and emphasizes the importance of studying ritual as a dynamical system; that is, identifying the reciprocally causal relationships among the people, places, objects, and signs, an approach I have entitled “ritual ecology.”

Measurements of the neutral thermosphere within the postmidnight substorm recovery phase diffuse aurora show very large horizontal winds, and strong vertical structure. Rocket, satellite, and ground based observations during the ARIA (Atmospheric Response in Aurora) campaigns, and earlier dawn side rocket observations, indicate neutral winds of up to 200m/s, and a characteristic jet-like wind maximum around 110 to 120-km altitude, with strong shears above and below. The observed wind magnitudes are found to have a dependence on geomagnetic activity level, but recent modeling studies suggest that tides which propagate up from the troposphere and stratosphere may play an important role in generating the strong vertical variations in the neutral winds. The relative importance of auroral and tidal forcing in producing the measured wind structure is not known, however. Simulations have been performed using a three dimensional (3-D) high resolution limited area thermosphere model to understand the processes which generate the observed neutral structure within the postmidnight diffuse aurora. Parameters measured during the ARIA I observational campaign have been used to provide auroral forcing inputs for the model. Global background winds and tides have been provided by the CTIP (Coupled Thermosphere Ionosphere Plasmasphere) model. The sensitivity of the response of the neutral atmosphere to changes in different parameters has been examined. Variations in the amplitudes and phases of the propagating tides in the background winds are found to have significant effects on the neutral structure in the E region, and the wind structure below around I 10 km is found to be mainly produced by tidal forcing. Changes in the electric field and ion density affect the winds above around 120km, and the importance of auroral forcing is found to depend on background winds. Variations in the orientation of the aurora relative to the background field, which may be caused by changes in the interplanetary magnetic field, are also found to modify the wind structure. When both auroral forcing and propagating tides are included, many of the basic characteristics of the wind structure are displayed, although the great strength of the wind shears is not well reproduced. The strength of the shears may be related to a currently unmodeled process, or to different types of waves.

This dissertation examines the nuances of multidisciplinary teamwork on a biometric device to fingerprint newborns. Since 2015 a group of engineers, medical professionals, social scientists, and designers have worked on a non-contact scanner that would capture infant fingerprints and create a digital record of one’s identity for vaccination purposes. My research opens critical space for imagining alternatives for the two competing perspectives of either infant biometrics as the pure evil or the ultimate solution for all problems.I analyze an online collaboration software called Slack, which the team used, as an additional lens in my ethnographic account of the team. I examine to what extent Slack mirrors offline team interactions and project progress. My research shows how to visualize the team’s multidisciplinary collaboration throughout the project, the phases of biometric design by discipline, and what the limitations of such representations are. I observe how the team wanted to go beyond just making a tool and redesign the whole healthcare delivery system to make it more equitable and accessible. Unable to solve all global health problems, after conducting multiple tests in the field, the project ends up centered on the technical side of making a device work. I also find how ethics is practiced from distinct disciplinary vantage points in the daily entanglements of limited resources and interpersonal relationships. At the team level, I demonstrate which concerns are voiced and draw attention to the role of the team leader in many key decisions. At the project level, the story of a particular biometric device is an invitation for a dialogue between those who make technologies of the future, and those who are rightfully skeptical and emphasize the unintended consequences of any biometrics. Ultimately, I suggest an approach to the biometric device not as one static deliverable but as a boundary object that brings together all the different stakeholders. I demonstrate how human the making of future technologies is; and how from numerous daily interactions the final device is created, influenced by people who, at some point, participate in the project as employees, volunteers, and study participants.

This dissertation presents a person-centered ethnography of the lived-experience of Parkinson’s Disease and the use of boxing as a healing modality to slow illness progression and empower a positive aging experience. Specifically, it explores how elements of agency, relationality and embodied experience are implicated in processes of the self and paradigms of personhood in the United States. By entering the world of a San Diego, California boxing gym that trains people with Parkinson’s, this work advances an anthropological understanding of how individuals employ cultural affordances to reckon with inconsistencies in self experience. Through aligning biographical narratives with the culturally popular metaphor of the fighter, individuals are able to embody an ethical subjectivity that encourages engagement in physical, mental, and social health despite the trajectory of degeneration that their illness proposes. Ritualized embodied learning actively binds the feelings of exhausted effort, and fatigued muscles to a sense of ideal personhood, and accomplishment; while the ethos of the gym and community of fighters create a meaningful sense of normality and belonging that enriches daily life.

What drives people to sacrifice time and energy to care for unrelated others? Caring in India has special cultural significance, often understood in relation to kinship, systems of reciprocity, and religious service. Based on fieldwork in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) of India during the summer of 2016, this paper investigates the motivations for engaging in care work, as well as the risks and challenges that arise in this work, among two separate groups of care workers: non-governmental organizations (NGOs) workers and sevadars, Sikhs taking part in religiously-grounded selfless service. Through an ethnographic study of the lived experience of care workers, I argue that cultural frameworks, in particular religious ideology and the importance of relationships of attachment, shape the motivation to care, the assessment of challenges associated with the work, and experiences of well-being that are a result of providing care to others. The opportunity to engage in care work creates the potential to fulfill moral obligations and strive towards ethical living. The subjective experiences of care workers, as well as the relationships created through this work, produce conditions that reinforce the continuation of this work and allow individuals to persist through the challenges that often lead to harm and burnout. The psychological processes and obligations that emerge during the process of doing care work recreate a cycle of commitment to ethically care for the self.

Observations of neutral winds from rocket release experiments within the premidnight and postmidnight substorm recovery phase aurora, show very large E-region neutral winds of several hundred m/s, where winds measured on the dusk side are even larger than those on the dawn side. These large winds are also associated with strong shears, and there is evidence that some of the regions below these shears may be unstable. The mechanisms which generate this strong vertical structure are not well understood. It is also not known whether the acceleration conditions in the pre and post midnight sectors of the aurora may produce significantly different neutral responses on the dawn and dusk sides. Simulations have been performed using a three-dimensional high resolution limited area thermosphere model to try to understand the neutral structure within the dawn and dusk side aurora. When simulations are performed using auroral forcing alone, for equivalent conditions within the dawn and dusk sectors, differences are found in the simulated response on each side. When measured values of auroral forcing parameters, and background winds and tides consistent with recent observations, are used as model inputs, some of the main features of the zonal and meridional wind observations are reproduced in the simulations, but the magnitude of the peak zonal wind around 140 km tends to be too small and the maximum meridional wind around 130 km is overestimated. The winds above 120 km altitude are found to be sensitive to changes in electric fields and ion densities, as was the case for the dawn side, but the effects of background winds and tides on the magnitudes of the winds above 120 km are found to be relatively small on the dusk side. The structure below 120 km appears to be related mainly to background winds and tides rather than auroral forcing, as was found in earlier studies on the dawn side, although the peak magnitudes of simulated wind variations in the 100 to 120 km altitude range are smaller than those observed. The source of the strong shears measured around I 10 km altitude on the dusk side is uncertain, but may be related to different kinds of oscillations, such as gravity waves, non migrating semidiurnal tides, or secondary oscillations produced by non linear interactions between waves.

In the process of adapting to - and expanding within - our environment, we develop complex social structures which are maintained at measurable costs. Current modes of production and development negatively affect the very same environment we depend upon for survival, fostering the creation of a system in which the adaptation and growth of one group is inversely proportional to that of another, as well as ultimately proving deleterious to itself. This system generates vulnerabilities experienced as slow-onset crisis at risk of developing into full-blown disasters. In this thesis, I analyze environmental disasters using a political ecology framework which posits that pre-existing socially created conditions of vulnerability represent the core causes of disasters. Although identifying human agency in what is considered “natural” disaster is a great step towards a communal call to action, I argue that, ultimately, the social creation of vulnerability that leads to disaster is generated by the ways individuals and societies deal with risk based on their perceptions of the future. Thus, a more holistic approach to the field moves us beyond vulnerability as the core cause of disasters, towards a psychocultural approach that investigates the complex motivations and interpretations involved in the collective creation of risk and vulnerability.

Drawing on 19 months of ethnographic research among Sikh communities in Delhi, India, this dissertation explores the contemporary practice of Sikh seva. In a context marked by histories of ethnoreligious violence, rising Hindu nationalism, and widespread inequality, some Sikhs draw upon seva to navigate and grapple with their own precarious citizenship, others’ suffering, and their aspirations for a good life. I argue that seva, as an act of care, is transformative and provides a strategy for survival and a way to live ethically. I utilize an on-the-ground approach to understand how communities draw upon religious care to foster ethical ways of being, heal after collective trauma, and survive precarious political contexts. This dissertation furthers understandings of the ways in which religious care can create societal good in light of societal problems, and how these practices can contribute to survival and the potential for wellbeing and flourishing. This research is relevant not only for understanding how Sikh communities can live ethically in majority Hindu India, but it provides insights applicable to other multicultural societies in our world.

This thesis examines the phenomenological aspects of dementia patients who are living out their lives with decreasing lucidity in the world around them. Popular tropes surrounding dementia consider the diagnosis a living death sentence. In this paper, I hope to illustrate the lived-experience of individuals suffering from the disease and combatting the opinion that they have lost their personhood in a culture idealizing autonomy and independence. I propose using Douglas Hollan’s framework of selfscapes to better conceptualize the embodied experience of dementia. In so doing, I will expose the flaws of Bourdieu’s habitus for the phenomenological consideration of individuals who may be temporally dislocated from “objective reality” and explore how the phenomenological misperception of Cartesian dualities encourage the decline of personhood in anthropological paradigms of embodiment.