Much has already been written about Morocco’s recent migrant regularization reforms as a new moment for African geopolitics. In contrast, very little has been written about the way in which these reforms, the second phase of which was implemented in December 2017, articulate with the Moroccan state’s ongoing forcible displacements of black sub-Saharan migrants from northern coastal cities like Tangier, to more southern, out-of-the-way locales like Tiznit and Errachidia. Using ethnographic field notes from a preliminary research trip to Rabat and Meknes in summer 2017, this thesis attempts to situate such experiences of displacement within Morocco’s emergent landscapes of emplacement, too, by reconciling them with pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial geographies alike. A Braudelian-inspired historical overview is provided of the regional movements, land claims, and patterned internal and external displacements that have shaped the modern nation-space of Morocco today, from the time of the Islamic conquest of North Africa and the writings of Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun, through the decades of European intervention, to the ongoing Western Sahara conflict and recent EU projects of border outsourcing and fortification. In the process, I argue that the current moment does not, in fact, represent a deviation from Morocco’s previous histories or its entrance into a new geopolitical era. Rather, I interpret it as another iteration in a centuries-long process of localizing Moroccan state identity and power against a larger regional geography marked by immense racial, cultural, and sociolinguistic heterogeneity.

This dissertation research explores the multiple configurations of violence—structural, direct physical, surgical—that form both the targets of practice in trauma surgery and, at times, its instantiation. Medicalization is often used by medical anthropologists to index the individualizing, pathologizing, and depoliticizing effects of medical approaches to social problems. But medicalization is likewise recognized as an important way to facilitate new forms of recognition and distributions of care. Medical care is a crucial and indisputable necessity for remedying the physical effects of violence, structural or otherwise, but institutions and providers of medicine are not morally uncomplicated distributors of healing but rather engender their own forms of violence. These entanglements complicate calls for increased care as solutions to seemingly ever-rising tide of criminalization and motivate the central question of this research—what is accomplished when public hospitals are deployed as tools to intervene on violence? How do connections between public hospitals and state violence constrain care in this context, and what would it take to meaningfully disentangle them? This dissertation project explores the work of trauma surgery, hospital violence intervention, and police in the management of violently injured patients in a Los Angeles County public hospital. Through extended ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and participant observation, I ask how surgeons’ experiences of violence shape their embodied understanding of the “conditions of possibility” for how they might intervene in it (Aretxaga 1997, 8). I follow Wendland (2010), who argues that these ideologies of dehumanization and moral categorization are not inevitable features of clinical practice but rather culturally specific and structured by clinicians’ broader conceptualizations of the social responsibility of medicine and the state. This project examines the violence embedded in clinical training and practice as a function of broader structural priorities that remain unchallenged as well as the opportunities for change, contestation and transformation that emerge through our embodied participation in them.

Black Americans hold a long tradition of civil activism in domestic politics and social change in the United States, while also sustaining a strong presence in international affairs. Throughout the 20th century, many African Americans joined the Department of State’s diplomatic corps, the U.S. Foreign Service, amidst racial injustice and discrimination at home. Black Americans, belonging to a historically marginalized group, can assert Black, American, or a combination of identities in diplomacy and global cooperative efforts. They deploy foundational expectations of diplomatic statecraft, but also, a Black Diplomacy, the legacy of representation and the unique tactics and approaches to foreign policy informed by racial identity and subjectivity. This thesis frames the concept of Black Diplomacy in a continuum of racialization and global governance and opens dialogue on the tensions, opportunities, or limitations that arise in identifying as both Black and Americans. I argue for a larger exploration on the diverse experiences of African American diplomats and whether their identities and perceptions may encourage a new departure for U.S. foreign policy formation and implementation.

This thesis explores the police role in diverting street-based, severely mentally ill individuals to the hospital for psychiatric assessment. Four illustrative ethnographic accounts drawn from participant observation fieldwork are presented. Analysis focuses on police discretion - the latitude for police coercive intervention – in the form of physical constraint when working with Department of Mental Health (DMH) social workers to place and negotiate hospitalization holds (“flash hospitalizations”) on acutely psychotic psychiatric patients. Police are found to frame physical constraint as a liability and danger to themselves and mentally ill clients. They also refer to the futility of flash hospitalization efforts in the face of chronic mental illness. They employ these anxieties of liability, danger, and futility rhetorically in order to communicate to DMH social workers and family members of the mentally ill the limits of police intervention in flash hospitalization scenarios. Ultimately, these anxieties derive from the way in which the police, as a bureaucratic institution, views mental health care, a field that is not based in police carceral expertise. These anxieties exist in the context of influential, socio-political movements of the 2010s, including Black Lives Matter, which have brought increased public scrutiny to street-based police actions.

Through a multidisciplinary approach based in anthropological theory, participant observation methodology, and psychiatric practice, this dissertation explores the lived interplay between psychotic mental illness and functional dependency in seven ethnographic cases of patients, families, and medical providers. Chapters address historical context, the spaces (i.e. homes, jails, shelters, streets) in which treatment and care are administered to psychotic and dependent persons, the ways in which psychiatric crises are handled by social workers and police officers, and the psychiatric and medical patient outcomes when basic needs are neglected. A conclusion and appendices propose clinical and social interventions to decrease this neglect and to increase patient empowerment.

In this dissertation, I contend that, though Lebanon has long been imagined as a haven of diversity in the Middle East, only recently has the country’s once-flourishing Jewish community been considered by state powers and the public as a representation of local cosmopolitanism. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90), Jewish synagogues, neighborhoods, schools, and cemeteries faced the same threats of destruction and abandonment as the greater built environment. Lebanese Jews, who stood at roughly 14,000 in the decade prior to the war, now almost exclusively live in the diaspora. Today, Jewish spaces have been refurbished by developers, repaired by diasporic groups, and adapted to house refugees of Palestinian and Syrian origin. To understand how diverse relationships to the spaces of an absent minority group influence concepts of belonging among the Lebanese body politic, I consider how those interfacing with Jewish sites reflect on their prior histories and articulate their own aspirations through processes of multidirectional memory.

The Introduction to the dissertation introduces Lebanon, its Jewish past, and the main questions and research modalities of the dissertation. Chapter One narrativizes Lebanon’s Jewish history within the broader scope of imperial projects and the development of a Lebanese state and national identity. Within this framework, I pay particular attention to the growth of a communal Jewish identity, especially within the scope of the hardening of ethno-religious affiliations into the sole legitimate category of political representation. Chapter Two accounts for the transformation of Wadi Abu Jamil—Beirut’s historic Jewish neighborhood and the location of the country’s only rehabilitated synagogue—vis-a-vis the violent spatial metamorphosis of the surrounding central district since the official cessation of the civil war. I chronicle the process of co-designing a Wadi Abu Jamil walking tour with a Lebanese architect that examined both its Jewish history and its current inaccessibility. In Chapter Three, I focus my analysis on photographs pertaining to Beirut’s historic Jewish neighborhood and its central synagogue. I address the ways in which the mobilization of collective nostalgia through the circulation of these snapshots on three Lebanese Jewish Facebook groups provides a realm for debating, challenging, and reconstructing concepts of belonging as they relate to remembering while remembering a shared homeland from the diaspora. Chapter Four addresses the quotidian transformations of Lebanon’s formerly Jewish neighborhoods, and the ways in which these sites are entangled with varying nationalisms, crises, dislocations, and local political contestations. This chapter draws on ethnographic material from Sidon in order to consider how non-Jewish “cultural brokers”—those who, through voluntary involvement or the happenstance of interacting with/living in formerly Jewish spaces—are charged with the role of interpreting and preserving the histories of these sites.

In the dissertation, I assert that these individuals serve as “cultural brokers”; through voluntary involvement or the happenstance of living in and around formerly Jewish spaces, they interpret and preserve the histories of these sites. I also analyze how political parties and elite state actors mobilize a Lebanese-Jewish past within a narrative that posits a uniquely Lebanese cosmopolitanism as essential to moving beyond ethno-sectarian violence. By examining notions of ‘Jewishness’ within the post-war state, I show how everyday interactions with the built environment construct discursive and social spaces within which people grapple with notions of social difference. The research for this dissertation was carried out over 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork. My fieldwork combined multiple methodologies in order to contend with the afterlives of Jewish spaces in Lebanon, including life history interviews conducted with interlocutors; numerous semi-structured and informal interviews; research conducted in institutional, private, and nontraditional archives; participant observation and “webservation;” visits to formerly Jewish sites across Lebanon; and photographic and experimental visual documentation.

This dissertation reports the findings of a ten-month field study of the human membership and lingua-cultural organizations participating in the “Breton Movement” or the “Emsav” (lit. the Uprising). The Breton Movement may be described as an ethno-nationalist social movement active in the region of Brittany, France. The Breton Movement underwent institutionalization during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and now functions as a local culture industry. As the Breton Movement is especially concerned with the Breton language (i.e. an endangered insular Celtic language spoken on the Armorican peninsula from the 5th Century CE onward), it has succeeded in integrating itself into an international network of academics and activists concerned with language endangerment and revitalization. Its integration into this network has allowed it to lay claim to material and immaterial goods. It has indeed helped the movement to build and bolster the aforementioned complex of lingua-cultural institutions. There is however considerable contestation concerning the movement’s “authority” over the language and the “authenticity” of the language variety that it promotes. Since a great deal has been written on the topic of linguistic “authority,” “authenticity,” and “legitimacy” in Brittany and elsewhere (see Costa 2010, Adkins 2013, Morvan 2017, Hornsby 2019 inter alios), this dissertation takes a different tack by looking at the meta-stable articulation of discursive entities (e.g. accent, dialect and language) and the social organization of interdiscursivity (i.e. the circulation of discursive elements between distinct sites, cf. Gal 2018). This dissertation is especially concerned with back-and-forth movement between the ethnographic field (i.e. concurrent social establishments) and the bibliographic field (i.e. the academic literature).

This dissertation is grounded in twenty months of ethnographic research conducted during the touristic development of the centro storico, or historical center, of Palermo, Sicily. It investigates the effects of this development on the everyday experiences of residents – including migrants and locals – and examines how urban requalification and tourism are unsettling the sociospatial order of the city and disrupting the politics of belonging. Each chapter of this dissertation explores how the large-scale phenomena now defining Mediterranean cities – economic restructuring, international tourism, and the so-called “crisis” of immigration – are experienced in the microcosm of the everyday. This dissertation demonstrates how, in the midst of liberal development in Palermo, the racialized figures of the migrant and the poor southerner emerge more clearly than ever before. It ultimately argues that Palermo emerges as a battlefield defining the future of Mediterranean cities. Palermo is a historically poor and working-class city, held tightly under mafia control until the late 1990s. Since the 2010s, it has also become a migrant city: in its centro storico, migrants are highly visible and share the same dilapidated neighborhoods that unofficially belong to the local underclasses. But the recent funneling of structural funds into the city for tourist development – and the ensuing changes to the urban environment and the sociospatial order – heightens the stakes for belonging. Official discourse is positioning Palermo as a city emerging from the clutches of the past, catapulting towards a future of ‘smart,’ sustainable development, and as a cosmopolitan “citt� aperta” (open city) for migrants. This dissertation documents how liberal development strategies are moving the local poor and migrants out of the city. It shows how the regeneration agenda became, along with tourism, the main response to the Eurozone crisis and the so-called Southern Question, or southern Italian underdevelopment. Drawing from walk-along interviews with ‘locals’ and ‘migrants,’ and following guided tours of the city, this dissertation examines the everyday experiences of tourist development from a variety of angles.

My dissertation focuses on mechanisms of abandonment, marginalization, and punishment produced in the name of care through biomedicalized responses to “opioid crisis.” I examine exacerbation of abandonment as an effect of new state-mandated oversight of opioid prescribing and dispensing on patients seeking opioid-related care for pain, addiction, or both. I draw on immersive ethnographic research in a public hospital system and a largescale encampment in California, as well as interviews of patients and addiction treatment providers in New York City. Building on prior research that documents two tiers of drug law enforcement in the U.S., I examine how two tiers are produced and maintained not only by segregating individuals into punishment through spatially structured enforcement and criminalization, but also by segregating people out of treatment. I examine how individuals and communities come to be segregated out of treatment and abandoned through state and capital investments in science and health care. In particular, describing the intersections of bureaucratic mandates, biomedical constructions of risk enacted through guidelines, policies, clinical decisions, the circulation of paperwork, the embodiment of moral reasoning, and the encroachment of drug law enforcement, I document the enactment and legitimization of patient discharges from public health care settings. Finally, I examine how people’s historicized and embodied relationships to state power affect the efficacy of buprenorphine as a treatment for opioid dependence. I propose that targeted state support for pharmaceutical interventions in response to social suffering can be understood as a mechanism of organized abandonment through investment.