Stringing beads - routing crystals

Im Rahmen dieser Diplomarbeit wird die Kollaboration zwischen einer Nichtregierungsorganisation und einem kommerziellen Unternehmen zur Schaffung eines Produktes zur Spendengewinnung als Fallstudie herangezogen. Die in vierjähriger explorativer Feldforschung erhobenen Daten werden mit anthropologischen Theorien über die Gabe und Gabentausch kontextualisiert und mit anderen Beispielen verglichen. Weiters werden theoretische anthropologische Zugänge zur Etnwicklungszusammenarbeit vorgestellt und ein eigener Zugang des Autors präsentiert. In enger Diskussion der Ergebnisse der explorativen ethnographischen Feldforschung mit anthropologischen Theorien stellt der Autor die These auf, dass das Produkt gleichzeitig eine Ware und eine Gabe ist und verortet diese These in aktueller Theorie über ethischen Konsum. Die Handlungen der Akteure, um das Produkt herzustellen, werden als Austausch von Gaben beschrieben und zwischen Tirol, Wien, Addis Abeba und Eliba in Ostäthiopien im Detail nachgezeichnet. Die Arbeit betont die Vielfältigkeit ökonomischer und sozialer Prozesse in der Mittelgewinnung von Nichtregierungsorganisationen und zeigt anhand eines Beispiels auf, auf welche Art Beziehungen und Transaktionen zu Wirtschaftsunternehmen in der Praxis funktionieren.In this diploma thesis, the collaboration between a nongovernmental organisation and a commercial company to create a fundraising product is presented as a case study. Through comparing the data collected in four years of explorative fieldwork to theories of the gift and gift-exchanges, the case will be contextualised and compared with other examples. Additionally, several theoretical perspectives on development will be discussed to present the perspective taken in this work. The author hypothesises that the fundraising product is at the same time gift and commodity and situates this hypothesis in contemporary anthropological theory on ethical consumption. The actor's transactions are presented as gift-exchanges and traced through the collaborative efforts in Tyrol, Vienna, Addis Abeba and Eliba in eastern Ethiopia. This paper emphasises the multifacetedness of economic and social processes in fundraising activities of contemporary NGOs and shows through a case study, how relations and transactions with corporate actors work in practice

Regional dynamics and local dialectics in Iron Age Botswana : case studies from the hinterland in the Bosutswe Region

textSince the 1980's, few have included sub-Saharan African in worldwide comparative discussion of complex societies. This exclusion is at the expense of challenging embedded notions of the development of complexity. The trading polity Bosutswe (700-1700 AD) at the eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and its surrounding region provide a perfect example of why this is important. In the Bosutswe region, complexity was not be driven by external factors, elites, or the core, but arose from local actors and out of localized contexts. During its occupation, Bosutswe became increasingly involved with long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean exchange network, linking trade from the African coast to the interior. At Bosutswe, glass beads associated with long-distance trade and local ostrich eggshell beads attest to a strong local economy supported by cattle herding, subsistence farming, and iron and bronze manufacture. This trade with Bosutswe peaked from 1200-1450 AD, when social stratification at Bosutswe became spatially and materially evident. This dissertation focuses on Bosutswe's trajectory through the point of view of two nearby settlements, Khubu la Dintša (1220-1420 AD) and Mmadipudi Hill (~550-1200 AD), to reconstruct the local economy and landscape. Expanding the concept of the polity to one situated in a landscape of human and environmental interchange provides a key comparative insight to other studies of complex societies and variable trajectories of societal development. The Bosutswe landscape and by extension Iron Age southern Africa can be conceptualized as a patchwork of landmark hilltop polity centers on a scrub desert landscape of agropastoral activity surrounded by smaller hilltop and ground sites. The local dynamic may have involved strategies by Bosutswe to mitigate environmental characteristics of low rainfall, opportunistic hunting and herding opportunities for the surrounding communities, and alliances between these communities for security in a politically unstable era. Everyday life would have involved issues about land use, as over time herders and farmers exhausted pastures, soil fertility, and firewood. Treating these early polities as landscapes of human, animal, and environmental relationships will help revise the way early complex societies are conceptualized: not as individual sites, but as local landscapes of power.Anthropolog

The utilisation of social and behavioural science through consulting.

The thesis is concerned with organisational consulting, and the 'theories' which guide social and behavioural consultants in what they do. To preserve the 'integrity of the phenomena' the research has utilised an interviewing methodology to obtain accounts which reveal 'personal theories'. The aim has been to achieve an adequate phenomenology of consultants' ideas, rooted in their personal lives and organisational role situations, and not just to treat consultancy as the disembodied application of skills and knowledge. Consultants' ideas and practices can thereby be viewed in relation to their role-contexts, and can be seen as adapted to specific operating situations, particularly in the comparison of internal,commercial and academic consultants. Thus far, the study makes a substantive contribution to the understanding of social consultancy by locating ideas and practices in role circumstances. But such consultants are also ah occupational group, sharing a common role-context. The role is the product of wider organisational and societal processes. Beyond the specific slant given by differences in their immediate work-role, therefore, there appear common features in their working models. Two paradigms, the negotiative and systems, are identified and analysed as projections of consultants' role experiences which were also functional for clients, insofar as they developed the cohesion of managers as a group and their capacity to cope with problems facing organisations in the period 1960-79. Ideas and practices are thus viewed, ideologically, in relation to an historical period and social formation. By considering consultants' ideas, as ideology, in relation to their market situation (expressed in role) we confront a central question in social theory - the relation between ideas and the material structures and processes of society. At this point the study therefore attempts to connect the sociology of knowledge directly with the theory of ideology, and to make a substantive contribution to each

Conference on Intelligent Robotics in Field, Factory, Service, and Space (CIRFFSS 1994), volume 1

The AIAA/NASA Conference on Intelligent Robotics in Field, Factory, Service, and Space (CIRFFSS '94) was originally proposed because of the strong belief that America's problems of global economic competitiveness and job creation and preservation can partly be solved by the use of intelligent robotics, which are also required for human space exploration missions. Individual sessions addressed nuclear industry, agile manufacturing, security/building monitoring, on-orbit applications, vision and sensing technologies, situated control and low-level control, robotic systems architecture, environmental restoration and waste management, robotic remanufacturing, and healthcare applications

Life Sciences Program Tasks and Bibliography for FY 1996

This document includes information on all peer reviewed projects funded by the Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications, Life Sciences Division during fiscal year 1996. This document will be published annually and made available to scientists in the space life sciences field both as a hard copy and as an interactive Internet web page

Society, ritual and symbolism in Umeda village (West Sepik District, New Guinea)

This thesis concerns the people of Umeda village, one of the four villages which make up the Waina-Sowanda Census district of the West Sepik district of New Guinea. The thesis falls into three major parts. In the first part (Chapters 1 and 2) the major features of the social structure are outlined. The economy (based on Sago, hunting, and gardening) is described. The discussion of Social Structure looks at various 'levels' of organisation starting with the cost inclusive and working downwards. These levels are 1) the connubium, 2) the village, 3) Village societies 4) Bush associations 5) the hamlet 6) hamlet societies 7) clans and sub-clans, and 8) the household. The main theme of the discussion is the role of marriage alliance, set up through sister-exchanges between exogamous (patrilineal) clan-hamlets, as the 'lateral’ bonding element in the social structure. It is shown, for instance, that members of the society conceptualise its overall structure in terms of 'compatibilities’ set up by alliance relationships. These alliance relations, though actually shifting slightly with each generation are seen as permanent structural features. This is given symbolic expression in the Village- and Hamlet-moiety organisation. The opposition of kinship relations (within the clan-hamlet) and alliance relations (outside it) is postulated as the basis of a pervasive opposition between ‘central’ and 'lateral' -- an opposition which underlies the moiety organisation, and which is also of crucial importance in understanding the Symbolic System as found e.g. in Ritual. Later sections of Chapter 2 (viii - xi) discuss interpersonal relations in more detail. The problems posed by sorcery beliefs are discussed in relation to marriage and sexual relations generally. The concept of 'tadv' - relations (killing, eating, shooting, and copulating with the other} are discussed as the basic modality of ego-alter relations across sociological boundaries. Sorcery is the reciprocal of marriage. Chapter 3 takes up the second major theme of the Thesis. This chapter is devoted to linguistic symbolism, particularly in relation to the basic social and kinship roles. Three forms of linguistic symbolism (or 'lexical motivation’) are distinguished; 1) semantic motivation 2) morphological motivation 3) psychological motivation. Chapter 3 concerns itself only with the first two kinds, Phonological motivation in Umeda being explored in Appendix I as it poses problems which go beyond the purely Anthropological. It is shown that the Umeda vocabulary contains many implicit clues as to the symbolic system of the people. A system of analogies is demonstrated, using lexical evidence, between the structure of the body, the structure of botanical entities such as trees and the overall structure of the society. Once again the ‘central/lateral’ opposition is shown to be crucial, but this is further elaborated into a notion of ‘organic structure’ -- a structural model applicable both to biological and sociological organisms. Considerable attention is devoted to an analysis of Umeda tree symbolism: for instance, the fact that the Mother's Brother is (lexically) identified with the Sago Palm, the Ancestors with the Coconut palm and so on. Chapter 3 thus performs a 'bridging’ function between the first part of the thesis which is basically concerned with Sociological questions, and the second part which is concerned with Ritual Symbolism. Through a consideration of language, an understanding is gained both of the 'organic' metaphor at the heart of Umeda symbolism, and of the way in which this kind of metaphor meshes in with the details of the functioning of the social system, dominated by certain basic kinship roles. Chapter 4 is mainly descriptive. The Ida fertility rites, performed annually to increase the productivity of the sago palms are described in detail. A discussion of the actual ceremonies is preceded by an account of the many months of preparations for the ritual. It is argued that the ritual, and the need to accumulate supplies of food for its performance, imposes pattern and discipline on mundane economic activity. The ceremonies themselves consist of the appearance, over the course of a night and the subsequent two days, of a sequence of masked dancers (all male) representing various ritual roles. The most important roles are those of 1) cassowaries, 2) fish --- of which there are two kinds, the one red, the other black, 3) sago, 4) termites and 5) ipele bowmen, representing neophytes accompanied by preceptors. Chapter 5 takes the various ritual roles in order of their appearance and analyses their symbolic significance. A preliminary discussion is devoted to methodological issues. Subsequent sections discuss ritual roles under a number of rubrics e.g. the significance in practical or mythological terms of the animal or species represented, the significance of the constraints on actors taking certain roles, the significance of body-paint styles and mask styles, the (significances of various methods of dancing etc. All these ‘role attributes’ are set out in Tabular diagram-form (Table 5). The problem then becomes the analysis of the ritual process, seen as a sequence of transformations taking place in the attributes of successive ritual actors over the course of the total rite. It is demonstrated that the Ida ritual can be best understood as a concrete and dramatic representation of the overall process of bio-social regeneration. The cassowaries, who open the ritual, are shown transformed, and regenerated, as the (neophyte) bowmen, whose loosing off of magical arrows (ipele) is the culmination, and concluding, act of the ritual cycle. This finding is supported by detailed analyses of the transformations of mask-styles and body paint styles throughout the ritual. An extended account is given of Umeda colour symbolism. This leads, finally, to a discussion of the ritual representation of Time. It is argued that the ritual is a means of (symbolically) renewing Time. Certain contradictions inherent in the notion of temporality are specified, and the ritual is seen as a means of overcoming these contradictions within the cultural and symbolic milieu of Umeda. This chapter concludes the main part of the thesis. Two appendices deal I) with phonological motivation in Umeda – it is argued that articulatory features are employed expressively in the structure of Umeda lexical items. II) An appendix gives the complete Pul-tod Myth – a myth referred to at various points in the structure in the thesis, concerning the adventures of the ‘Oedipal’ hero, Pul-tod (Areca-man)