https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/56656 2026-04-15T06:03:40Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/56804 Title: Witnessing faith in Anthropology : technologies and techniques of conversion among Catholic charismatics in Malta Abstract: This study focuses on Catholic Charismatic youths and their experiences of conversion and faith within a Catholic Charismatic community. This thesis starts by first focusing on what is conversion within a Catholic Charismatic group and how the individual in a community comes to convert. In an attempt to discover the nature of conversion, I went through the processes of conversion and used myself as a primary informant. I also gathered information from conversations with other members regarding their experiences of conversion. Following the work of Harding (1987), the first section is a discussion on the rhetoric used within such Charismatic communities and how self-narratives and testimonies shape the individual to change their life trajectory and acquire meaning through the ‘Journey Narrative’. This section highlights the role of the community in the process of conversion since they provide a support system, ‘proof’ of the benefits of conversion as well as the narrative template for the individual to change. Another aspect which impacts conversion within this community is the use of technologies and techniques during the meetings and worship rituals. This study discusses how music, lighting, the structure of the ritual, and performativity all impact the individual and the community itself to create the optimum experience for someone to convert. These technologies and techniques work on the premise that the human being is fundamentally a sensory human being who is highly affected by the senses. This analysis leaves the question of whether conversion is simply stimulation of the senses or whether it involves a supernatural manifestation that changes the individual. This is where my experience of conversion sheds light upon this dilemma. Following the work of Edith Turner and other experiential ethnographers, I discuss how technologies and techniques are important in facilitating conversion, but in order to convert one needs to personally make the decision to take a ‘leap of faith’ and open their minds to the possibility of the supernatural. Description: B.A.(HONS)ANTHROPOLOGY 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/56791 Title: Instagram and the art of living : a study of emerging-adult users in Malta Abstract: In this dissertation, I look at young adults in Malta who form part of the social media community. I argue that the relationship between their online and offline worlds is complex and of several kinds. It calls for a broad perspective of how what goes on offline influences online activity and vice-versa. I also examine the notions of what is public and private, arguing that neither concept has been erased by social media, and that the context of the public-private distinction needs to be seen in the light of etiquette and social capital. Description: B.A.(HONS)ANTHROPOLOGY 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/56786 Title: Identity, discourse, and self-regulation : a study of “club drug” use among Maltese youths Abstract: The youthful recreational use of Ecstasy, cocaine, and other illicit substances that occur as ‘club drugs’ is widespread in Western societies. Although this type of drug consumption is a global phenomenon that is often addressed and analysed through positivist epidemiological models, it is localised and attributed with complex, culturally-specific meanings and functions by club drug users themselves. In this thesis I analyse these meanings and functions among a group of upper-middle class club drug users in Malta. I argue that eminently social processes such as secrecy, discretion, and gossip fundamentally regulate, inform and index this type of drug use among these youths. In turn, these engender patterns of sociality, complicity, and specific collective behavioural strategies. Further, I posit that drug consumption does not merely reflect an individual drive for ‘pleasure’ and ‘empathy’, or even pathological conditions of ‘addiction’ among these youths. Rather, carefully moderated and modulated club drug consumption allows them to construct their identity as more ‘virtuous’ consumers vis-à-vis others who consume these drugs immoderately and indiscriminately. Referring to the Maltese structural dichotomy of tajjeb (good/well/benevolent) versus ħażin (bad/rotten/evil), I show how these youths categorise drug users according to whether they are willing and able to engage in ‘composed’ drug consumption or otherwise. Furthermore, for them local social class tensions and distinctions are also indexed through drug consumption, as those who engage in bacchanalian club drug-taking are disparaged and categorised as belonging to a lower social class (ħamalli). Description: PH.D.ANTHROPOLOGY 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/56785 Title: The city and its symbol : gentrification and the overtaking of a living space by its own potential for marketing Abstract: My dissertation’s main focus is built on the premise that the native inhabitants, both of Valletta and (more abstractly) of Malta in general, are losing their capital city for its own symbol (“symbol” in this context being the cultural simulacra created by its aesthetics and historical/cultural value). By this I mean that the cultural and social significance of Belt Valletta is being eroded both by neo-liberal gentrification as well as by the re-formulation of the city towards being a large scale marketplace and tourist destination rather than an organic city with strong socio-cultural significance for its local inhabitants. The symbolic aspect I mentioned pertains to how Valletta's own perceived identity as a site of heritage and significance is being utilized as a marketing tool to further the ends of said gentrification. I view the V18 program as a critical precipitating factor in this large-scale reorientation of the Belt Valletta and argue for the possibility that Valletta is itself a case example/microcosm, rather than an anomaly, of what is happening to the Maltese Islands in general. Other than the data gathered by the fieldwork undertaken, the dissertation was also underpinned (both theoretically as well as in the data’s ability to contextualize) by several articles from the Times of Malta mainly penned in the last three years, Ambivalent Europeans by Jon P. Mitchell (used to establish a pre-contemporary perception of the culture of Valletta), Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” to provide the conceptual tool of “the simulacra” and several articles done on the subject of gentrification and heritage commodification such as Pablo Alonso Gonzalez’s “Heritage and rural gentrification in Spain” and Wouter Van Gent’s “Neoliberalization, Housing initiatives and Variegated Gentrification: How the “Third Wave” broke in Amsterdam” amongst several others. Description: B.A.(HONS)ANTHROPOLOGY 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z