Introduction: Ethnography in Retrospect
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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. -
Curren T Anthropology
Forthcoming Current Anthropology Wenner-Gren Symposium Curren Supplementary Issues (in order of appearance) t Human Biology and the Origins of Homo. Susan Antón and Leslie C. Aiello, Anthropolog Current eds. e Anthropology of Potentiality: Exploring the Productivity of the Undened and Its Interplay with Notions of Humanness in New Medical Anthropology Practices. Karen-Sue Taussig and Klaus Hoeyer, eds. y THE WENNER-GREN SYMPOSIUM SERIES Previously Published Supplementary Issues April THE BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF LIVING HUMAN Working Memory: Beyond Language and Symbolism. omas Wynn and 2 POPULATIONS: WORLD HISTORIES, NATIONAL STYLES, 01 Frederick L. Coolidge, eds. 2 AND INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas. Setha M. Low and Sally GUEST EDITORS: SUSAN LINDEE AND RICARDO VENTURA SANTOS Engle Merry, eds. V The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations olum Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form. Contexts and Trajectories of Physical Anthropology in Brazil Damani Partridge, Marina Welker, and Rebecca Hardin, eds. e Birth of Physical Anthropology in Late Imperial Portugal 5 Norwegian Physical Anthropology and a Nordic Master Race T. Douglas Price and Ofer 3 e Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas. The Ainu and the Search for the Origins of the Japanese Bar-Yosef, eds. Isolates and Crosses in Human Population Genetics Supplement Practicing Anthropology in the French Colonial Empire, 1880–1960 Physical Anthropology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States Humanizing Evolution Human Population Biology in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century Internationalizing Physical Anthropology 5 Biological Anthropology at the Southern Tip of Africa The Origins of Anthropological Genetics Current Anthropology is sponsored by e Beyond the Cephalic Index Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Anthropology and Personal Genomics Research, a foundation endowed for scientific, Biohistorical Narratives of Racial Difference in the American Negro educational, and charitable purposes. -
Ethnography, Cultural and Social Anthropology
UC Berkeley Anthropology Faculty Publications Title Ethnography, Cultural and Social Anthropology Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9t13v9kz Journal American Anthropologist, 55(4) Author Lowie, Robert H. Publication Date 1953-10-01 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California ETHNOGRAPHY, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY By ROBERT H. LOWIE HE discussion by Professors Murdock and Firth, Professor Fortes's T contribution to the debate, Professor Radcliffe-Brown's illuminating letter in a recent issue of this journal, and a number of other statements by American and British colleagues (Murdock 1951; Firth 1951; Radcliffe-Brown 1952; Fortes 1953; Evans-Pritchard 1951) stimulate reflections on cultural and social anthropology. In the present, wholly uncontroversial article I shall first define the aims of cultural anthropology as I understand them and shall then inquire intQ the relations of that discipline with social anthropology as defined by British scholars. I Whatever differences may divide cultural from social anthropologists, they are hardly greater than those which divide self-styled cultural anthropologists. IndeedJ I should say that many of us feel incomparably closer to the English anthropologists referred to above than, say, to Goldenweiser in his later phases. A concrete example will illustrate the issue. In one of his books (Golden weiser 1922) this writer devotes a chapter to the Baganda, relying as he was bound to do on Roscoe's well-known work. He tells us that "maize is perhaps the principal staple food, but plantain trees are also cultivated on a large scale." Now the primary source (Roscoe 1911: 5, 432) states in unmistakable terms that plantains "furnish their staple food," whereas maize "was never grown in any quantity .. -
What Is Ethnography in Sociology?
WHAT IS ETHNOGRAPHY IN SOCIOLOGY? James Rhodes Department of Sociology What is ethnography? ‘In its most characteristic form...[ethnography] involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions- in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research’ (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995:1). Minimal definition of ethnography Iterative-inductive research (that evolves in design through the study), drawing on A family of methods (multiple methods) Involving direct and sustained contact with human agents Within the context of their daily lives (cultures); Watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions, and Producing a richly written account That respects the irreducibility of human experience, That acknowledges the role of theory As well as the researcher’s own role And that views humans as part object/part subject (O’Reilly, 2005:3). Historical origins/context Malinowski and tradition of social anthropology (1920s) Ethnography seen as a methodological approach: ‘to use concrete statistical documentation to record the organization of the tribe and the anatomy of its culture To use minute, detailed observations to log the actual details of daily life To collect ethnographic statements, narratives, utterances as documents of native mentality’ (O’Reilly, 2005: 15). Chicago School and Sociology (1917-1942) Saw field research and observational methods as key to understanding the ‘natural ecology’ of Chicago: ‘these ethnographies studied face-to-face everyday interactions in specific locations. The descriptive narratives portrayed “social worlds” experienced in every day life within a modern, often urban, context…The investigator “took the role of the other” in these empirical investigations. -
The Structure of Everyday Narrative in a City Market: an Ethnopoetics Approach
Journal of Sociolinguistics 20/5, 2016: 654–676 The structure of everyday narrative in a city market: An ethnopoetics approach Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese and Rachel Hu University of Birmingham, United Kingdom This paper considers the value of Hymesian ethnopoetics as a means of analysing everyday narrative in conditions of mobility and change. The paper offers an account of the development of ethnopoetics as a means to make visible and valorize narrative in the Native American oral tradition, and as a method of revealing culturally specific relations of form and meaning. Hymes’ ethnopoetic approach viewed narrative structure as a reflection of a cultural tradition of meaning-making. Hymes’ analysis proposed that traditional narrative was a culturally shaped way of speaking, and analysis of narrative structure could reveal and recreate culture. His orientation rested on an assumption that the culture of a group was more or less stable and fixed. This paper adopts an approach to analysis based on ethnopoetics, representing everyday narrative dramatically, organized not only as lines and verses, but also as scenes and acts. Representation in scenes and acts makes visible the dynamic nature of the narrative. The paper asks whether Hymes’ ground-breaking work on ethnopoetics still has currency and purchase in 21st-century conditions of mobility, change, and unpredictability. Analysis of everyday narrative in a city market concludes that, notwithstanding the complexity of notions of ‘culture’ and ‘language’ in such conditions, ethnopoetics -
How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality Clarence C
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 000:000–000 (2009) How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality Clarence C. Gravlee* Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-7305 KEY WORDS race; genetics; human biological variation; health; racism ABSTRACT The current debate over racial inequal- presents an opportunity to refine the critique of race in ities in health is arguably the most important venue for three ways: 1) to reiterate why the race concept is incon- advancing both scientific and public understanding of sistent with patterns of global human genetic diversity; race, racism, and human biological variation. In the 2) to refocus attention on the complex, environmental United States and elsewhere, there are well-defined influences on human biology at multiple levels of analy- inequalities between racially defined groups for a range sis and across the lifecourse; and 3) to revise the claim of biological outcomes—cardiovascular disease, diabetes, that race is a cultural construct and expand research on stroke, certain cancers, low birth weight, preterm deliv- the sociocultural reality of race and racism. Drawing on ery, and others. Among biomedical researchers, these recent developments in neighboring disciplines, I present patterns are often taken as evidence of fundamental a model for explaining how racial inequality becomes genetic differences between alleged races. However, a embodied—literally—in the biological well-being of growing body of evidence establishes the primacy of racialized groups and individuals. This model requires a social inequalities in the origin and persistence of racial shift in the way we articulate the critique of race as bad health disparities. -
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2012
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2012 - 2013 Volume I Halle /Saale Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2012 – 2013 Volume I Halle/Saale Table of Contents iii Table of Contents Structure and Organisation of the Institute 2012–2013 1 Foreword 7 Department ‘Integration and Conflict’ 9 Getting Back to the Basics 9 On Comparative Methods and Theory Building 10 Recent Developments in Theory Building 14 Identification and Marginality 15 The Empirical Dimension: reflections on the production of data, documentation, and transparency 25 Research Group: Integration and Conflict along the Upper Guinea Coast (West Africa) 27 Centre for Anthropological Studies on Central Asia (CASCA) 33 Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ 39 Introduction: Hierarchies of Knowledge and the Gold Standard for Anthropology in Eurasia 40 Kinship and Social Support in China and Vietnam 46 Historical Anthropology 52 Economic Anthropology 58 Urban Anthropology 64 Traders, Markets, and the State in Vietnam (Minerva Group) 69 Department ‘Law & Anthropology’ 75 Introduction: The legacy of the Project Group Legal Pluralism 75 Four Research Priorities 76 Ongoing Research Activities at the Department 82 Legacy of the Project Group Legal Pluralism 101 Local State and Social Security in Rural Hungary, Romania, and Serbia 103 Siberian Studies Centre 105 International Max Planck Research School ‘Retaliation, Mediation, and Punishment’ (IMPRS REMEP) 115 International Max Planck Research School for the Anthropology, Archaeology and History of Eurasia (IMPRS ANARCHIE) 123 Publications 131 Index 181 Location of the Institute 186 Structure and Organisation of the Institute 1 Structure and Organisation of the Institute 2012–2013 Because questions concerning the equivalence of academic titles that are conferred by institutions of higher learning in different countries have still not been resolved completely, all academic titles have been omitted from this report. -
HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY (Frazer Lecture)1
HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY (Frazer Lecture)1 By Alan Macfarlane From: Cambridge Anthropology Vol.3 no.3 (1977) Marc Bloch wrote that the "good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies" (Bloch, p.26).The good anthropologist is likewise a cannibal. "What social science is properly about" urged Wright-Mills, "is the human variety, which consists of all the social worlds in which men have lived, are living, and might live" (Wright-Mills, p.147). In the first half of this paper I will discuss the ways in which social anthropology and history could, in theory, benefit each other. In the second half I will briefly describe a case study of an attempt to compare historical and contemporary societies. The current dilemma facing social anthropologists can be stated briefly. While their past achievements command considerable respect and still excite students and general readers, practitioners already regard themselves as an almost extinct species. Their plight is easily explained. Their hunting grounds have nearly vanished, the pre-literate and non-industrial societies they originally studied have almost been destroyed and their rather simple weapons, the diffusionist spear and functionalist bow, are obsolete. They do not satisfy emotionally or intellectually. Doom was prophesied in the early 1950s, but has been masked and postponed by the hitherto impenetrable musings of Levi-Strauss. Some believed that he had discovered a hidden pass into a new land, thus locating a rich flora and fauna consisting of symbols, myths, collective representations, classificatory systems, all of which could be trapped and devoured with the aid of the structuralist net. -
A Student's Guide to Reading and Writing In
A Student’s Guide to Reading and Writing in Social Anthropology Cover image from “Anthropology 1662: Anthropology of Middle Eastern Communities” taught by Zahra N. Jamal in Fall 2008. ©Copyright 2010, President and Fellows of Harvard College This guide was prepared in 2007 by Smita Lahiri, Lilith Mahmud, and James Herron, and revised in 2010 by Smita Lahiri and James Herron. A Gordon Gray Faculty Grant funded the writing and design of the original version of the guide. The Anthropology Department and the Harvard Writing Project funded the printing of this revised version, which was designed by Karen Hendrickson-Santospago. A Student’s Guide to Reading and Writing in Social Anthropology TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 Introduction 7 Reading Anthropological Literature 7 Essays 9 Ethnographies 13 Moves Anthropologists Make 13 Entering a Conversation 14 Borrowing and Extending 16 Establishing Authority 17 Countering 18 Stepping Back 21 Writing Assignments: Types and Strategies 21 Response Papers: An Informal Formality 24 The Nebulous and Open-Ended: Pitfalls of the “Short-Long” Essay 26 Taming the Term Paper Monster 31 Locating the Right Sources 33 Working with Sources 39 An Annotated Paper 51 Other Writing Support Resources Image from “Anthropology 1972: Reconceptualizing the U.S.-Mexico Border: Comparative and Global Perspectives” taught by Robert Alvarez in Fall 2009. Introduction Welcome to Social Anthropology. This world of social anthropology is endlessly varied. Its practitioners may be found in Japanese fish markets, Argentine labs, Lebanese bars, Indonesian photography studios, East St. Louis neighborhoods, Thai temples, and Brazilian favelas — to name just a small sampling of the ethnographic locales studied by Harvard faculty and students, past as well as present.