Annals of Anthropological Practice最新文献

Community engagement, an often-repeated phrase across academic and government sectors, is a deceptively simple, pretty phrase. Frequently it is discussed as a practice anyone can do and a nice add-on to an existing project. However, practicing community engagement in research in a meaningful way requires a perspective shift in the way the research is done, a series of commitments to ethical relations with the communities involved and impacted by a project and its outcomes, and the solo and collective work of reflection. This article offers a look into community engagement from the perspective of a graduate student learning what it means to do this kind of work in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. I outline how community engagement is defined and practiced by scholars in anthropology and other fields and discuss the performance and institutionalization of community engagement. Guided by Juanita Sundberg's concept of homework, I reflect on lessons learned in the process of conducting community-engaged research that can have an impact.

This paper critically explores the afterlife of CoPED, an international interdisciplinary participatory action field school in eastern Sicily from 2015 to 2022. Drawing on fieldnotes taken during the program reflection sessions, small group discussions, informal conversations during meals, and post-CoPED debriefings with community partners, I consider the long-term impact of the field school on the different types of participants—students and faculty from three Universities and members of Participatory Presidium of the Simeto River Agreement and other residents, as well as what anthropology has contributed to the program. The article briefly outlines the background of CoPED and its pedagogical commitments, pointing to some of the benefits and challenges that CoPED practices create for the community and for participants. Then, I explore the benefits, costs, and pressure points of CoPED, from material to organizational, to training and mentoring. The article concludes with a reflection on the complexities of long-term field school collaborations to suggest the roles that anthropology can and does play in shaping the participants and the field in this interdisciplinary context.

This article examines the inception, goals, and impacts of an ethnographic field school in conservation, culture, and environmental change, established in collaboration with small conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Honduras’ Bay Islands. It traces the author's journey from decades of critical and activist ethnography on rhetorical erasure and territorial dispossession of African and Indigenous descendants by conservation and tourism development towards the surprising turn (to the author) to establish a study abroad program that combined conservation research tourism and ethnographic fieldwork. The article provides an overview of the central themes explored during the program: neocolonialism, racialized dispossession, and displacement-in-place in Caribbean tourism; neoliberal conservation and the transformation of landscapes through land privatization; and the impacts of climate change, ecological grief, and community resiliency in the face of environmental change. Student feedback, community benefits, and goals for the program's future are detailed.

The Ethnographic Field School in Belize has been training American undergraduate students and Belizean interns in basic ethnographic research methods since 2013. During this time, in collaboration with university study abroad offices and Belizean governmental and non-governmental agencies and organizations, the field school has conducted community-based ethnographic research on several community development issues (e.g., sugar cane farming, child labor, education, and health). Students gain skills in ethnographic methods as well as personal growth. The community within which we conduct our research benefits through our findings being shared with agencies and organizations that develop development policies and programs. The long-term legacy of the field school includes the development of student participants’ ability to adopt a culturally relativistic lens and skills to apply to future study and careers, as well as our partners using our findings for their community development projects.

What transformative potential might reside in play as a collaborative method, particularly in contexts of migration and with populations of marginalized youth? In this paper, we explore play “in anthropology and as anthropology” while drawing from our collective experiences with collaborative research through a Palermo-based participatory film and storytelling lab that foregrounds “il gioco” (play). We discuss the lab's approach to play as a collaborative method in the process of co-creation that helps with navigating social and linguistic differences, invites practices of improvisation, and aspires to disrupt uneven landscapes of power. We also consider how play can serve as a form of ethnography and mode of analysis. Engaging with theory on collaborative anthropology, creative and experimental ethnography, and decolonizing methodologies, we gesture to the possibilities for critical collaborative play as a feminist, antiracist methodological orientation. Particularly as the field of anthropology grapples with existential crises and strives toward decolonizing futures, play as method warrants further critical attention.

Although fingerprint analysis is widely used in forensic science investigations for personal identification, this unique feature of human beings always has something new to reveal. Genetic factors heavily influence fingerprint formation during embryonic development; therefore, there is a possibility of resemblance or inheritance of fingerprint patterns among the family members. The main objective of the present study is to understand the resemblance of fingerprint patterns among close family members, that is, father, mother, and their children. The study included 134 participants from 20 families of north India. Fingerprints from all the participants were obtained and analyzed for similarities and differences in pattern types between the parents and children to assess their strength of association. The results indicate a significant association (p-value < 0.05) between the fingerprint patterns of the first and second child and their mother. However, no such significance was found between the father and the children. The present study shows that there is a 40% chance of inheritance of fingerprint patterns from the mother to both the children, while the father shows 30% similarity with the first child and only 10% similarity with the second child. Whereas, only 20% of similarity was found among both the siblings. The findings of this preliminary study suggest that in certain circumstances such as mass disasters, cold cases, paternity disputes, missing persons, and so forth, forensic scientists may help to establish connections and corroborate familial relationships by studying the fingerprint patterns of family members.

This article presents opportunities for enriching anthropological knowledge and methods with machine learning and data analysis. Different examples show how quantitative methods empower anthropologists and how computational methods supplement ethnography, from sensor data and interview transcripts to designing technology solutions and automatically labeling cultural heritage. Conversely, the authors discuss the benefits of qualitative approaches in contemporary anthropological research and show how to transition from data analysis to ethnography and vice versa. Finally, the article pinpoints aspects in which each method can fail individually. It discusses why a combination of the two approaches, called circular mixed methods, minimizes the chance of failure and maximizes insights from the data.

In this essay, the meaning of diversity is explored as it pertains to senior underrepresented minority (URM) faculty experiences. The experiences of senior URM faculty were gathered through the URM Senior Scholars Histories Project to bring more visibility to racist and sexist practices and to the lack of diversity among faculty within research universities. This brings into question the use of the term diversity in higher education, a term that is often used, but falls short of a clear definition and plan for its implementation for better serving faculty, staff, and students. Through a brief overview of the use of the term diversity in higher education, it becomes apparent that it has been used as a pretty word for nearly 50 years, despite tireless efforts to make real, transformative structural changes within higher education institutions. The question now is: where do we go from here and what can we do to build and create new ways of being that embrace diversity as the norm?

In this article, we highlight a partnership between CommuniVax and a human-centered design firm (Bridgeable) that resulted in CommuniVaxCHAT—an online toolkit capable of engaging community members and translating their experiences and local knowledge in a way that decision-makers, including mayors and public health directors, can act upon. In addition to considering the process involved in creating CommuniVaxCHAT, and its associate practicalities, we examine how human-centered design, and more particularly personas and journeys, can act as boundary objects to facilitate engagement between groups and create interventions or policy. In this way, we argue that HCD can be used similarly to PhotoVoice as a tool to introduce ethnographic insights into applied and participatory contexts.

“Studying up” was Laura Nader's provocation to anthropologists to scrutinize the actions of the powerful few in relation to the ordeals of the powerless many. Engaging this lineage, this article describes CommuniVax, a rapid ethnographic research coalition supporting an equitable COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the United States. By tapping hyperlocal knowledge as well as that held by public health and governmental authorities at higher reaches, the coalition opened the possibility for a more just pandemic response and stronger democratic institutions. The project also broke with prevailing features in the studying up tradition: It operated as a multidisciplinary collective rather than a lone ethnographer, partnered with elites rather than a priori holding them at arm's length, and emphasized pragmatic solutions over scholastic critiques. These departures embody an “applying up” modality, supporting the idea ethnographers have plural strategies for studying actors who exert strong influence over others’ lives.