This dissertation addresses the problem of the development of cities in Upper Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.E. I investigate these cities through their settlement patterns and urban plans. I argue that these cities were not planned or organic, but exhibited degrees of planning. I treat my reconstruction of the...
Racial disparities in cardiovascular health constitute one of the most pressing current public health problems in the United States. This dissertation examines how individual's cultural experiences of stress become embodied and contribute to these racial health inequalities. Anthropologists have traditionally approached culture through narrative ethnographic methods that are difficult to...
This dissertation examines the role of market makers in making markets for options and futures on Chicago's derivatives exchanges. Recent institutional and technological changes in the ways that financial products are traded have given rise to the possibility of markets without market makers, raising the question of how these developments...
Bosnian women war refugees are not only trauma survivors, but are actively engaged in economic and social practices that shape their American sites of relocation. These economic activities--wage labor, and unremunerated volunteer and kin labor--are embedded in a moral framework of mutual obligation rooted in the concept veze / connections,...
This dissertation investigates whether residents of Windhoek's squatter settlements are changing urban space through their efforts to secure housing and to conduct remunerative work from their dwellings. Studies about the informal economy have moved from analysis of it as a distinct sector to the social and political processes that create...
This dissertation asks how deepening global inequalities reshape the ways families negotiate “economic moralities,” normative expectations of material obligation and entitlement. It focuses on the families of middle class migrants: French-educated Senegalese urbanites whose diplomas no longer protect them from discrimination in Paris but who, among Africans, are still construed...
Changing economic activities bring significant cultural, epidemiological, and nutritional transitions. These transitions have important and lifelong effects on the health of populations experiencing them. Infancy represents a critical period when rapid growth and metabolic programming occur, making infants particularly vulnerable to long-lasting biological changes due to such transitions. The objective...
Refugees gain access to benefits and services in the United States through the bureaucratic birthdates recorded in the documents they carry when they first enter the country. Examining how and why chronometric age based on these documents was essential to resettlement was the starting point for my dissertation, which explores...