301, GN357 Culture and cultural processes Including social change, structuralism, diffusion, and etc.

Focusing on migration from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal, this thesis examines the role played by food and plants that grow in Guinean land in connecting life-worlds in both places. Using a phenomenological approach to transnationalism and multi-sited ethnography, I explore different ways in which local experiences related to food production, consumption and exchange in the two countries, as well as local meanings of foods and plants, are connected at a transnational level. One of my key objectives is to deconstruct some of the binaries commonly addressed in the literature, such as global processes and local lives, modernity and tradition or competition and solidarity, and to demonstrate how they are all contextually and relationally entwined in people's life-worlds. In order to do so I trace Guinean foodstuffs and plants from their origin sites in Guinea-Bissau to their final destination in Portugal. I examine, first, the significance of the Guinean land where they grow. Second, I look at the adaptations that take place in Guineans' relationship with that land when it ‘travels' – through its food and plants – to Portugal. Third, I explore food-related ways in which the past, present and future of a Guinean life-world that is ‘disrupted' by migration are brought together through memory practices and future projects of migration and return. Finally, I examine practices of food exchange as gifts and trade across borders. By starting with production and ending with exchange practices, this thesis emphasises that both are not necessarily alienated from each other, even when they are physically distanced by migration. The unique relationships they generate and the role played by Guinean land's special properties, as well as the fact that these are able to travel, through the food and plants that share its substance, to Portugal, enable Guineans' local life-worlds to be connected in a transnational context.

306, DS393 Bangladesh. East Pakistan, DS401 India (Bharat), GN357 Culture and cultural processes Including social change, structuralism, diffusion, etc., and HT0601 Classes

This thesis investigates the way that second generation British Indian Bengali middle class, predominantly Hindu respondents, have attempted to communicate their “modern” middle class respectability through their social practices, work and lifestyles. In their reproduction of this respectability, they attempt to distance negative British South Asian stereotypes prevalent in the media, work institutions and in day-to-day life; sometimes to the extent of ‘othering' other South Asians generally or British Bangladeshi Muslim Sylhetis specifically. Second generation's adaptive responses to racism and stigmatised stereotypes prevalent in British society also reaffirms the British Indian Bengali's presumptions of their ethnic distinctiveness and justifying homogenising racist stereotyping of these ‘other' South Asian groups. This thesis examines several aspects of their lives that are affected by these distinguishing tactics, through: presentation of their ethnicity; middle class identity; position of women within “the community”; ideas of love and romance and “type” of marriage. Additionally, there is an examination of how the second generation are increasingly challenging the assertion that all South Asians are primarily driven by ethnicity, religion and regional-language markers in their search for a marriage partner. Marriage trends amongst British Indian Bengalis are showing distinct moves away from finding a partner through ascribed statuses. Likewise, the second generation in their social interaction also exhibit a weaker sense of identification with their regional-language groups.