Master thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)
open access
This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of Dominican women’s hair choices. My ethnography makes use of beauty, the body, and hair to understand the hair culture on the island. I have spent three...Show moreThis thesis is an ethnographic exploration of Dominican women’s hair choices. My ethnography makes use of beauty, the body, and hair to understand the hair culture on the island. I have spent three months in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic and visited traditional and curly hair salons to create a real-life image of why and how women wear their hair the way they wear it. Class, race, dominating beauty ideals all influence how Dominican women perceive themselves, and per extension their hair as beautiful. The curly hair boom, mostly promulgated through the growing use of social media has started a hairy revolution, destabilising the tradition of the Dominican blowout, for which the Dominican salon is so known for. While curly hair and straightened hair paradoxically, and fluently coexist in the Dominican Republic, the tensions of spending money on hair care continue to persist for both hair practices. This thesis offers a fluid perspective of women’s body choices, by addressing the agentic, oppressive and liberating aspects of Dominican women’s hair practices.Show less
Master thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)
open access
This research focuses on the analysis of the forms of human-environment relationship that characterize different communities in the coastal area of North Jakarta, and on how these might be...Show moreThis research focuses on the analysis of the forms of human-environment relationship that characterize different communities in the coastal area of North Jakarta, and on how these might be connected to inequalities between local communities. In North Jakarta, relationship with the environment is strongly affected by the presence of environmental issues, namely sea level rise, land subsidence, and chronic floods, which force local communities to come to terms with the surrounding waters on a daily basis, developing different experiences and perceptions of the environment. Moreover, such different experiences and perceptions are connected to political struggles related to the protection of the Jakarta bay ecosystem, the livelihood of fishing communities, and mitigation projects such as the construction of a giant seawall and of reclaimed islands off the coast of the city. The research population includes residents of four different neighbouring districts located along the coast of the Indonesian capital. Despite being so close to each other, these are very different areas, home to fish markets, fishing settlements and industries, luxurious residential areas, shining malls and exclusive leisure spaces. These districts are inhabited by very different communities in terms of social class, income, lifestyle, occupation, and ethnicity. Therefore, they are an ideal field to observe diverse forms of human-environment relationship, and to test to what extent could these be related to the above-mentioned inequalities and to different ontologies of the environment.Show less
