Pub Date : 2023-06-06DOI: 10.1177/14661381231175853
David Sanson
This paper examines the tensions, struggles, and opportunities of doing ethnographies ‘at-home’. For the purpose of his PhD dissertation, the author returned to the city where he grew up, one of the biggest ports in France, with a strong maritime and industrial history. In this paper, the researcher reflexively recounts the social and personal springs of this longitudinal fieldwork among childhood friends and relatives in the working-class background from where he originates. While shedding light on the identity pressures that drove him to/through this research process, the author also addresses the profound emotional component of such investigation, as well as the difficulties of writing about it. Reflecting upon this singular experience, the paper eventually stresses how the researcher’s peculiar position influenced his methodological postures, determined the direction of his research questions and also how it ultimately provided robust original data and results, hereby asserting the strength of fieldwork conducted close to home for the production of critical and scientific social knowledge.
{"title":"Close quarters. Sailing the murky waters of an ethnography ‘at-home’","authors":"David Sanson","doi":"10.1177/14661381231175853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231175853","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the tensions, struggles, and opportunities of doing ethnographies ‘at-home’. For the purpose of his PhD dissertation, the author returned to the city where he grew up, one of the biggest ports in France, with a strong maritime and industrial history. In this paper, the researcher reflexively recounts the social and personal springs of this longitudinal fieldwork among childhood friends and relatives in the working-class background from where he originates. While shedding light on the identity pressures that drove him to/through this research process, the author also addresses the profound emotional component of such investigation, as well as the difficulties of writing about it. Reflecting upon this singular experience, the paper eventually stresses how the researcher’s peculiar position influenced his methodological postures, determined the direction of his research questions and also how it ultimately provided robust original data and results, hereby asserting the strength of fieldwork conducted close to home for the production of critical and scientific social knowledge.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46365359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1466138120967373
Marie-Eve Bouchard
In this article, I examine how scales are produced, stabilized, and challenged through communicative practices, and how these scales organize (since colonial times) the racial groups that form Santomean society. I argue that the historical distinctive status of the Forros and the prestigious status of the Portuguese language are influenced by different scaling practices that are intertwined and interrelated. I demonstrate that it is the Forros' imagined and historical proximity to whiteness that bestow them racial privilege, and that allows them to maintain their position of social and political power in the country. In other words, their power results from proximity to Whiteness.
{"title":"Scaling proximity to whiteness: Racial boundary-making on São Tomé Island.","authors":"Marie-Eve Bouchard","doi":"10.1177/1466138120967373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138120967373","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, I examine how scales are produced, stabilized, and challenged through communicative practices, and how these scales organize (since colonial times) the racial groups that form Santomean society. I argue that the historical distinctive status of the Forros and the prestigious status of the Portuguese language are influenced by different scaling practices that are intertwined and interrelated. I demonstrate that it is the Forros' imagined and historical proximity to whiteness that bestow them racial privilege, and that allows them to maintain their position of social and political power in the country. In other words, their power results from proximity to Whiteness.</p>","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":"24 2","pages":"197-126"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1466138120967373","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10645396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-21DOI: 10.1177/14661381231177661
Jia Li, Bingbing Ai
This study examines the classroom interactions and agentive practices of a cohort of Chinese teachers when teaching Myanmar students under the Gaokao policy at a borderland high school in China. The complexities of teaching Myanmar students of diverse backgrounds are manifested in the context of the constraints of professional accountability and working conditions. The study reveals these teachers’ classroom norms and interactions are an outcome of negotiations between their agency and structural power. The teachers’ expectations of the international students’ abilities and prospects are constrained by the limitations of the current curriculum. The paper argues that internal and external conditions contribute to restricting the students’ access to educational resources and employment prospects. This paper draws attention to tensions and dilemmas of pedagogic practice in a borderland setting and calls for setting up a hybrid, inclusive third space for students and teachers in international education.
{"title":"Teaching Myanmar students under the Gaokao policy in a borderland school: Teachers’ challenges and agency","authors":"Jia Li, Bingbing Ai","doi":"10.1177/14661381231177661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231177661","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the classroom interactions and agentive practices of a cohort of Chinese teachers when teaching Myanmar students under the Gaokao policy at a borderland high school in China. The complexities of teaching Myanmar students of diverse backgrounds are manifested in the context of the constraints of professional accountability and working conditions. The study reveals these teachers’ classroom norms and interactions are an outcome of negotiations between their agency and structural power. The teachers’ expectations of the international students’ abilities and prospects are constrained by the limitations of the current curriculum. The paper argues that internal and external conditions contribute to restricting the students’ access to educational resources and employment prospects. This paper draws attention to tensions and dilemmas of pedagogic practice in a borderland setting and calls for setting up a hybrid, inclusive third space for students and teachers in international education.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48581520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-15DOI: 10.1177/14661381231169167
Antje Scharenberg
This article offers a methodological reflection on what it means to practise politically engaged ethnography with contemporary alter-European activists. While politically engaged research has a long history in the social sciences, it continues to present methodological and epistemological challenges to ethnographers who want their work not only to be academically rigorous, but also politically relevant. In this article, I build on scholarship conducted in collaboration with activists and social movements and what has come to be known as ‘militant ethnography’ in particular. Reflecting on three years of fieldwork with alter-European activists conducted between the UK’s vote to leave the EU in 2016 and the European Parliament elections in 2019, this article suggests that engaged knowledge production, here, is as an ongoing process of contestation. The article introduces four conceptual pillars along which these epistemic politics may be negotiated, understanding the knowledges produced as contextual, corporeal, contradictory and collective.
{"title":"Contested knowledges: Negotiating the epistemic politics of engaged activist ethnography","authors":"Antje Scharenberg","doi":"10.1177/14661381231169167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231169167","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a methodological reflection on what it means to practise politically engaged ethnography with contemporary alter-European activists. While politically engaged research has a long history in the social sciences, it continues to present methodological and epistemological challenges to ethnographers who want their work not only to be academically rigorous, but also politically relevant. In this article, I build on scholarship conducted in collaboration with activists and social movements and what has come to be known as ‘militant ethnography’ in particular. Reflecting on three years of fieldwork with alter-European activists conducted between the UK’s vote to leave the EU in 2016 and the European Parliament elections in 2019, this article suggests that engaged knowledge production, here, is as an ongoing process of contestation. The article introduces four conceptual pillars along which these epistemic politics may be negotiated, understanding the knowledges produced as contextual, corporeal, contradictory and collective.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47576152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-12DOI: 10.1177/14661381231174549
Nehemia Stern
This article explores the concept of time among combat reservists in the Israel Defense Forces. Most ethnographic studies of temporality tend to focus on how time’s passage is measured or ‘reckoned’ within varying cultural contexts. In contrast, this article looks to the more corporeal and embodied aspects of the human experience of time. It argues that within Israeli military contexts time is experienced as a near material-like substance that imposes itself – in a very physical way – upon the bodies of combat soldiers. In this sense, the ‘military timescape’ is experienced as a sort of malleable substance that the physical donning of a military uniform can transcend, alter, and refract. A detailed ethnographic exploration of time’s corporeal dimensions offers anthropologists a temporal, as opposed to a spatial, paradigm for engaging with some of the unique sociocultural phenomena of militarism and of military reserve service more specifically.
{"title":"‘Military timescapes’: The corporeal experience of time in an Israel defense forces reserve combat unit","authors":"Nehemia Stern","doi":"10.1177/14661381231174549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231174549","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the concept of time among combat reservists in the Israel Defense Forces. Most ethnographic studies of temporality tend to focus on how time’s passage is measured or ‘reckoned’ within varying cultural contexts. In contrast, this article looks to the more corporeal and embodied aspects of the human experience of time. It argues that within Israeli military contexts time is experienced as a near material-like substance that imposes itself – in a very physical way – upon the bodies of combat soldiers. In this sense, the ‘military timescape’ is experienced as a sort of malleable substance that the physical donning of a military uniform can transcend, alter, and refract. A detailed ethnographic exploration of time’s corporeal dimensions offers anthropologists a temporal, as opposed to a spatial, paradigm for engaging with some of the unique sociocultural phenomena of militarism and of military reserve service more specifically.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44951633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-10DOI: 10.1177/14661381231172351
{"title":"Corrigendum to “Transnational Giving and Evolving Religious, Ethnic and Political Formations in the Global South”","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/14661381231172351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231172351","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":"24 1","pages":"454 - 454"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49225821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-10DOI: 10.1177/14661381231171300
Leyla Bektaş Ata
This article aims to interrogate the construction of normality with a view to a squatter metropolitan setting in İzmir, Turkey. In doing so, I focus on the everyday experiences of the inhabitants in Limontepe and frame them in the context of place-making. I read the concept of ‘normal’ through Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and refer to women’s micro-practices in drawing its contours. Women, living within the boundaries of normality use tactics to cope with the existing normal and related interventions to their bodies, movements, and thoughts. Ethnographic research is the key to understanding inhabitants’ gendered experiences with space.
{"title":"Construction of normality in the gecekondu settlement: Experience of place, social pressure, and tactics","authors":"Leyla Bektaş Ata","doi":"10.1177/14661381231171300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231171300","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to interrogate the construction of normality with a view to a squatter metropolitan setting in İzmir, Turkey. In doing so, I focus on the everyday experiences of the inhabitants in Limontepe and frame them in the context of place-making. I read the concept of ‘normal’ through Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and refer to women’s micro-practices in drawing its contours. Women, living within the boundaries of normality use tactics to cope with the existing normal and related interventions to their bodies, movements, and thoughts. Ethnographic research is the key to understanding inhabitants’ gendered experiences with space.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44568983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-09DOI: 10.1177/14661381231159818
Bruno Lefort
This article discusses how migrant businesses actively contribute to the negotiation of everyday coexistence in a Finnish provincial city. It focuses on oriental barbershops to unpack the interplay between place, power, and social imagination. Against the trope of the ethnic business that reproduces assumptions framing migrant activities in terms of community formation, looking at these salons from the perspective of people’s existential need for emplacement reveals how the dynamics of belonging and marginalization are experienced, navigated, and contested by the barbers of Tampere. While the identity-centredness in the definition of diversity and the social hierarchies implied by the discourses of integration force them to negotiate their presence from the margins, the barbers also compose counter-narratives of coexistence. Grounded in an aspiration for recognition, their stories cast a social imaginary that, without ignoring difference, shifts its emphasis towards an ethics of mutuality, thus unlocking a pathway to challenge essentialization and inequalities.
{"title":"Places of belonging: Rethinking coexistence from oriental barbershops in a Finnish city","authors":"Bruno Lefort","doi":"10.1177/14661381231159818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231159818","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses how migrant businesses actively contribute to the negotiation of everyday coexistence in a Finnish provincial city. It focuses on oriental barbershops to unpack the interplay between place, power, and social imagination. Against the trope of the ethnic business that reproduces assumptions framing migrant activities in terms of community formation, looking at these salons from the perspective of people’s existential need for emplacement reveals how the dynamics of belonging and marginalization are experienced, navigated, and contested by the barbers of Tampere. While the identity-centredness in the definition of diversity and the social hierarchies implied by the discourses of integration force them to negotiate their presence from the margins, the barbers also compose counter-narratives of coexistence. Grounded in an aspiration for recognition, their stories cast a social imaginary that, without ignoring difference, shifts its emphasis towards an ethics of mutuality, thus unlocking a pathway to challenge essentialization and inequalities.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44633686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-22DOI: 10.1177/14661381231159057
P. Mutsaers, Maikel Meijeren
In a special issue in Ethnography, the question was raised how to study violence ethnographically in Latin America and the Caribbean. The present article seeks to extend this special issue with reflections on how to study different forms of violence ‘after the fact’, based on fieldwork at a juvenile detention centre in Curaçao in 2019 and 2020. We present intersubjectively realistic accounts of violence in the family sphere. These accounts came into being by means of two acts of empirical triangulation: (1) looking at violent episodes through the eyes of different people involved and (2) contrasting the counterstories that emerged from this with the detention centre’s case files that construct particular images of the detained youth and their family members. We end the article with critical reflections on our own unwitting contribution to the production of silence, which frustrated the youth’s counterstories.
{"title":"Triangulation and violence in the Caribbean: Crimes retold from a Curaçaoan juvenile detention centre","authors":"P. Mutsaers, Maikel Meijeren","doi":"10.1177/14661381231159057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231159057","url":null,"abstract":"In a special issue in Ethnography, the question was raised how to study violence ethnographically in Latin America and the Caribbean. The present article seeks to extend this special issue with reflections on how to study different forms of violence ‘after the fact’, based on fieldwork at a juvenile detention centre in Curaçao in 2019 and 2020. We present intersubjectively realistic accounts of violence in the family sphere. These accounts came into being by means of two acts of empirical triangulation: (1) looking at violent episodes through the eyes of different people involved and (2) contrasting the counterstories that emerged from this with the detention centre’s case files that construct particular images of the detained youth and their family members. We end the article with critical reflections on our own unwitting contribution to the production of silence, which frustrated the youth’s counterstories.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49353051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1177/14661381231158945
Joshua M. Bluteau
This photo essay explores the practice of digital self-portraiture as an epistemological practice. Drawing on the well-established role of photography within the anthropological canon, this photo essay looks with a new criticality on the act of self-portraiture by an anthropologist as both performative praxis and ethnographic tool. Employing a series of digital photographs taken in Venice, this essay explores how the practice of taking self-portraits to enrich an Instagram self is a vital step in the ethnographic research of social media. Allowing the researcher to engage with the practices of their interlocutors through performing the same actions as they do.
{"title":"Turning around the camera: Self-portraits of an anthropologist on Instagram","authors":"Joshua M. Bluteau","doi":"10.1177/14661381231158945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231158945","url":null,"abstract":"This photo essay explores the practice of digital self-portraiture as an epistemological practice. Drawing on the well-established role of photography within the anthropological canon, this photo essay looks with a new criticality on the act of self-portraiture by an anthropologist as both performative praxis and ethnographic tool. Employing a series of digital photographs taken in Venice, this essay explores how the practice of taking self-portraits to enrich an Instagram self is a vital step in the ethnographic research of social media. Allowing the researcher to engage with the practices of their interlocutors through performing the same actions as they do.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43223825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}