Sociologists exhibit growing interest in the politics of expertise. Analyses of evaluations, economic paradigms, blueprints, censuses, policy instruments and the like have come to occupy an important position in recent research. While much of this emergent scholarship has drawn on historical methods, a growing number of scholars have turned to ethnography. A close reading of this work reveals that ethnographers have actively tailored rather than passively transposed ethnography to the study of expertise. Departing from traditional conceptions of ethnography, these works exhibit growing attentiveness to movement, mediation, and materials. We argue that this retooling of ethnography is not merely a response to empirical realities but rather stems, at least in part, from the influence of science and technology studies, specifically Actor-Network Theory. This case provides the occasion to make a broader point about ethnography as a ‘theory/method package’: theory does not only shape what ethnographers study, but also how they conduct research.
Although prominent in literature on West Africa and especially Nigeria, the phenomenon of ogbanjes in Sierra Leone is little discussed. By following the story of one ogbanje, this paper unravels their significance for social life, for local epistemologies and cosmologies in Freetown. The paper discusses personhood and morality, conceptions of femininity and motherhood as well as the search for culprits. It argues that ogbanjes have to be understood as avengers who, in the name of society, penalize those deeds of women which meet with the disapproval of the community. Ogbanjes embody a breakdown of accepted social concepts as they are able to openly articulate criticism towards their parents and elders and thus serve as a way to negotiate the coming of age. The negotiations over appropriate treatment of ogbanjes highlight the interplay between different forms of belief. In addition, ogbanjes provide coping mechanisms and explanatory tools for untimely deaths.
Despite extensive studies of street culture and the risks of offending and victimization in urban marginalized areas, little is known about the role of cultural repertoires for variation in victimization risks among young men not involved in crime. Based on two ethnographic studies, conducted independently of the authors in neighbouring township areas of Cape Town, we offer insights into patterns of victimization among young men not involved in crime who live and attend school in the townships. Young men who perform decent cultural repertoires are highly exposed to victimization due to their moral rejection of crime-involved youth. Young men who perform flexible cultural repertoires, by incorporating and shifting between gang and decent repertoires, experience low victimization due to their adaptation to crime-involved youth. Findings emphasize the importance of detailed investigations of the way varying cultural repertoires, in particularly heterogeneous flexible repertoires, influence offending and victimization patterns among young men in high-risk settings.
This article focuses on the ‘Kriegsenkel’ – the German ‘grandchildren of the Second World War’. Born in the 1960s and 1970s, Kriegsenkel feel that through processes of transgenerational transmission unresolved war experiences were passed on to them by their families and are largely responsible for their emotional problems – from depression and anxiety disorders to relationship break-ups and career problems. I explore how, after decades of public taboos on the suffering of the majority population, this emergent identity is constructed and addressed entirely within the framework of Western therapeutic culture. Sociologists have long critiqued therapy culture for promoting political disengagement and attitudes of victimhood. Based on more than 80 ethnographic interviews, I argue that this view needs to be moderated to account for the ways in which individuals use therapeutic culture to exert agency and devise strategies to actively deal with emotional distress in an environment where wartime suffering is considered politically sensitive.
The online-offline distinction is increasingly observed by academics and laypersons. How are the ‘virtual’ spaces intertwined with the offline physical world? What are locally specific meanings of the online communicative practices? And how do offline contexts shape online activities? Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork among Chinese urban elite migrants, the study explores the ways in which new types of urban communities are formed as an outcome of online-offline dynamics in a rapidly changing society. The research starts as a ‘traditional’ ethnography focusing on the offline ‘natural habitat’ of the participants. However, the participants demonstrate that their virtual spaces are as important as their offline physical spaces; the online and offline spaces are growing into one lived reality, and the ethnographer is compelled to take into account the online in order to gain a rounded understanding of the participants’ life worlds.
Informed by Gibson’s affordances and Bourdieu’s habitus, this visual ethnographic study explores parents’ ideas about learning and leisure and the actual domestic leisure children (between three to seven years old) consume in association with socioeconomic status. It is found that parent informants have similar reservations about local education regardless of socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, their different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds contribute to their different involvement in children’s learning and leisure through their use of the domestic setup, television and computing devices, and toys. Through leisure, middle-class parent informants transmit certain emotions, values, skills, behavioral dispositions, and tastes to their children, which coincide with institutional approaches to learning. The study finds that children’s domestic leisure is largely patterned by materials (domestic setup and leisure-induced appliances), practices (TV and mobile computing usage and toy selection and play) and social structure, and thus links considerably to children’s disparity in academic achievements and attitudes towards learning.
This article explores the temporalities, presences, and absences of bodies and narratives within and beyond research, the connections and disconnections which these can create, and the different types of proximity involved in their construction. Here the gaps within ethnographic research, storytelling, and memory practices and the often fleeting shared spaces that might result from them (or exist perhaps despite them) are investigated. Through an exploration of a personal family narrative alongside an academic research project the article draws upon selected images, archives, interactions, and the often unanswered or unpursued questions which accompany these to explore further the role of gaps and shared spaces within research and within narratives, and also in relation to the potential for a more multifaceted understanding – and representation – of different levels, or proximities, of knowledge, narrative and experience.
This article reflects on how an ethnographer’s approach to field entry, the topic of study, her use of ethnographic methods and contextual factors shaped research participants’ perception of her multiple identities in a Ghanaian hospital environment. Her perceived multiple identities influenced trust and distrust relations between her and her research participants, which impacted on the research project. The article discusses the paradox of the researcher’s negotiation of her multiple identities of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ and its influence on the process of data collection, understanding and analysis of the study topic. The article argues that research projects give birth to the ethnographer. Obviously, the observations of the ethnographer, who is the main research instrument, of her own position, are an important source for data collection. Participation and positioning in organizational activities can provide the ethnographer with a personal experience of her study topic and data that enhances understanding of organizational processes.
This article examines the roles of brokers in conducting research in a (post-)conflict context and uses this analysis as a lens to rethink reflexive ethics in humanitarian research. Drawing on fieldwork in Gulu, northern Uganda, the paper analyses the ambiguous position of brokers, and the complex social space in which they navigate. The paper outlines how brokers, in the pursuit of opportunities and in trying to meet expectations of other players, use strategies such as concealing information for researchers, or actively promoting the research project rather than merely facilitating it. It is further argued that research in northern Uganda may reproduce conceptions of war-affected people as vulnerable and of the war-affected context as problem-fraught and in need of intervention. The paper concludes by seeking ways to rethink a reflexive ethical stance in humanitarian research and encourages researchers to take the role of brokers and other stakeholders into account.
Contemporary approaches to evaluating ‘complex’ social and health interventions are opening up spaces for methodologies attuned to examining contextual complexities, such as ethnography. Yet the alignment of the two agendas – evaluative and ethnographic – is not necessarily comfortable in practice. I reflect on experiences of conducting ethnographic research alongside a public health evaluation of a community-based initiative in the UK, using the lens of ‘missing out’ to examine intersections between my own ethnographic concerns and those of the communities under study. I examine potential opportunities posed by the discomfort of ‘missing out’, particularly for identifying the processes and spaces of inclusion and exclusion that contributed both to my ethnographic experiences and to the realities of the communities engaging with the initiative. This reveals productive possibilities for a focus on ‘missing out’ as a form of relating for evaluations of the impacts of such initiatives on health and social inequalities.
The aim of the article is to explore how an apprenticeship through signs can inform ethnographic inquiries. Upon engaging with signs, one can develop new empirical sensibilities that could allow for the appreciation of the flows, forces and intensities encountered during such research processes. In particular, it enables us to attend to those aspects of research that we may struggle to capture or illuminate. We suggest naming such endeavour nomadography in order to emphasize the move away from anthropocentric accounts and to reflect the iterative, polymorphic and experiential nature of this approach. We also draw on a brief extract from some fieldwork in Fiji that focused on the ‘discovery’ of a new plant species. In particular, we wish to explore how a nomadographic approach provides a way of rejuvenating our thinking conceptually, empirically and methodologically by rethinking these three interconnecting and overlapping aspects of the research process.
Northeastern, post-industrial cities have some of the highest rates of incarceration, parole and foster care management in the United States. In this essay, I focus on one woman, who I call Kira, to explore ethnographically the lived experience of institutional surveillance in the post-industrial, northeastern city. Written as an analysis of fieldwork completed in a major post-industrial center, this essay traces the emergence of an anxious affect that tethers Kira’s intimate and structural relationships. I show how this affective subjectivity has serious structural implications for the duration and intensity of state surveillance, as well as the possibilities for freedom and continuity in Kira’s world. Through engagement with affect and object relations theory, this paper works through the subjective experience of political-economic marginalization and surveillance in the inner-city. I conclude with reflections on the ethical implications of ethnography and the broader stakes for an anthropology embedded in these types of affective relationships.
This paper examines the content and processes of embodied resocialization that occur at a children’s weight loss camp. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I provide the children’s accounts of their decision to attend camp. In addition to teaching the children to implement body projects through strategic and embodied means, the structured environment at camp allowed for the recalibration of the campers’ habits. Social control supported weight loss at camp but ultimately created problems for effective resocialization. This paper contributes to a better understanding of processes of embodied resocialization and the tension between self-control and social control when resocialization occurs in an immersive environment for a short period of time.
In this paper, we reflect on how time is appraised, organized, and managed by a group of researchers conducting an ethnography of 12 low-income families. We develop the concept of temporal dispositions: perceptions and preferences around time that in turn shape temporal practices. The concept of temporal dispositions encapsulates individuals’ background and training, agency and reflexivity, and the dynamic nature of ongoing social life and interactions through which temporal meanings may change or take on new symbolic weight. Overlaid upon each of these are larger social structures and power relations that affirm some temporal dispositions and stigmatize others. We conclude by considering the implications for ethnographic fieldworkers. We argue that analyzing the many ways researchers and participants navigate and perceive time offers insight into unspoken temporal assumptions, ideologies, and inequalities.
While Palestine is often approached either as a site of ‘resistance’ or of recent neoliberal de-politicization, the case of young university students defeats dichotomous categorizations and points to the more complex and layered nature of political subjectivities. Drawing on unique ethnographic fieldwork as a student at Najah University in Nablus, this article addresses students’ political subjectivities against the backdrop of three macrochanges in Palestinian recent history: the professionalization of politics, the tightening of internal repression, and the neoliberal economic turn. Overall, the study argues that, while Najah undergraduates maintain a strong nationalist discourse, they have come to conceptualize ‘politics’ as negative, at once ineffective and dangerous. Caught up in a web of conflicting social expectations, the pessimism vis-à-vis the political field leads them to abandon traditional sites of participation and to adopt a cynical yet ultimately political approach to consumption in an attempt to ‘change air’ and ‘just live’.
The term social interaction is used so commonly, to the point of obscureness, often without defining or setting limits to it. In-depth micro visual-ethnographic analysis of sleepers’ awakenings in public places offers a list of typical bodily behaviors which may indicate when interactions start/end. This becomes evident by video analysis of NYC subway commuters’ awakenings in natural settings. While awake, individuals’ bodies point-out specific situational directions. However, while snoozing, corporeal directions lay off and sleepers’ body-idioms, self-presentations, and pointing-acts mute. Consequently, dozers become relatively directionless, relaxing bodily boldness. Following this understanding of public physical patterns, I argue that, contrary to conventional microstudies’ understandings, even in public places interactions have clear corporeal-experiential limits that can be operationalized and defined. I suggest naming this other (non-interactional) family of social behaviors interalia (from Latin, ‘among others’, i.e., being relatively indistinct corporeally). This study aims to provide a contemporary applicable toolkit for ethnographers of everyday lives.
Through an examination of an investigation of commercial sexual practices conducted by an NGO, I explore how a public health programme creates its object on the ground through painstaking fieldwork. This paper is about a particular emplaced, embodied, visual practice; NGO fieldworkers identify and follow through the city women whose bodily dispositions identify them as ‘prostitutes’, although the women themselves vehemently reject this label. A particular politics of recognition emerges around uneven visibilities of women in the city. The fieldworkers labour to make the banality of ‘prostitution’ and its practices visible to the ‘prostitutes’ themselves, while at the same time cultivating a visual expertise in the recognition and classification of a putatively culturally specific bodily repertoire. Paying close attention to the techniques fieldworkers use to read public bodies shows how ordinary practices of urban bodily cultivation, everyday Dakarois technologies of gender, become progressively weighted with risk as they tangle with the evolving categories of a public health programme. Risk emerges here via a series of unequal exchanges within the visual economy of the city. Fieldworkers may find themselves exposed to new forms of reputational risk while they labour to define the social, sexual and semantic complexities of genn (going out).
This article aims to illuminate the theoretical basis for rhythmanalysis as developed by Henri Lefebvre, who intended it to be a transdisciplinary concept that could be used to theorize everyday life, ‘from the most natural (physiological, biological) to the most sophisticated’. I will attempt to show how this concept can be transformed into a toolkit to research people groups (such as refugees, migrant workers, professionals) where it is impossible to conduct traditional ethnographic fieldwork either because of the difficulty of access or when an event (such as migration) has already taken place. It is a mainly theoretical paper informed by the author’s research on older migrants in Britain. It argues that if the principles behind rhythmanalysis can be distilled to conduct ethnography in absentia for a migrant worker group, then these same principles can be adapted to conduct research in most spaces where access and/or co-presence are difficult.
This paper asks ‘What is a life worth?’ by analyzing the wrongful death lawsuit for Douglas Morales, an undocumented student who died in 2008 at 17 from brain injuries suffered playing football. The paper first examines how sociologists and New Jersey law monetarily value a child’s life, especially when undocumented status would have decreased long-term earnings. Second, it uses ethnographic, counterfactual methods to do a ‘sociological autopsy’ offering a plausible alternative, a more positive scenario – including a path to legal status – for Douglas’s future life. It uses interviews and document review to establish Douglas’s life habits, leveraging sociological and psychological research on immigrant youth achievers to predict higher future earnings. The paper advances ‘public sociology’ by deploying ethnographic, case-oriented methods to challenge the devaluation of this undocumented life, critique American immigration policies, and to help the decedent’s family directly.
This contribution shall focus on post-9/11 port security, its policing actors and how their occupational, counter-terrorist identity is (re)established. The empirical context of this study is that of operational port police officers and security officers who construct port security in the ports of Rotterdam and Hamburg. Drawing from a multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork study, specific attention is paid to how operational staff, employed in a highly securitized realm saturated with War on Terror governance, (re)establish their occupational identity through the terrorist other without having ever been confronted, face-to-face, with terrorism. Instead of fighting in a global War on Terror, and given the way they construe their identity through the terrorist other, they endure an everyday War on Meaninglessness.
This article provides a detailed analysis of the labor of professional rock climbers. It focuses on a mode of multi-layered labor contrasting with the traditional allocation of tasks among workers, i.e. the division of labor. It is argued that, while multi-layered labor emerges in markets with low economic circulation and weak organization, it also reflects how professional versatility is at the heart of the mode of production of value in these labor markets. Indeed, producing value for climbing companies as a climber is anchored in a strong professional versatility. Based on multi-sites and digital fieldwork with professional rock climbers, media producers and the climbing industry, the argument is developed by drawing on an account of the journey of a professional climber. Ultimately, this article is an invitation to question the self-explanatory nature of professional categories to highlight the multiple facets of labor commonly hidden behind the term ‘professional’.
This article reflects on the merits of the expedition as an anthropological method on the basis of a recent cross-disciplinary experience, involving biologists, archaeologists and anthropologists working together in High Arctic Greenland. True to the term, the expedition had chartered a vessel from where the team could go ashore in places that would otherwise have been difficult to access, and where the individual perspectives could cross-fertilize each other in actual practice. It is argued that anthropology itself is a mode of experimentation in practice, which enables new trains of thought, and an engagement with other disciplinary practices. The gain of our cross-disciplinary experiment was therefore not only to know more about the makings of a particular landscape in a multi-disciplinary perspective, but also to understand how anthropology makes sense of inherently moving facts.
Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork at a community-based prisoner reentry program, this article investigates how staff members attempt to cultivate former prisoners’ cultural capital to mitigate stigma and facilitate interactions with employers. I call this curriculum work wisdom, which involves teaching clients how to (1) disclose discrediting information and communicate remorse; (2) tailor their style of dress, speech, and bodily comportment to avoid evoking negative stereotypes; (3) negotiate the tacit norms of workplace culture; and (4) remain confident and resilient in the face of rejection. Work wisdom provides former prisoners with the dramaturgical resources to perform dominant cultural scripts and practices in the short term as they undergo the longer-term process of reintegration. These findings illustrate how the cultivation of cultural capital begins by teaching superficial performances that can be internalized as durable dispositions over time. In the conclusion, I discuss the limitations of work wisdom.
Approaches to landscape are characterized by an unresolved distinction between political representation on the one hand and phenomenology on the other. In this paper we address this distinction by demonstrating how those living in close quarters with landscape (farmers) translate their lived experience into political representation. Through the use of rhetoric culture theory we show how farmers use narrative and symbolism to stake their political claims. Moreover, we argue that a focus on lived experience should not deprive our ethnographic encounters of political significance. On the contrary, we demonstrate how by focusing on the lived experience of farmers we can better appreciate how they are motivated to act politically, have the skills to act politically, and gain political legitimacy in the eyes of others. We argue that whilst phenomenological approaches provide fertile grounds for political analysis, the majority of such research remains politically empty. We demonstrate how, contrary to much of the literature, farmers can and do aesthetically fix the landscape for rhetorical effect, and how narrative as rhetorical representation always already serves to politicize time. We suggest rhetoric, therefore, as an appropriate conceptual tool for mediating and advancing our understanding of the relationship between landscape experience and landscape politics.
This account of a UK live-action roleplay (LARP) event highlights complex shifts between different interpretive frames, foregrounding the role of the physical setting as well as of non-players and locals in providing symbolic resources that inhibit or support breaking frames. The conception of framing used here draws upon and extends Goffman’s definition of a frame as part of the organization of activity that specifies meaning and expectations of involvement. In looking at the setting of such framing processes ethnographically, this article presents UK LARP as a distinctive engagement with rural materiality and a creative alternative to traditional country pursuits. From the point of view of a game organizer, the paper identifies the creation of specific contextual frames by the visiting hobbyists associated with three interpretations: 1) a narrative conception of the space as a backdrop for fantastical events, 2) a ludic conception of the space as an area of game-playing, 3) an event conception of the space and its inhabitants as something to be managed. Three examples of disruptions to the work employed to maintain these frames demonstrate the fragility of the magic involved in this fantastical hobby.
Horse riding is a popular leisure activity within rural Britain. Straddling two masculinized social contexts – rural, land-based society and sport/physical recreation – horse riding is a feminized, yet mixed-sex, milieu. This article presents data from an ethnography of the social world of horse riding to consider how women within this context do and redo gender in ways that may begin to challenge ideas about what women are, and what they are capable of, within rural and sporting contexts. Women’s active leisure in the countryside has been rendered largely invisible for decades, yet women’s sport/physical recreation forms an important part of rural leisure worlds. This ethnographic study of women and horse riding offers examples of how feminine identities help shape the rural leisure landscape in ways that begin to redefine gender relations and gender identities within the British countryside in small, yet potentially significant, ways.
This article brings together findings from two separate ethnographic studies that explore the motivations, behaviours and experiences of those who voluntarily engage in high-risk activities. Focusing on Csikszentmihalyi’s phenomenology of enjoyment, and taking a particular interest in the psychological and experiential aspects of action, the accounts of skydivers and climbers are presented and discussed in relation to each of the components Csikszentmihalyi has identified as necessary for providing a deep sense of enjoyment. The aim of the article is to show how the concept of flow provides a useful framework for understanding the attractions of engaging in high-risk pursuits that are often overlooked. This contributes to an understanding of particular rural settings, specifically mountains and flying sites, as a backdrop for meaningful action.
To call a place rural is to categorize it as a particular kind of place and, often, to presume that particular kinds of being innately occur there. Over the past 20 years, however, trends in British rural studies have problematized easy ascription; this article is an ethnographic contribution within those trends. If it is no longer adequate to read the rural as a container for being, then, as I contend here, rurality can be explored anew through doing. I draw upon David Matless’s (1994) frame of ‘doing the village’ representationally, and amplify it to include concepts of place as representational and relational. I thus use ‘doing’ to read the multiple ways in which diverse residents in a Northern England village engage with both their real locality and with nationally shared rural imaginings.
Long-haul truck drivers and members of their social networks in urban locales constitute a hard-to-reach population at risk for acquiring and disseminating STIs/HIV. This paper focuses on the unique logistical, methodological, and ethical challenges faced by population health scientists while studying long-haul truck drivers and members of their sexual networks in inner-city neighborhoods of a major US metropolitan center and the innovative strategies developed to overcome the challenges. Formative research and focus groups with several trucker-centered populations (N = 28) led to in-depth interviews and serologies with 60 truck drivers and 24 sexworkers. Various difficulties encountered by the research team are discussed, followed by strategies devised to overcome them.
Many would argue that ethnographic knowledge claims are partial. Many say this predicament demands the researcher’s self-reflexivity about ethnographic claims. Commonly, ethnographers perform reflexivity by discussing how their research may reflect interests or biases that accompany their positions in hierarchies of domination. Positional reflexivity uneasily straddles a realism that claims to know which position(s) affected the research, and a normativism that aims to demystify what we claim to know. Both stances suppress the interpretive work that researchers and researched constantly are doing. In a more interpretive practice of reflexivity, ethnographers explore how they figured out other people’s meanings in the field, instead of focusing on correlations between their claims and their social position. Interpretive reflexivity considers social positions within ongoing circuits of communication between researcher and researched. Since interpretations are part of explanation in much ethnography, interpretive reflexivity widens our ability to assess causal as well as interpretive claims.
Difficulties distinguishing the ethnographic object and the ethnographer's analysis can pose a challenge to the conduct and dissemination of ethnographic work. The close distance between ethnographic observation and the ethnographer's interpretation elides the boundary between considerations of theory and method. In his book, Interpretation and Social Knowledge, Reed describes interpretivism as an epistemological approach aimed at harnessing the potential of social explanations developed in ethnography's interstitial position – the space between theory and social reality. This issue of Ethnographyc provides a forum for ethnographers coming from different theoretical positions and working in different empirical areas to reflect upon on the value and limitations of interpretivism in ethnography.
Through his metaphor of landscapes of meaning, Reed provides a way of looking at meaning in terms of how it explains action, with the assumption that action occurs within landscapes of meaning. However, my ethnographic evidence suggests that Reed’s metaphor needs to enlarge its scope. In doing this I use my research on immigrant girls in Sweden. The aim is to demonstrate that people can and do live across, within and between landscapes of meaning. This interstitiality can both produce extreme hardship and possibilities of freedom and agency. I share the story of one person, Nazira, who is negotiating with different social and cultural worlds. This allows her to criticize different cultural contexts and to work towards emergent cultural forms. I conclude by arguing that my ethnographical accounts could be used in support and as a critique of the theoretical understanding of landscapes of meaning within Reed’s interpretivist sociology.
While ethnographers call for including temporal contexts in their studies, they do not closely consider how to accomplish this. Instead, they tend to treat the past as historical facts, collected by experts, and largely isolated from the understandings of their subjects. This study analyzes how residents being interviewed about their city invoked the past. As opposed to a past born from static historical sources, the past of interviewees was largely autobiographical, and it was actively performed through interactions that strategically critiqued or wistfully enhanced the present. These intimate, populist histories reflected and maintained community ideals and identities, and they defied elite, professional explanations, revealing conflicts between how researcher and researched define the world. Ethnographers and other researchers of the present should be sensitive to how their subjects construct the past, as well as their own representations of history and the dynamics of power underlying them.
This study of the unusually high incidence of young male suicides in the transnational Alevi-Kurdish community in London demonstrates the benefits of combining a Durkheimian structural approach with a qualitatively driven ethnographic methodology. Examination of the life experiences of those who committed suicide is located within the underlying social organization of the transnational community in which the suicides occurred, enabling us to explore unanticipated events that render certain groups more at risk of committing suicide. Interviews with significant others facilitated a deeper understanding of the personal life paths of those who committed suicide. The suicide cases followed a particular assimilation trajectory that gradually positioned them in a ‘rainbow underclass’, an anomic social position leading to suicide. Despite the sensitivity of the subject, participants appreciated the opportunity to discuss their experience frankly and contribute towards a better understanding of the underlying causes in a desperate attempt to prevent further suicides.
In this article I use an ‘outsider within’ epistemology to conduct a reflexive analysis of the impact of researcher characteristics on gathering data in multiracial organizations. The reported research elucidates that the intersection of race, gender, class background, age and occupational prestige influenced the ethnographer's social interactions with respondents in the teaching profession. With examples selected principally from two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two predominantly racial/ethnic minority multiracial schools in Southern California, I identify a hidden privilege for Latina professionals. I contend that unlike white or male privilege, which are granted consciously and unconsciously, the hidden privilege is fleeting, and works only when verbally revealed in occupations held in lower prestige.
By analysing the case study of a young Muslim man's conversion within and between different expressions of Islam in the Gambia, this article challenges common understandings of conversion that see it as a transition from one form of religious belief or identity to another, as well as theories of Islam's place in Africa that distinguish between ‘local’ traditions and ‘world’ religions. The ethnographic case study illustrates that, for Gambian youth, conversion is not a unilinear path but entails the continuous making of moral negotiations and a preparedness to reflect on the ambiguity of selfhood – an inevitable result of the making of these negotiations.
Growth elites use cultural workers (artists, clergy, intellectuals) to rebrand old industrial cities as ecological delights that bring the market, society, and nature into harmony. Cultural workers’ vision of transforming the industrial city into a green commons has deep historical roots and enduring appeal. The market appropriation of this utopian vision is at once a revalorization technique and a conflict suppression maneuver. Merging theorization of practice, black urban politics, and the sustainability fix, this study frames the volatile relation of growth elites and cultural workers in Detroit as sustainability was made to mean resource enclosures. Cultural workers used their ties across cities and countries to fight the fix. There is a conflict between economic and cultural capital to control the spirit of capitalism and its relations with society and nature.
Although many long-term Sri Lankan migrants to Italy have words of praise for Italian culture and find few reasons to permanently return to their hometowns, they often take the decision to bring children back to Sri Lanka for their education. The reason most cited to opt for Sri Lankan schooling is that ‘Italians don’t have good values’. Certain Sri Lankan normative practices that adults can circumvent while in Italy play a fundamental heuristic role in the education of children and are allegedly only present in Sri Lanka. However, values are also a fundamental aspect of arguments put forward by migrants to stay in Italy as workers. This article discusses the ambiguities that concepts such as values and culture have in the daily usage of migrant workers. To clarify how they are used in arguments for and against migration, I suggest that scholarship in the anthropology of ethics can be illuminating in the ethnographic context of the Sri Lankan transnational experience. I discuss how migrant parents critically approach their understanding of Sri Lankan and Italian cultures, and how they ponder over alternative courses of action that tread between the material objectives of migration and the ethical values of Sri Lankan Catholicism.
This paper investigates how every day interactions within senior centers may be conducive to the generation of social capital that seniors can tap into, and how the creation of social capital is shaped by the social positions and physical location of the individuals involved. Based on 22 in-depth interviews and 15 months of field observations at two centers in Phoenix, one serving Asians and the other Latinos, we find that the presence of seniors in socially advantageous positions facilitates the flow of beneficial resources for other seniors. Seeming ethnic differences in the generation of social capital actually stem from the interaction of other forms of capital and the structure of opportunities for different groups, reflecting broader patterns in the reproduction of inequality. These observations may be policy-relevant with regard to the allocation of public resources in the face of fiscal crises.
Humanitarian actors struggle to protect refugees from the violence of war, but critics argue that they often succeed in nothing more than segregating the displaced and turning their hardships into global public spectacles. This article narrows and refines these criticisms of contemporary humanitarian action by examining humanitarian spectacles at a local level in an ethnography of the Buduburam Refugee Camp, a predominantly Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, West Africa. It is clear from this vantage point that disenfranchisement and bureaucratic intransigence deeply constrained camp life. But the public spectacles we examine also highlight the unexpected persistence of civic life and the depth of social connections between camp residents themselves; between refugees and humanitarians; and between refugees and their hosts. By making the homogeneous, distant concept of humanitarian spectacle into a heterogeneous concept with local dimensions, we are able to capture more of the experiences of people who live in unsettled contexts. This argument contributes to research on refugees and humanitarianism by drawing attention to the interconnected social world of the refugee camp. It also contributes to research on public spectacles by casting these spectacles as neither a pure expression of distance nor empowerment, but rather an easily sullied form of civic life.
Pre-interview interactions between qualitative researchers and research subjects are characterized by two-way sense-making processes, through which research subjects attempt to make sense of researchers’ intentions, and what they themselves stand to gain or lose from participating in a given research. Based on a reflexive account of my ethnographic fieldwork experiences in Kenya’s South Coast region, among men known as ‘beach boys’ and as participants of ‘female sex tourism’, I illustrate how the concerns and interests of my target interviewees were generated and negotiated during the pre-interview phase. I do so by analysing our pre-interview interactions, drawing links between my assigned identities, asymmetries between us and the concerns and interests that were generated, as the men considered their participation or non-participation in the research.
This article explores how online communications and social networking sites raise new ethical and methodological questions for qualitative researchers who design studies to be primarily ‘off-line’. The author explores how social media affect efforts to recruit participants, gain informed consent, collect data, leave the field, and disseminate results, particularly as participants have greater ability to respond to those findings. In examining the dilemmas ethnographers increasingly encounter, this article points to the shifts of power between participants and researchers and suggests that this might promise greater equity between participants and researchers, while also potentially introducing new pitfalls.
Focusing on social dialogue and the sensory body within a tandem cycling group pairing blind and sighted riders, this article addresses the creation of a ‘dialogical performance’ (
By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with two grassroots groups that operate near the Arizona-Mexico border, this article illuminates how nativism is translated into day-to-day activism, often in ways that, while openly critical of the state, actually serve to strengthen the state. In contrast to conventional accounts that characterize nativist groups on the border as ‘vigilante’, I argue that the two groups which are the focus of this study, the Soldiers and the Engineers, seek to collaborate with state actors in an effort to restore the state’s exercise of what these groups consider to be legitimate violence in the borderlands. That is, the two groups enact nativism through popular sovereignty. Believing that the state’s ‘absence’ on the border is the result of an understaffed Border Patrol, the Soldiers fashion themselves into a civilian extension of the agency, taking pride in collaborating with locally stationed agents. Meanwhile, the Engineers find their entry point to the state through the ‘border security industrial complex’, hoping to work as private contractors for the Department of Homeland Security to restructure border surveillance. I conclude that we might expect popular sovereignty in other contexts where the state is perceived to be weak.
This article studies the construction of ethnicity within majority and minority families and more in particular the strategies developed to ensure intergenerational continuity via an in-depth analysis of the narratives of Belgian-Flemish-, Italian- and Moroccan-origin parents in Flanders, Belgium. Parents were asked to discuss the upbringing of their children and the main elements they want to transmit, with a focus on their ethno-cultural identity. These narratives shed light on how parents perceive themselves, their children and other groups in society, and, more importantly, what these perceptions entail for the upbringing of their children. This article studies the strategies developed to ensure ethno-cultural continuity within the family and/or ethnic group, and discusses in which way these strategies become ‘logic’ in the eyes of these parents. The analysis shows how internalized perceptions and dispositions about one’s ethnicity, cultural background and religious affiliation influence strategy development to ensure linguistic and religious continuity and family cohesion, given the specificities of the social context. Overall, parents try to make sense of the burden of ethno-cultural continuity they feel resting upon their shoulders, but the article discusses how minority and majority parents’ perceptions and strategies tend to differ according to one’s social location and to power differences.
This article presents episodes of gay sex in the daily lives of people from a Brazilian shantytown (favela). It does so through a writing genre I call ‘ethnographic striptease’, which offers a picture of sexuality that is less ‘clinical’ and more similar to the form of an ‘erotic art’. This is based on the Foucauldian proposed distinction between two forms of knowledge discussed in History of Sexuality, Volume I: ‘scientia sexualis’ and ‘ars erotica’. I ask what an understanding of sexuality based more on the latter would look like. The result is presented in six concrete examples of this ethnographic form, which are provided in the article. These are followed by some personal commentaries, rather than by a ‘scientific analysis’ of them. By disrupting the boundaries of established narrative genres, the article offers a contribution towards the expansion of the ways in which human sexuality can be addressed and communicated. In a game of hiding and revealing, an ethnographic striptease offers a different look at queer sex life emerging from a large favela in Rio de Janeiro.
Through an examination of a Midwestern professional comedy club, this article theorizes stand-up comedy as part of the broader affective-cultural assemblage that is nightlife entertainment. Using the Deleuzian notion of assemblage, this analysis builds on poststructural accounts of the dynamic and transient properties of culture, and the relationship between space, culture, and affect. As a specific affective-cultural assemblage, stand-up comedy operates as both constrainer and enabler of racial and heteronormative order through the bringing together of a variety of diverse logics and practices. I argue that stand-up comedy should no longer be thought of strictly in discursive or symbolic-interactionist terms that over-determine the roles of particular agents (i.e. comics). Instead, when described as emergent, transient, and fundamentally affective, stand-up comedy and other cultural forms can be seen for their openness and multiplicity, both contributing to racial and heteronormative order as well as upending it.
This article considers two revenants – a man and a ghost – who haunt the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal. Following Derrida’s assertion that haunting is historical, I take seriously the concept of haunting and insist upon its relevance to anthropological inquiry. As a mode of storytelling that comes from a particular way of apprehending the world, I argue that anthropology might give credence to specters as social figures and assign ethnography the task of chasing after ghosts, not simply for the poetic spaces they may open up but out of a concern for justice and responsibility in the past, present, and future. My own ethnographic encounter with the two revenants described here has generated questions about the often taken-for-granted equivalence of the real and the true. Likewise, it has encouraged me to interrogate the unpredictable (and oftentimes uneasy) cohabitation of memory and history, both within the Fann Clinic and beyond.
Academic debates on union politics in the Global South have tended to focus on effective union and solidarity campaigns. Labour struggles, however, do not always yield beneficial outcomes for workers. Three decades of neo-liberal policies in Sri Lanka suggests complexities that labour rights advocates would potentially prefer to shy away from. Efforts to re-politicize union rights of labour in an era of economic liberalization require us to sharpen our gaze on these ruptures too. Using workplace ethnography in Sri Lanka, this article details the interactions of management and labour during a struggle over union formation. It suggests that paying detailed attention to the political economy of labour highlights a complex situation in which fostering unionization, despite its importance for the collective will of labour, may require hard work.
This article studies two charities. Their volunteers shared a feeling of compassion for the homeless and an egalitarian spirit, but compassion is a two-sided phenomenon with respect to equality: it can either underline the common humanity of the benefactor–unfortunate dyad or breed feelings of condescension and shame. Moreover, if and when volunteers successfully accomplish their good intentions, the fact that their gift expects no return could reinstate inequality – hence, the ‘charity paradox’. I show that one organization resolved the paradox by promoting situational equality in the volunteers’ conversations with the poor, while the other reduced interactions to a server–served relationship.
In this article I reflect upon my experience as an ethnographer within the informal African city, which I describe as a borderland. In the contemporary African city informality prohibits peripheral men from achieving manhood, predicated on marriage, which requires steady work. As perpetual social juniors they fantasize about an elsewhere to which an ever-porous world exposes them but which stands in stark contrast to their lived experiences. Black urbanism (Simone, 2010) situates this mediated experience of elsewhere, an imagined global conceived simultaneously as a space of creativity, possibility and disillusionment through its linkages with members of the black diaspora glorified through not productive but consumption-oriented identities. Positing that we are both borderland figures, I discuss my interactions/intersections with peripheral men in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. I consider how my identity as a woman from the African diaspora entailed a direct encounter with this elsewhere, and how this influenced their lives.
Drawing on ethnographic research with homeless and street-involved youth in Vancouver before, during, and after the 2010 Olympic Games, this article offers a portrait of neoliberal urbanization as experienced by a city’s most marginalized residents. Taking as paradigmatic the aspirational goals of Olympic host cities to enhance their reputation as ‘global cities’, the article explores what this means for homeless youth through three processes: city cleansing, city marketing, and self-regulation. Examining how each of these are imbricated with policing and security practices, the article offers an in-depth look at how these abstractions are lived by homeless youth in the everyday. The article concludes by suggesting that marginalized young people are not the beneficiaries of Olympic legacies, despite promises made by organizing committees. In contrast, findings indicate that homeless young people are further marginalized by the Olympics, providing support for previous research that aligns mega-events with neoliberal outcomes.
This experimental essay shows the ways that Somali Bantu refugees’ experiences of resettlement, especially their encounters with the bureaucracy of immigration and resettlement, fragment what for the refugees are meaningful wholes (such as families), as well as the sometimes creative, though often frustrated, ways they work to re-create wholeness and meaning in their new context. Revealing cognition and feeling in the moment, these fragments challenge the conception of refuge as relief or resolution, the end of the journey. Instead they expose just how fragmentary refuge is, where the fragments, like the experience of refuge, take the form of a puzzle that shows the precarity and uncertainty of refuge. But the stories told in these fragments also push back at their fragmentation by revealing how refugees puzzle through and attempt to control fragmentation, demonstrating the strength of refugee agency and the beautiful potency of their resistances.
The current proliferation of often not so distinct ‘participatory’ approaches and labels (photo-voice, photo-novella, community video, auto-driven photo-elicitation) can be traced back to two distinct techniques or research approaches with a long history – namely the use of visual stimuli in an interview situation and the idea of stimulating the field to produce its own imagery with respect to a certain issue. This article aims to clarify the specific strengths and weaknesses of the different options in participatory research as well as interrogate their underlying goals (e.g. scientific knowledge production versus social action/awareness) and their largely undisclosed assumptions. To illustrate and explore the main techniques discussed in this article, excerpts and a brief discussion of a number of inspiring student projects in participatory visual research have been inserted throughout the text.
This comparative ethnographic study charts the similarities and differences in crafting the job search enterprise following the Great Recession at two nonprofit programs in Minneapolis: Career Net, a support group for middle-class job seekers, and Good Deeds, a welfare-to-work service. Both programs attempted to create flexible, productive, and disciplined job seekers, but this unique comparison reveals how these organizations differently reproduced neoliberal subjectivities: Career Net helped participants actively re-craft their personal and professional selves through personal branding and social networking, training participants to become self-entrepreneurs. Good Deeds, on the other hand, took a more top-down approach to controlling client behavior, relying on program requirements and sanctions to keep clients in line and shuffle them into low-wage work. Cohering along lines of race and class, Career Net and Good Deeds underscored the demands of employability and further tipped the power scales in the interest of capital.
This article examines the contradictory processes that have given women a greater access to Japan’s urban night space as the increasingly flexible work environment offered them white-collar employment opportunities and enhanced women’s economic resources, which in turn generated shifts in commercial practices to de-problematize drinking for women and a proliferation of diverse drinking venues. This study contends that these changes, which are largely commercially driven and not necessarily reflecting a stronger social acceptance of women drinking in public late at night by the broader Japanese society, nonetheless legitimize women’s place in the once male-dominated urban night space by recognizing women’s contributions to the night-time economy as consumers, hence affirming also the importance of white-collar work for women as a valid realm.
This article reconsiders creative city planning strategies in light of a Bourdieuian field model of cultural production. Creative city discourse imagines street-level artistic scenes as tolerant milieus that attract creative human capital and promote growth, whereas a field perspective views art scenes as generating logics and practices of exclusion. Using ethnographic observation and interviews with artists and other stakeholders in art crawl events in Portland, Oregon, and Nashville, Tennessee, this article describes how artists interact with their audiences in new urban contexts. Art crawls are monthly, coordinated, gallery-opening events that bring together art scenes and new audiences in particular times and districts, and they have proliferated in cities of all sizes in recent years, notably in places without rich traditions in the arts. This article finds that artistic professionals work to attract crowds, but the logics of their field then require sorting and selecting between them.
This article problematizes the ethnography of process with respect to civic engagement and political subjectivity. Process is approached in a two-pronged sense: as a target of ethnographic/phenomenological discovery and as a place-based issue particular to the US. Regarding the first sense, I examine the dialogic emergence of political subjectivity in specific communication contexts. Concurrently, I raise epistemological questions about the power of words to name states and processes of civic-being. Regarding the second sense, I argue that the experience, expression, and investigation of political subjectivity in the US is informed and hampered by a political/discursive culture that emphasizes discrete ‘engagement measures’ and ‘decisive stances’ over processes. Interweaving these two prongs together, I argue for greater experimentation with re-presentational forms that excavate and regenerate processes of civic engagement and political subjectivity. Data stem from ethnographic and theatrical work with young adults in Atlanta and national survey instruments designed to measure ‘engagement’.
The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: ‘media epidemiography’. This composite of the terms ‘epidemiology’ and ‘ethnography’ is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today’s swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain’s indignados movement, with Twitter as the central site of propagation. Protesters have used Twitter and other viral platforms to great effect and in a range of different ways, including as a means of setting the tone and agenda of the protests, spreading slogans and organizational practices, and offering alternative accounts of the movement. These developments may signal the coming of an era in which political reality is shaped by viral contents ‘shared’ by media professionals and amateurs – an age of viral reality.
‘Following the social life’ of broadcasts, to use Marcus’ (1995) metaphor, this article explores how self-designated ‘expatriates’ residing in the south of Portugal use radio to advance efforts in support of local causes of public concern they become involved with as strategies of reterritorialization. Drawing on media ethnography, it argues that the radiophonic mediation of ‘charitable’ efforts foregrounds the possibilities and limitations of a connection to the public sphere facilitated by a commercial station in a lifestyle migration setting (Benson and O'Reilly, 2009; O’Reilly, 2000). Operating within an English-language public sphericule (Gitlin, 1998), broadcasts do not allow for deliberative interaction on air but rather promote the reproduction of ‘charitable’ values and practices among, mostly, British residents. However, mixing elements of critical and representative publicity, the radio’s specific mode of address and circulation of texts particularly reflects and plays into naturalized but ambivalent stances of connection with local realities.
As a part of a larger ethnographic study of urban beekeepers in New York City, this article considers the challenges of conducting multispecies participant observation – being in the field with both human and non-human informants, beekeepers and bees. Keeping in mind the intra-active nature of human/insect entanglements, we explore how to interpret and translate the actions of another species while resisting anthropomorphic descriptions. Through a decentering of the authors, the bee is reflexively rendered as a non-human informant and an actor in its own right. The embodied experiences of conducting participation observation with humans and insects are used to speculate on the possibility of an ontology of bees and the idea of intra-species mindfulness. This work is in dialogue with the field of multispecies ethnography, actor-network theory and critical animal studies, positioning the bee though networks of ethnographic data and translation.
Hip hop culture has been celebrated in the media and scholarship as a universal youth language, part of a global hip hop nation, and a type of counter-public. This article examines the everyday meanings and practices of hip hop among hip hop activists in Kampala, Uganda, specifically within the Batuuze rap group. Rather than portraying hip hop as a counter-public of the disempowered, I argue that the Batuuze engagement is based on what I call moral economy that enables the negotiation of connections in social and cultural networks towards what is considered a good life. Here, the hip hop nation is less of an alternative public sphere and more a way of articulating and contextualizing the world in a specific locality, which produces connections and opportunities in the young rappers’ lives.
This article explores the communicative practice of a Tanzanian NGO, Femina. Based on a tripartite model of engagement (Madianou, 2012) integrating speech, action and understanding, and drawing on fieldwork on the communication practices of Femina, I critically assess the forms of civic engagement the organization strategizes about and seeks to articulate amongst Tanzanian youth. Situated in the ‘perverse confluence’ (Dagnino, 2011) between neoliberal and radical democratic agendas in the communicative practices of civil society-driven media platforms, Femina navigates between identities as an NGO, a social movement and a media initiative. In the context of the growing literature on social networking sites and their affordances, dynamics and structures, the case of Femina illustrates how a civil society sphericule emerges within the dynamic co-evolution of new and old media platforms. The study is furthermore an example of the difficult shift in civil society practice, from service provision to an agenda of public service monitoring, social accountability and community engagement.
The public sphere is increasingly being depicted as a site of inadequately assessed risk when American undergraduates post blogs, videos, and Facebook updates that become viral, prompting others to mutter ‘don’t they know better than to press send?’ In this article, I offer an analytical frame for such posting that does not re-inscribe US tendencies to attribute ignorance or misguided selfishness to unwelcome behavior. In the United States, there are multiple and mutually defining understandings of how publics are constituted. Historically, these ideas often change when Americans respond to the ways new technologies alter how communication is made public or private. This is an ethnographic account of one way that multiple publics are seen to co-exist uneasily as people negotiate the newness of new media. Grounded in my ethnographic research, I explore how cautionary stories about ‘pressing send’ reflect neoliberal concerns about allocating risk and responsibility among individual choice-makers.
In urban Japan, it is not just public expressions of affection or touch between adult men and women that are uncommon, but opportunities for dancing among adults are very limited in Japanese daily life. This article explores the choreography of ‘parasexuality’ – delimited yet intensified sensuality – that is created through sensual touching among salsa dancers. While public expression of intimacy is highly charged and best avoided in Tokyo, I argue that the bracketed ‘pleasure zone’ of Latin dance legitimates and intensifies sensual interactions in the form of explicitly tactile ‘parasexuality’ for both men and women. What marks salsa as a romantic fantasy space is the disembeddeness of sensuality and sexuality from everyday routines, on the one hand, and participants’ individual expression of aesthetic pursuits that liberates them from the responsibilities of everyday gender ideology, on the other hand.
This article reflects on the methodological challenges and opportunities of 20 years of research on Chinese migrants abroad against a shifting background of global politics and academic institutions. It suggests that, while ethnography is always implicitly comparative, juxtaposition rather than comparison in time and space, within and outside the ‘field’, may be a better way of describing the cumulative working of ethnographic research. I reflect on three ethnographic moments whose significance only became clear in hindsight, with the benefit of juxtapositions with other experiences, both academic and non-academic.
The Western optic of ‘nuclear family’, which is devoid of the individual’s embeddedness in the larger kin group, fails to explain the commitment of overseas Filipino migrants to the ‘extended family’. Yet, it underpins much of the qualitative field methods today. To explain interdependencies as well as tensions within kin groups, this article proposes a shift in theoretical ground from a ‘sociology of the family’ to ‘cultures of relatedness’. To understand migrants’ culture in the destination also necessitates that culture in the origin be given primacy, in a methodological shift referred to as ‘centripetal ethnography’. This dual and conjoined shift in perspective and method is applied in studying Paraiso, a rural-upland village in the Philippines, where overseas migration commenced in the 1970s. The interplay of autonomy and solidarity in siblingship is illumined by focusing on the house as practised in the village and, moving outward, in the overseas context.
‘Multi-sited ethnography’ is now a common method for anthropological studies on migration. But how multi-sited is multi-sited enough? Don’t we have to stand somewhere in order to confront problems and engage with changes? Based on my research experiences on migration in and from China since the early 1990s, this article explores ‘multi-scalar ethnography’ as a method of fieldwork, analysis, and writing. Multi-scalar ethnography delineates how movements are constituted at different scales (smooth flows at one level can be disruptions or encapsulations at another), how migrants’ scale-making projects intersect with states’ scale management, and how we can locate multiple sites analytically. In doing so, multi-scalar ethnography enables an explanation of why some mobility is more consequential than others, and identifies strategic sites where critical engagement can be grounded.
This article examines the diverse ways in which people experience being strangers in public space. Based primarily on the journal entries of teenagers in New York City on their trips, we show the different ways in which riders experience being a rider amid diversity and norm violations. Some teenagers see being a rider as an engaging role, some as a detached role, and others as a precarious role. All the teenagers use folk theories to navigate the social world, but how they use them varies depending on how they experience being a rider. Finally, riding in groups shifts their experiences and interpretations in complex ways that make riding more enjoyable, but filled with additional emotional tensions. Building from previous theories and studies on strangers and public spaces, this article contributes to longstanding debates in sociology over how people interact with others in urban environments.
How can an elusive phenomenon such as human trafficking be studied anthropologically? Recent anthropological research has problematized and destabilized bound territory and sitedness. UN agencies, governments, and NGOs attempt to combat trafficking in persons, but find it hard to pinpoint traffickers and their victims for programmatic purposes. Similar to anthropology’s relativization of site, displaced locality is central to the anti-trafficking discourse. In this essay, I reflect upon my own research on the social worlds of trafficking and anti-trafficking along the Lao-Thai border and show how a ‘tandem ethnography’ allows a methodological oscillation between the policy domain of anti-trafficking and the social world of mobility, sex commerce and the recruitment within it. Rather than giving away the importance of physical locality, I argue for the importance of strategic positioning within an ethnography of the mobile. As such, the old anthropological principle of comparisons must be brought into the field.
This article focuses on ‘dread’ in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and political realms, and the repressions thereof. Focused on a rapidly expanding religious movement in India, it challenges normative discourses of religious practitioners as fundamentalists or reactionaries, and strives to extend the imperatives of recent critical urban ethnography into the domain of religious practice.
This study of South Korean pre-college students in Singapore has two goals: (1) to propose multimedia ethnography as a method for examining children’s views on migration; and (2) to use this method to explore intersections between globality and locality in children’s migration experiences. Multimedia ethnography allows the ethnographer to analyse how children reflect on and shape their experiences and imaginations through examining various modes of communicative practices – such as drawings, diaries, and peer talk. My multimedia data reveals that the discourses of ‘being global’ that are dominant in Korean society significantly influence the migrant children’s imaginings of their future selves. Yet at the same time, experiences of localness play a central role in the children’s construction of ‘the world’ and globality. As such, multimedia ethnography brings to light how the migrant children’s unarticulated everyday experiences constitute the process of ‘going global’.
Based on an ethnographic case study conducted in the Dormaa District, this article describes a group which has emerged in southern Ghana in the last decades and is called Burgers. Burgers are transnational migrants who have materially achieved a middle-class status in their country of origin by doing blue-collar jobs in Western Europe or North America. Their emergence as a class highlights the links between transnational migration, global inequalities and national imaginaries of social status. Since their relative wealth lacks conventional legitimations, these migrants are a cause of irritation to existing imaginaries of social status in Ghana. In this context, redistribution of resources and collaborative silences are central to understanding how Burgers negotiate their status and convert money into symbolic capital.
This research deals with exclusionary processes of social ascription in which low socio-economic status is linked with disregard, in turn ‘producing’ a disrespectful or contemptuous treatment of others. On the basis of an ethnographic study of Hauptschüler in Berlin, Germany, the production of and dealing with contempt is looked at from different angles: as processes of refused recognition, as discrimination based on race/ethnicity and class in the school system, and with regard to negative and derogatory media representations. A wide range of social practices of Hauptschüler – friendship, body-practices, emotions, and irony – are considered as mechanisms of coping with contempt and thus take on a political meaning.
Ethnography is often described as the translation of culture, yet there has been little discussion of actual linguistic translation in ethnography. Many ethnographers engage in research across divides of language that require them to make decisions about how to represent the language of their informants. The privileging of academic Standard English creates dilemmas for ethnographers whose subjects speak stigmatized languages. Based on an analysis of 32 book-length ethnographies about African Americans (reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology between 1999 and 2009), this article answers the questions of how ethnographers typically deal with language difference in their texts, particularly when research takes place across dialects of the same language, and why language matters in the production of ethnographic texts.
This article describes the sensory experiences of fighting through an ethnography of mixed martial arts (MMA). MMA is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows, and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. This sensory ethnography involves, inter alia, the documentation of the rhythms pertaining to the cadence of drills, the flow of sparring and grappling sessions, the attunement of bodies to other bodies through touch, the beat of music accompanying training sessions, the smell of sweat and flatulence, and the throbbing pain that is registered through taste. This article relies on 45 in-depth interviews with mixed martial art fighters and participant observation over a four-year period.
Ethnographies of NGO and nonprofit practices are increasingly focused on the social lives of middle-class liberals who significantly shape how societies recognize social suffering and its redress. At the same time, the boundaries between academic and NGO worlds are blurring ever more as ethnographers prioritize ‘engaged’ projects and as more doctoral students enter graduate school with NGO experience. This article addresses the distinctive dilemmas that arise from this lack of distance between ethnographers and research subjects and particularly the difficulty of critically examining the moral sentiments of progressive actors. I tell the story of a first fieldwork project in which I struggled to objectify the social power of professional education reformers who already analyzed themselves and whose efforts to combat race and class inequalities seemed to be beyond reproach. The narrative explores how the particularity of their norms and ideals continually threatened to disappear in the contexts of university life, of critical ethnographic literature, and of the fieldwork itself. I argue that a direct focus on the production of morality is crucial to grasping the meaning of ‘progress’ as a product of struggle.
In the borderlands of northeastern Cambodia, booming regional demand for luxury rosewood timber has seen the recent expansion of illegal cross-border logging in Laos. This article outlines Khmer–Lao villagers’ interactions with border authorities that enable their cross-border logging and their construction of anti-elite political narratives to critically engage with other ethnographic studies of the remote borderlands in Asia. I argue that in the quest to challenge dominant top-down assumptions of the remote borderlands as beyond state power and to highlight the unique dynamics of borderlands, ethnographic studies of these regions can focus overly on political opposition. I propose more recognition of, firstly, the desire and distrust in borderlanders’ engagements with different authorities, and secondly, the commonalities in contestation that emerge across different national spaces.
Global production and trade networks have significant transformative effects on production regimes across the Global South, and tend to produce particular work regimes and workplaces at the sites of production. CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) interventions similarly seek to reshape production processes in their search to improve labour conditions and protect workers’ rights. However, workers’ voices and their preferences for particular work regimes and employment conditions are rarely considered in such debates. Drawing on data from the Tiruppur garment cluster in South India, the article presents ethnographic evidence on what workers themselves make of the work regimes and ethical codes of labour practice produced under neoliberal governance. It explores how garment workers engage with different labour regimes and why some workers actively seek to avoid employment in companies where Fordist regimes prevail and CSR policies are implemented. Such avoidance and exit strategies amount to a critique of particular neoliberal labour regimes that seek to control labour and curtail its freedom and dignity at work.
This article examines the semiotic operations by which ‘heritage’ is represented and serves as a commodity in a tourism project in southwest Virginia known as The Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail. I examine the methods and stakes of representing musical ‘heritage’, presenting it for consumption, and relying on it as a regional economic engine. Central to these methods and stakes is a representation of ‘heritage’ as an inalienable possession of a place, of its people and landscape. This representation in turn indexes a paradox of folk authenticity, where a musical form that is supposed to inhabit the last commercialism-free domain of ‘heritage’ is simultaneously called upon, according to the paradigm of ‘asset-based development’, to generate regional revenue. In this process the folk culture that is supposed to dwell in the contoured landscape of ethnomimetic transmission and vernacular expression has to register on the plane of potentially infinite equivalences comprising exchange-value, where, metaphorically at least, the ‘crooked’ road, valued for its use to the tourist as such, is straightened for the sake of exchange.
This article examines how the ideas about working-class culture presented in Paul Willis’s classic monograph (1977) Learning to Labour apply or do not apply to the data generated by an ethnographic analysis of a London construction site that I conducted in 2003/4. While Learning to Labour had significant relevance to understanding the class-bound masculine cultures of the construction workers, because building work has a pre-industrial history and a post-industrial contemporary, the claim that working-class masculinity is driven predominately by the features of industrial work life is found wanting. Rather than being bound exclusively to industrial work, the exigencies of working-class-bound masculinity could be found in the builders’ problematic and attenuated relationships with the modern state and its legal and moral injunctions. Such relationships to the modern state illuminate why fundamental features of working-class masculine culture are reproduced in a post-industrial global London by both migrant and more indigenous workers, and thus also illustrate part of the reason why class and ethnic inequality persist in the contemporary UK.
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally and morally justified violence can be a source of long-term legitimacy; but because of multiple possible readings of a certain situation (according to different, conflicting moral and legal discourses), the very same action has potentially delegitimizing effects. Our own position as participant observers made us aware of these contradictions because, as researchers, we were confronted with a similar dilemma.
Concerns among international donors about aid effectiveness have led to important structural changes in how development assistance is delivered. Drawing its inspiration from rights-based approaches to development, the 2005 Paris Declaration lays out a blueprint for a new aid architecture that directs funds through two channels: 1) budget support for governments to deliver public goods and services; and 2) project awards for advocacy NGOs to promote political reform. Excluded from this aid regime are service-oriented NGOs, which continue to offer services, but are compelled to appeal to local government for funding. This article explores these structural changes and their discursive origins, arguing that new aid policies disadvantage service-oriented NGOs. It presents ethnographic research conducted at the Isipho Victim Empowerment Programme, a South African NGO, to illustrate how new aid policy has important consequences for the quality of social services and local governance.
This study draws upon ethnographic data from a group of homeless persons residing in a 24-hour donut shop that doubles nightly as an ersatz shelter. This article examines the role of ‘urban hybrid spaces’ – spaces that serve dual roles as legitimate business establishment and homeless habitation or hangout – in facilitating the construction and enactment of more dignified identities for the unhoused. Ethnographic data depict the strategies by which unhoused individuals utilize an urban hybrid space to verbally, symbolically, and performatively assert and maintain a ‘patron identity’ – understood as someone who is housed, employed, autonomous, occupies the donut shop legitimately, and associates with other such people. I argue that this identity is uniquely facilitated by the social and physical context provided by the donut shop qua private business.