How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality Clarence C
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Ethnography: Challenges and Opportunities
Research made simple Evid Based Nurs: first published as 10.1136/eb-2017-102786 on 9 September 2017. Downloaded from Ethnography: challenges and opportunities Janice Jones,1 Joanna Smith2 10.1136/eb-2017-102786 Introduction observation, often complemented with interviews, and Collectively qualitative research is a group of meth- detailed analysis often at a micro level. Although the methods used are not exclusive to ethnography, it is 1Institute of Vocational Learning, odologies, with each approach offering a different the depth of fieldwork and the continuous process of School of Health and Social Care, lens though which to explore, understand, interpret or London South Bank University, explain phenomena in real word contexts and settings. engaging with participants and their natural environ- London, UK This article will provide an overview of one of the ments that is central and adds strength to the find- 6 2Children’s Nursing, School of many qualitative approaches, ethnography, and its rele- ings of ethnographic studies. Participant observation Healthcare, University of Leeds, vance to healthcare. We will use an exemplar based on requires immersion in the setting under investigation, Leeds, UK a study that used participant-as-observer observation and observing the language, behaviours and values of 7 and follow-up interviews to explore how occupational the participants. Consequently, paramount to under- therapists embed spirituality into everyday practice, and taking an ethnographic study is the role of the researcher Correspondence to: offer insights into the future directions of ethnography in data collection. Dr Janice Jones, Institute of Engaging with participants in the real world poses Vocational Learning, School of in response to increased globalisation and technological Health and Social Care, London advances. -
Functionalists Write, Too: Frazer/Malinowski and the Semiotics of the Monograph1
1 Functionalists Write, Too: Frazer/Malinowski and the Semiotics of the Monograph1 James A. Boon What does the ethnographer do? – he writes (Geertz 1973:19). art of the business of anthropology is to make superficially exotic practices appear familiar and superficially familiar practices exotic. PRegardless of how such practices are experienced by observers, they are interpreted by observers in writing: notes, articles, books. That ethnographic description and ethnological comparison occur as writing suggests the fundamental symbolic remove from whatever immediacy or presence anthropological discourse presumes to embody. All varieties of writing are semiotic systems – shifting signs and symbols that stand for (replace, substitute, differ from) what they are conventionally understood to ‘represent’. Moreover, any writing of ethnographic detail and ethnologi- cal generalization in whatever style or format is constrained by sets of rules and values that at their fullest extent we call cultures. Fieldwork – ‘being there’ – offers no exception to these semiotic facts. Fieldwork is not only a way of doing; it is also a device for writing, a format for organizing description, a conceit around which ethnographic discourse revolves. (It was not always so.) At this level fieldwork, despite the fact that it happens, is a ‘fiction’. Cross-cultural interpretation requires outside help, even when fieldwork works. Cultures cannot be penetrated simply with passports, survey sheets, statistics, genealogies, dictionaries; Source: Semiotica, vol. 46, nos. 2/4, 1983, pp. 131–149. 2 CONTEXTS AND CONTROVErsiES or intuition, benign tolerance, indomitable self-confidence, or studious self-effacement (although each of these may occasionally help!). Rather, cross-cultural interpretation must be made to happen; and it is made to happen by means of semiotic operations derived from sources beyond the conditions of fieldwork proper, as narrowly construed in the functio- nalist school. -
The Politics of Identity in Organizational Ethnographic Research
HUM0010.1177/0018726714541161Human RelationsAlcadipani et al. 541161research-article2014 human relations human relations 2015, Vol. 68(1) 79 –106 The politics of identity in © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: organizational ethnographic sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0018726714541161 research: Ethnicity and tropicalist hum.sagepub.com intrusions Rafael Alcadipani São Paulo Business School, Fundação Getúlio Vargas (EAESP-FGV), Brazil Robert Westwood University of Newcastle, Australia Alexandre Rosa Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES), Brazil Abstract The article addresses aspects of the politics of identity that became manifest in the researcher–researched relationships in the context of an organizational ethnographic field study at a UK-based printing business. As the fieldwork commenced, it quickly became apparent that the researcher’s Brazilian nationality and Latin American ethnic identity were being performed and responded to in certain specific and problematic ways. This study analyzes the dynamics of identity work and identity politics in ethnographic and other qualitative research. However, the specific contribution of this article is that it examines the questions that arise when the typical structures and patterns of research practice – which are themselves embedded in a spatialized politics of knowledge – are reversed. Historically, research in the social sciences (including management and organization studies) has been conducted by researchers from the center in relation to others in the non-center. Furthermore, in so doing, epistemologies, theories and methods developed in and for the center are deployed to examine and explain phenomena in those other places. This article addresses the question of what Corresponding author: Rafael Alcadipani, São Paulo Business School, Fundação Getúlio Vargas (EAESP-FGV), Rua Itapeva, 474–11º andar—CEP 01332-000, São Paulo, Brazil. -
Ethnography and Democracy: Hymes's Political Theory of Language
Ethnography and democracy: Hymes’s political theory of language JAN BLOMMAERT Abstract Dell Hymes’s oeuvre was explicitly political, and this paper addresses this often overlooked dimension of his work. The project of ethnography was intended by Hymes to be a counterhegemonic and democratic science, which o¤ered voice to the subjects it studied and so created a critical social-scientific paradigm that destabilized and negated established truths by dialogically engaging with reality. This critical and counterhegemonic paradigmatic dimension of ethnography is first sketched and discussed at some length. Next, we discuss Hymes’s ethnopoetic work. In his ethnopoetic work, Hymes’s critical concern with voice, democracy, and inequality is articulated most clearly and persuasively. It is by looking at ethnopoetics that we see the blending of a methodological and a political project. Keywords: Hymes; ethnography; ethnopoetics; critique; democracy. 1. Introduction Dell Hymes’s work is, like that of Bourdieu and Bernstein, but also that of Gumperz and Go¤man, highly political. Texts such as the essay ‘‘Speech and language’’ (Hymes 1996: ch. 3), or the introductory essay to his Reinventing Anthropology (2002 [1969]) explicitly testify to that; most of his oeuvre, however, can be read as a political statement, an at- tempt toward a critical science of language in social life, toward ‘‘a union of knowledge and social values’’ (2002 [1969]: 51). Hymes would often mention his own background as an explanation for this, especially his ex- periences as a GI enlisted so as to gain access to college education under the GI Bill, and stationed in the Far East. -