Examining Relationships between Culture, Creativity and Business Stage in an Emerging Market: A Categorical Data Analysis of Vietnam’s Data Set

In this article, we offer a new way of exploring relationships between three different dimensions of a business operation, namely the stage of business development, the methods of creativity and the major cultural values. Although separately, each of these has gained enormous attention from the management research community, evidenced by a large volume of research studies, there have been not many studies that attempt to describe the logic that connect these three important aspects of a business; let alone empirical evidences that support any significant relationships among these variables. The paper also provides a data set and an empirical investigation on that data set, using a categorical data analysis, to conclude that examinations of these possible relationships are meaningful and possible for seemingly unquantifiable information. The results also show that the most significant category among all creativity methods employed in Vietnamese enterprises is the “creative disciplines” rule in the “entrepreneurial phase,” while in general creative disciplines have played a critical role in explaining the structure of our data sample, for both stages of development in our consideration.

A MEMETIC/PARTICIPATORY APPROACH FOR CHANGING SOCIAL BEHAVIORS AND PROMOTING ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP IN JALISCO, MEXICO

This dissertation addressed the issue of sustainable development at the level of individual behaviors. Environmental perceptions were obtained from people living around the biosphere reserve Chamela-Cuixmala in Jalisco, Mexico. Several environmental issues were identified by the people, such as garbage and grey water on the streets, burning plastics, and the lack of usage of recreational areas. All these issues could be addressed with a change in behavior by the villagers. Familiarization activities were conducted to gain people's trust in order to conduct a community forum. These activities included giving talks to school children and organizing workshops. Four different methodologies were generated using memetics and participation to test which would ameliorate those environmental issues identified by the people through a change in behavior. The methodologies were 1) Memes; 2) Participation and Memes; 3) Participation; 4) Neither Participation nor Memes. A meme is an idea expressed within a linguistic structure or architecture that provides it with self-disseminating and self-protecting characteristics within and among the minds of individuals congruent with their values, beliefs and filters. Four villages were chosen as the treatments, and one as the control, for a total of five experimental villages. A different behavior was addressed in each treatment village (garbage, grey-water, burning plastics, recreation.) A nonequivalent control-group design was established. A pretest was conducted in all five villages; the methodologies were tested in the four treatment villages; a posttest was conducted on the five villages. The pretest and posttest consisted in measuring sensory specific indicators which are manifestations of behavior that can either be seen, smelled, touched, heard or tasted. Statistically significant differences in behavior from the control were found for two of the methodologies 1) Memes (p=0.0403) and 2) Participation and Memes (p=0.0064). For the methodologies of 3) Participation alone and 4) Neither, the differences were not significant (p=0.8827, p=0.5627 respectively). When using memes, people's behavior improved when compared to the control. Participation alone did not generate a significant difference. Participation aided in the generation of the memes. Memetics is a tool that can be used to establish a linkage between human behavior and ecological health.

Afro-Cuban Bata Drum Aesthetics: Developing Individual and Group Technique, Sound and Identity

The Lucumi religion (also Santeria and Regla de Ocha) developed in 19th-century colonial Cuba, by syncretizing elements of Catholicism with the Yoruba worship of orisha. When fully initiated, santeros (priests) actively participate in religious ceremonies by periodically being possessed or "mounted" by a patron saint or orisha, usually within the context of a drumming ritual, known as a toque de santo, bembe, or tambor. Within these rituals, there is a clearly defined goal of trance possession, though its manifestation is not the sole measure of success or failure. Rather than focusing on the fleeting, exciting moments that immediately precede the arrival of an orisha in the form of a possession trance, this thesis investigates the entire four- to six-hour musical performance that is central to the ceremony. It examines the brief pauses, the moments of reduced intensity, the slow but deliberate build-ups of energy and excitement, and even the periods when novices are invited to perform the sacred bata drums, and places these moments on an equal footing with the more dynamic periods where possession is imminent or in progress. This document approaches Lucumi ritual from the viewpoint of bata drummers, ritual specialists who, during the course of a toque de santo, exercise wide latitude in determining the shape of the event. Known as omo Ana (children of the orisha Ana who is manifest in drums and rhythms), bata drummers comprise a fraternity that is accessible only through ritual initiation. Though they are sensitive to the desires of the many participants during a toque de santo, and indeed make their living by satisfying the expectations of their hosts, many of the drummers' activities are inwardly focused on the cultivation and preservation of this fraternity. Occasionally interfering with spirit possession, and other expectations of the participants, these aberrant activities include teaching and learning, developing group identity or signature sound, and achieving a state of intimacy among the musicians known as "communitas."

The role of binocular vision in primate locomotion.

Dissertation

The Aesthetics of Motion in Musics for the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Rumi

This dissertation investigates the concept of motion as a fundamental aesthetic element in the devotional music, dance, and rituals performed in honor of the celebrated thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet and saint, the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Muhammad Rumi. The main focus of the study is threefold. First, it investigates the prevalence of the notion of movement in Islamic music and culture, specifically within the Sufi communities of Turkey, in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the relationship between music, aesthetics, and worldview. Secondly, it explores how musical performance functions as a form of devotion or religious worship by focusing on the musical repertories performed in honor of a single holy figure, the Mevlana Rumi. Finally, it provides an ethnographic account of contemporary developments in Sufi musical culture in Turkey and across the world by describing the recent activities of the Mevlana's devotees, which includes members of the Mevlevi Order of Islamic mystics as well as adherents of other Sufi brotherhoods and followers of so-called New Religions or New Age. The primary research for this study involved two short one-month field trips to Turkey and India in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and a longer one year expedition to Turkey in 2004 and 2005, which also included shorter stays in Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt. Additionally, the dissertation draws directly from critical theories advanced in the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and ethnochoreology and focuses on the kinesthetic parameters of music, dance, trance, and ritual as well as on broader forms of socio-cultural movement including pilgrimage, cultural tourism, and globalization. These forms of movement are analyzed in four broad categories of music used in worship, including classical Mevlevi music, music of the zikr ceremony, popular musics, and non-Turkish musics.

A Politics of the Unspeakable: The Differend of Israel

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

Reason, risk, and reward: Models for libraries and other stakeholders in an evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem

Scholarly publishing, and scholarly communication more generally, are based on patterns established over many decades and even centuries. Some of these patterns are clearly valuable and intimately related to core values of the academy, but others were based on the exigencies of the past, and new opportunities have brought into question whether it makes sense to persist in supporting old models. New technologies and new publishing models raise the question of how we should fund and operate scholarly publishing and scholarly communication in the future, moving away from a scarcity model based on the exchange of physical goods that restricts access to scholarly literature unless a market-based exchange takes place. This essay describes emerging models that attempt to shift scholarly communication to a more open-access and mission-based approach and that try to retain control of scholarship by academics and the institutions and scholarly societies that support them. It explores changing practices for funding scholarly journals and changing services provided by academic libraries, changes instituted with the end goal of providing more access to more readers, stimulating new scholarship, and removing inefficiencies from a system ready for change. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association.

The End(s) of the End of Poverty

This dissertation explores the emergence of Millennium Development and the promise to end poverty by 2015. After exploring the global scale phenomena, the project turns to the implementation of the "end of poverty" in the model Millennium Village of Sauri, Kenya.

Regulating the Ocean: Piracy and Protection along the East African Coast

From 2008-2012, a dramatic upsurge in incidents of maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean led to renewed global attention to this region: including the deployment of multi national naval patrols, attempts to prosecute suspected pirates, and the development of financial interdiction systems to track and stop the flow of piracy ransoms. Largely seen as the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land, piracy has been slotted into narratives of state failure and problems of governance and criminality in this region.

This view fails to account for a number of factors that were crucial in making possible the unprecedented rise of Somali piracy and its contemporary transformation. Instead of an emphasis on failed states and crises of governance, my dissertation approaches maritime piracy within a historical and regional configuration of actors and relationships that precede this round of piracy and will outlive it. The story I tell in this work begins before the contemporary upsurge of piracy and closes with a foretaste of the itineraries beyond piracy that are being crafted along the East African coast.

Beginning in the world of port cities in the long nineteenth century, my dissertation locates piracy and the relationship between trade, plunder, and state formation within worlds of exchange, including European incursions into this oceanic space. Scholars of long distance trade have emphasized the sociality engendered through commerce and the centrality of idioms of trust and kinship in structuring mercantile relationships across oceanic divides. To complement this scholarship, my work brings into view the idiom of protection: as a claim to surety, a form of tax, and a moral claim to authority in trans-regional commerce.

To build this theory of protection, my work combines archival sources with a sustained ethnographic engagement in coastal East Africa, including the pirate ports of Northern Somalia, and focuses on the interaction between land-based pastoral economies and maritime trade. This connection between land and sea calls attention to two distinct visions of the ocean: one built around trade and mobility and the other built on the ocean as a space of extraction and sovereignty. Moving between historical encounters over trade and piracy and the development of a national maritime economy during the height of the Somali state, I link the contemporary upsurge of maritime piracy to the confluence of these two conceptualizations of the ocean and the ideas of capture, exchange, and redistribution embedded within them.

The second section of my dissertation reframes piracy as an economy of protection and a form of labor implicated within other legal and illegal economies in the Indian Ocean. Based on extensive field research, including interviews with self-identified pirates, I emphasize the forms of labor, value, and risk that characterize piracy as an economy of protection. The final section of my dissertation focuses on the diverse international, regional, and local responses to maritime piracy. This section locates the response to piracy within a post-Cold War and post-9/11 global order and longer attempts to regulate and assuage the risks of maritime trade. Through an ethnographic focus on maritime insurance markets, navies, and private security contractors, I analyze the centrality of protection as a calculation of risk and profit in the contemporary economy of counter-piracy.

Through this focus on longer histories of trade, empire, and regulation my dissertation reframes maritime piracy as an economy of protection straddling boundaries of land and sea, legality and illegality, law and economy, and history and anthropology.

The effect of differences in methodology among some recent applications of shearing quotients.

A shearing quotient (SQ) is a way of quantitatively representing the Phase I shearing edges on a molar tooth. Ordinary or phylogenetic least squares regression is fit to data on log molar length (independent variable) and log sum of measured shearing crests (dependent variable). The derived linear equation is used to generate an 'expected' shearing crest length from molar length of included individuals or taxa. Following conversion of all variables to real space, the expected value is subtracted from the observed value for each individual or taxon. The result is then divided by the expected value and multiplied by 100. SQs have long been the metric of choice for assessing dietary adaptations in fossil primates. Not all studies using SQ have used the same tooth position or crests, nor have all computed regression equations using the same approach. Here we focus on re-analyzing the data of one recent study to investigate the magnitude of effects of variation in 1) shearing crest inclusion, and 2) details of the regression setup. We assess the significance of these effects by the degree to which they improve or degrade the association between computed SQs and diet categories. Though altering regression parameters for SQ calculation has a visible effect on plots, numerous iterations of statistical analyses vary surprisingly little in the success of the resulting variables for assigning taxa to dietary preference. This is promising for the comparability of patterns (if not casewise values) in SQ between studies. We suggest that differences in apparent dietary fidelity of recent studies are attributable principally to tooth position examined.

The Oud Across Arabic Culture

This study is a compilation and compendium of information on the oud, the most important instrument in Arabic classical music. It has grown out of my own long-time involvement in studying and playing the oud, and in particular out of my interest in the lack of sources and knowledge available to the vast majority of oud players and researchers, as well as for the readers. My own path started from an intensive study of the oud, which included exposure to several treaties; some housed in museums around the globe, and some only available in the Arabic language. The study combines archival research (including Arabic poetry and pre-Islamic Era and medieval treaties), symbolism, new archaeological discoveries, field interviews, and analysis of existing scholarship, and draws on my professional performance experience for detailed stylistic analysis of the oud's performance practice and its historical development. The study consists of participant observation, personal performance, and interviews conducted in person, via telephone, and/or via e-mail, according to the choice of the performers. The performers have been selected from networks of musicians who perform regularly at lounges, concert halls, and private events. These performers have been chosen according to their musical knowledge, technical skill, experience, and activity in Arabic music and oud performance. Chapter one deals with the purpose of this study and the methods of investigation, as well as giving a brief overview of the history of the oud. In addition, there will be an introduction to the Arabic musical system (mâqâm), which is primarily based on the mechanics and sound production of the oud. Chapter two deals with the oud in Arabic sources: the first source is Arabic poetry in the pre-Islamic Era. The second source is Arabic poetry in the medieval era, in which I found a significant number of poets who allude to the oud, providing accurate descriptions of the player, singers, and the scenes within the contexts of oud performance. The third source is the Arab scholars' intensive treatises with meticulous accounts of the instrument's apparatii, including descriptions and measurements of the parts, strings, and tuning. While chapter three deals with the classification, the development of the oud, chapter four deals with topics such as: the symbolism of the oud and its relation to cosmology, astronomy, mathematics and anatomy. In most of the pertinent Arabic writings, philosophers mention a significant correlation between the oud and the other sciences. Chapter five deals with recreating the performance practice of the oud. A case study of the oud performers focuses on their style, technique, training, and personal experiences. Topics such as improvisation and ornamentation, the oud in the Arabic musical ensemble, the social uses and functions, and gender in musical performance practices will be included in detailed analysis. Other important topics will be analyzed such as traditional vs. modern technique, and the repertoire of the oud. Specifically, in regard to technique, the study outline the style of the music, the role of the oud in Arabic ensembles, the function of the oud in music composition, and the form of the ensembles in Arabic performance and practice.

Of Trustees and Offsprings: A Diasporic Trail of Parsi “Crisis” from Bombay to Hong Kong

This thesis examines the discourse(s) of crisis in the Parsi diaspora. Treating crisis as a common variable, rather than a singular and unique event across various Parsi communities, I investigate the dimensions of crisis that bind separated Parsi communities in anxiety through a shared language, cultural experience, and historical memory. Turning first to India and then Hong Kong as my case studies, I analyze “crisis,” that has often been identified in terms of demographic decay or postcolonial decline, in the context of more subtle debates around racial purity and trust funds. Crisis, for the Parsi diaspora, while indicating a critical moment in the present, also serves to reveal the underlying and pre-existing socio-economic and cultural tensions in the communities. Relying largely on life-story interviews, online blogs and articles, and archival work, I portray the crisis not as a unique and sporadic event, but rather as one of continuity and complexity, albeit manifesting each time in different and unique guises, that continues to disrupt as well as unite the Parsi diaspora today.

Dispersal and Integration in Female Chimpanzees

In chimpanzees, most females disperse from the community in which they were born to reproduce in a new community, thereby eliminating the risk of inbreeding with close kin. However, across sites, some females breed in their natal community, raising questions about the flexibility of dispersal, the costs and benefits of different strategies and the mitigation of costs associated with dispersal and integration. In this dissertation I address these questions by combining long-term behavioral data and recent field observations on maturing and young adult females in Gombe National Park with an experimental manipulation of relationship formation in captive apes in the Congo.

To assess the risk of inbreeding for females who do and do not disperse, 129 chimpanzees were genotyped and relatedness between each dyad was calculated. Natal females were more closely related to adult community males than were immigrant females. By examining the parentage of 58 surviving offspring, I found that natal females were not more related to the sires of their offspring than were immigrant females, despite three instances of close inbreeding. The sires of all offspring were less related to the mothers than non-sires regardless of the mother’s residence status. These results suggest that chimpanzees are capable of detecting relatedness and that, even when remaining natal, females can largely avoid, though not eliminate, inbreeding.

Next, I examined whether dispersal was associated with energetic, social, physiological and/or reproductive costs by comparing immigrant (n=10) and natal (n=9) females of similar age using 2358 hours of observational data. Natal and immigrant females did not differ in any energetic metric. Immigrant females received aggression from resident females more frequently than natal females. Immigrants spent less time in social grooming and more time self-grooming than natal females. Immigrant females primarily associated with resident males, had more social partners and lacked close social allies. There was no difference in levels of fecal glucocorticoid metabolites in immigrant and natal females. Immigrant females gave birth 2.5 years later than natal females, though the survival of their first offspring did not differ. These results indicate that immigrant females in Gombe National Park do not face energetic deficits upon transfer, but they do enter a hostile social environment and have a delayed first birth.

Next, I examined whether chimpanzees use condition- and phenotype-dependent cues in making dispersal decisions. I examined the effect of social and environmental conditions present at the time females of known age matured (n=25) on the females’ dispersal decisions. Females were more likely to disperse if they had more male maternal relatives and thus, a high risk of inbreeding. Females with a high ranking mother and multiple maternal female kin tended to disperse less frequently, suggesting that a strong female kin network provides benefits to the maturing daughter. Females were also somewhat less likely to disperse when fewer unrelated males were present in the group. Habitat quality and intrasexual competition did not affect dispersal decisions. Using a larger sample of 62 females observed as adults in Gombe, I also detected an effect of phenotypic differences in personality on the female’s dispersal decisions; extraverted, agreeable and open females were less likely to disperse.

Natural observations show that apes use grooming and play as social currency, but no experimental manipulations have been carried out to measure the effects of these behaviors on relationship formation, an essential component of integration. Thirty chimpanzees and 25 bonobos were given a choice between an unfamiliar human who had recently groomed or played with them over one who did not. Both species showed a preference for the human that had interacted with them, though the effect was driven by males. These results support the idea that grooming and play act as social currency in great apes that can rapidly shape social relationships between unfamiliar individuals. Further investigation is needed to elucidate the use of social currency in female apes.

I conclude that dispersal in female chimpanzees is flexible and the balance of costs and benefits varies for each individual. Females likely take into account social cues present at maturity and their own phenotype in choosing a settlement path and are especially sensitive to the presence of maternal male kin. The primary cost associated with philopatry is inbreeding risk and the primary cost associated with dispersal is delay in the age at first birth, presumably resulting from intense social competition. Finally, apes may strategically make use of affiliative behavior in pursuing particular relationships, something that should be useful in the integration process.