This dissertation draws on ethnographic data and political ecological theory to analyze the experience of residents living in the IBM-Endicott Superfund site in Endicott, New York. Combining in-depth narratives and quantitative measures from a household survey, it highlights residents' perceptions of 1) environmental health risk, 2) risk mitigation, 3) deindustrialization...
There is a fundamental distortion in our understanding of Native people, especially Native women. This distortion is rooted in imperialism and the colonization of Native lands and has created a dominant/subordinate relationship between Non-Native/Native people. Anthropological life history research has traditionally reflected this relationship. As a Native woman, the author...
This investigation assessed the effectiveness of an adolescent substance abuse treatment program that incorporated "Rites of Passage." Named Gender Based Treatment (GBT), the treatment program sought to address the adolescents' developmental needs through the use of rituals, myth and story telling, and rites of initiation.
Employing quantitative and qualitative analysis,...
This study analyses the culture, knowledge and resource use patterns of the Karang tribe in Phong-Luk village, which is located at the Kaengkrachan National Park. The goal of this project is to reveal the culture-based local wisdom of the Karang tribe that is consistent with sustainable environmental resource management and...
Climate change increases weather unpredictability, threatens communities whose livelihoods depend on natural resources, such as rural communities. Utilizing a Community Capital Framework (Flora and Flora, 2013) and Governance of Complex Adaptive Systems (Duit and Galaz, 2008), this study concentrated on the role of cultural and political capital in supporting rural...
This thesis examines perceptions of cooperation among small to medium sized enterprises (SME) in western Oregon's forest products industry. Recent changes in the industry, such as corporate consolidation, global marketing, and government regulations have created an environment in which many SMEs find it difficult to stay competitive. Cooperation among SMEs...
Shan-Mei, a Tsou aboriginal village in Taiwan, is widely known as a legend of environmental conservation, where ecotourism has been successfully combined with integrated community development. Indigenous knowledge containing "ecological wisdom" and decision-making based on consensus are perceived to be the greatest contributors to this achievement. I conducted three months...
Microfinance, or the technique of lending small amounts of money to the world's poor for productive activities, has emerged as a dominant approach to poverty alleviation among international development organizations. However, consensus does not yet exist as to the best mechanism for delivery of loans. While most organizations simply offer...
This dissertation examines women's lives in a rapidly urbanizing rural community in Southern Pakistan to understand their responses to modernity in developing societies. Applying a mixed-methods approach, socio-demographic data is collected and contrasted with oral history and personal narratives to analyze social change through women's access to education and reproductive...
Families of remarriage constitute a growing number of
American families. The spiraling divorce rate of the 1970s
was accompanied by a concomitant increase in the number of
remarriages. Forty percent of American families today
contain at least one spouse that has been previously
married, thus studying relationships within families of...