Pub Date : 2023-01-09DOI: 10.1177/14661381221147021
Garima Jaju
The field site is the retail showrooms of a fast-expanding organized retail company selling budget eyewear products across shopping malls and high streets of urban India. Through a thick description of 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork – arriving, forging social relations, recording and writing – this article traces the practical, ethical and epistemological paradoxes in doing ethnography. The article identifies these paradoxes as inherent to ethnography given its radical intent. Not studying them as limitations or failures, the article makes the case for a more honest and critical reckoning with these internal contradictions by making them more present in ethnographic practice and writing. It is argued that in so doing we enrich our understanding of the complex and contradictory social worlds we inhabit and study.
{"title":"Extra-terrestrial landings: An ethnographic account of doing ethnography","authors":"Garima Jaju","doi":"10.1177/14661381221147021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221147021","url":null,"abstract":"The field site is the retail showrooms of a fast-expanding organized retail company selling budget eyewear products across shopping malls and high streets of urban India. Through a thick description of 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork – arriving, forging social relations, recording and writing – this article traces the practical, ethical and epistemological paradoxes in doing ethnography. The article identifies these paradoxes as inherent to ethnography given its radical intent. Not studying them as limitations or failures, the article makes the case for a more honest and critical reckoning with these internal contradictions by making them more present in ethnographic practice and writing. It is argued that in so doing we enrich our understanding of the complex and contradictory social worlds we inhabit and study.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46750740","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 : 2023-01-04DOI: 10.1177/14661381221146983
L. M. Hernández Aguilar
Based on a digital ethnography on the imageboard platform 4chan/pol, this article traces the biopolitical compression of Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories into memes, which have populated far-right boards in the last decade. The article makes an argument for the relevance of studying the relation between the intellectual elaboration of Conspiracy Theories and their compression into concise and easily consumable memes, by fleshing out the functionality of memes in the argumentative economy of Conspiracy theories, (a) as encoding and compressing their core components; (b) by filling in the (unspoken) gaps in the logic of Conspiracy theories; and (c) by advancing a biopolitical understanding of social life.
{"title":"Memeing a conspiracy theory: On the biopolitical compression of the great replacement conspiracy theories","authors":"L. M. Hernández Aguilar","doi":"10.1177/14661381221146983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221146983","url":null,"abstract":"Based on a digital ethnography on the imageboard platform 4chan/pol, this article traces the biopolitical compression of Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories into memes, which have populated far-right boards in the last decade. The article makes an argument for the relevance of studying the relation between the intellectual elaboration of Conspiracy Theories and their compression into concise and easily consumable memes, by fleshing out the functionality of memes in the argumentative economy of Conspiracy theories, (a) as encoding and compressing their core components; (b) by filling in the (unspoken) gaps in the logic of Conspiracy theories; and (c) by advancing a biopolitical understanding of social life.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45937374","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 : 2023-01-03DOI: 10.1177/14661381221148904
J. Barnes, M. Taher
This paper presents a mode of collaboration between a researcher and research assistant for ethnographic data collection. We describe our experience as a researcher, who previously conducted fieldwork in Egypt but is now largely situated in the United States due to having young children, and a Cairo-based research assistant, who conducted participant observation of everyday practices of buying and eating subsidized bread for the researcher’s book project on bread, wheat, and security in Egypt. We position our narratives of this process side-by-side, interspersed by joint reflections, addressing questions regarding power asymmetries, the distribution of benefits, and what makes research collaborations work well. We argue that partnering in observation brings the benefit of more than one way of seeing and thinking through data. Moreover, we propose that this form of collaboration can be an effective strategy for researchers for whom continuous presence in their fieldsite is not possible.
{"title":"Walking with bread in Cairo: Ethnographic collaboration between a researcher and a research assistant","authors":"J. Barnes, M. Taher","doi":"10.1177/14661381221148904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221148904","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a mode of collaboration between a researcher and research assistant for ethnographic data collection. We describe our experience as a researcher, who previously conducted fieldwork in Egypt but is now largely situated in the United States due to having young children, and a Cairo-based research assistant, who conducted participant observation of everyday practices of buying and eating subsidized bread for the researcher’s book project on bread, wheat, and security in Egypt. We position our narratives of this process side-by-side, interspersed by joint reflections, addressing questions regarding power asymmetries, the distribution of benefits, and what makes research collaborations work well. We argue that partnering in observation brings the benefit of more than one way of seeing and thinking through data. Moreover, we propose that this form of collaboration can be an effective strategy for researchers for whom continuous presence in their fieldsite is not possible.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44175325","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 : 2022-12-29DOI: 10.1177/14661381221145353
Phoenix Chi Wang
Borrowing from scholarship on emotional labor, emotion management and symbolic power, this article highlights emotions’ symbolic role in sustaining the vital correspondence between the reality of social life and the official classification system. Through the concept of the ‘desired state of mind’ and empirical data from 3 years’ ethnographic fieldwork in an urban 911 dispatch center in New England, this research shows what the ‘desired state of mind’ of this context is, how the link between the folk and the bureaucratic is made though ‘controlled empathy’, and how the cost and consequence of this process is shaped by the status disparity prevalent in 911 emergency community.
{"title":"The ‘desired state of mind’: Emotional labor and the hidden cost of symbolic power in 911 emergency response in the U.S","authors":"Phoenix Chi Wang","doi":"10.1177/14661381221145353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221145353","url":null,"abstract":"Borrowing from scholarship on emotional labor, emotion management and symbolic power, this article highlights emotions’ symbolic role in sustaining the vital correspondence between the reality of social life and the official classification system. Through the concept of the ‘desired state of mind’ and empirical data from 3 years’ ethnographic fieldwork in an urban 911 dispatch center in New England, this research shows what the ‘desired state of mind’ of this context is, how the link between the folk and the bureaucratic is made though ‘controlled empathy’, and how the cost and consequence of this process is shaped by the status disparity prevalent in 911 emergency community.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45373386","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 : 2022-12-27DOI: 10.1177/14661381221147137
Aleena Sebastian
Matrilineal practices constitute an important aspect of the social organization among the Minangkabau Muslims of West Sumatra. Challenges were posed to the co-existence of customary practices and religious elements by specific regional and historic factors such as Dutch colonialism, the introduction of the money economy, Islamic reformism, legislative interventions, and other socio-economic transformations in colonial and post-colonial West Sumatra. These factors attempted to refashion kinship along new familial relations and was marked by the entry of Minangkabau women into the public sphere, engaging with the transformation in multifarious ways. What one could observe in their contemporary form of social organization is the mutual existence of change and continuity of practices. These practices need to be understood as historically specific negotiations among customs, religion and the state, and are ethnographically explored in the paper.
{"title":"Matrilineal practices among muslims: An ethnographic study of the Minangkabau of West Sumatra","authors":"Aleena Sebastian","doi":"10.1177/14661381221147137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221147137","url":null,"abstract":"Matrilineal practices constitute an important aspect of the social organization among the Minangkabau Muslims of West Sumatra. Challenges were posed to the co-existence of customary practices and religious elements by specific regional and historic factors such as Dutch colonialism, the introduction of the money economy, Islamic reformism, legislative interventions, and other socio-economic transformations in colonial and post-colonial West Sumatra. These factors attempted to refashion kinship along new familial relations and was marked by the entry of Minangkabau women into the public sphere, engaging with the transformation in multifarious ways. What one could observe in their contemporary form of social organization is the mutual existence of change and continuity of practices. These practices need to be understood as historically specific negotiations among customs, religion and the state, and are ethnographically explored in the paper.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46447372","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 : 2022-12-23DOI: 10.1177/14661381221146988
Samuel Dinger
This article is an ethnographic study of a sakan shababiyy––a non-familial domestic space shared by young Syrian men living in exile. Based on fieldwork carried out in Lebanon between 2017 and early 2020, the article describes the texture of everyday life in a space where young men attempt to make home together in exile amidst the escalating pressures of housing discrimination, political repression, and economic collapse. The narration critically engages Bourdieu’s famous analysis of the Kabyle house as a frame for considering the ambiguous ‘reversals and reflections’ that structure domestic space in the aftermath of war and displacement. As a group of formerly middle-class young men rebuild lives upended by violence, peer cohabitation produces a masculine domesticity that is both an improvised and creative response to the exigences of exile and the grounds for orienting towards more optimistic imagined futures.
{"title":"The sakan shababiyy, or the world improvised: Displacement and masculine domestic space in Lebanon","authors":"Samuel Dinger","doi":"10.1177/14661381221146988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221146988","url":null,"abstract":"This article is an ethnographic study of a sakan shababiyy––a non-familial domestic space shared by young Syrian men living in exile. Based on fieldwork carried out in Lebanon between 2017 and early 2020, the article describes the texture of everyday life in a space where young men attempt to make home together in exile amidst the escalating pressures of housing discrimination, political repression, and economic collapse. The narration critically engages Bourdieu’s famous analysis of the Kabyle house as a frame for considering the ambiguous ‘reversals and reflections’ that structure domestic space in the aftermath of war and displacement. As a group of formerly middle-class young men rebuild lives upended by violence, peer cohabitation produces a masculine domesticity that is both an improvised and creative response to the exigences of exile and the grounds for orienting towards more optimistic imagined futures.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43215640","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 : 2022-12-21DOI: 10.1177/14661381221098605
Sangmi Lee
By comparing changes in New Year’s celebrations among Hmong in two diasporic communities in Laos and the U.S., this paper examines the temporal and spatial aspects of cultural authenticity in the context of different nation-states and homelands. While the Hmong community in Laos has experienced considerable reduction and impoverishment of their New Year’s over time, their co-ethnics in the United States have expanded it into an elaborate and commercialized festival. Such modifications of this cultural tradition reflect differing levels of economic development and the multicultural ideologies of these two nation-states. Because both diasporic Hmong communities realize that their New Year’s has dramatically changed from the past, neither claims to have retained the “authentic” tradition. Instead, they produce discourses about imagined authenticity which presume that a more “authentic” version of their New Year’s existed not only temporally in the past, but also continues to be spatially located in distant ethnic or natal homelands.
{"title":"National differentiation and imagined authenticity: The Hmong New Year in multicultural Laos and the United States","authors":"Sangmi Lee","doi":"10.1177/14661381221098605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221098605","url":null,"abstract":"By comparing changes in New Year’s celebrations among Hmong in two diasporic communities in Laos and the U.S., this paper examines the temporal and spatial aspects of cultural authenticity in the context of different nation-states and homelands. While the Hmong community in Laos has experienced considerable reduction and impoverishment of their New Year’s over time, their co-ethnics in the United States have expanded it into an elaborate and commercialized festival. Such modifications of this cultural tradition reflect differing levels of economic development and the multicultural ideologies of these two nation-states. Because both diasporic Hmong communities realize that their New Year’s has dramatically changed from the past, neither claims to have retained the “authentic” tradition. Instead, they produce discourses about imagined authenticity which presume that a more “authentic” version of their New Year’s existed not only temporally in the past, but also continues to be spatially located in distant ethnic or natal homelands.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48220304","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 : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1177/14661381221147031
Dominika Czarnecka
This paper adds to the limited number of studies about physical autonomy and practice shifts among fitness instructors who responded to the change brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and moved their professional activity online. I conceptualize physical autonomy as the ability of moving unrestrained and unhindered. I apply the online–offline ethnography to explore the interdependencies between digital media/technologies and the embodied practices of fitness instructors in online workouts. I also pay attention to fitness instructors’ perception of their physical autonomy in the world of online training during the pandemic. This article shows that instructors’ capacity for action has become more and more dependent on new technology.
{"title":"Online workouts and fitness instructors’ physical autonomy in times of the Covid-19 pandemic","authors":"Dominika Czarnecka","doi":"10.1177/14661381221147031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221147031","url":null,"abstract":"This paper adds to the limited number of studies about physical autonomy and practice shifts among fitness instructors who responded to the change brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and moved their professional activity online. I conceptualize physical autonomy as the ability of moving unrestrained and unhindered. I apply the online–offline ethnography to explore the interdependencies between digital media/technologies and the embodied practices of fitness instructors in online workouts. I also pay attention to fitness instructors’ perception of their physical autonomy in the world of online training during the pandemic. This article shows that instructors’ capacity for action has become more and more dependent on new technology.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48894839","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 : 2022-12-16DOI: 10.1177/14661381221145424
Samantha Leonard, Ann Ward
Many ethnographers had to reconceptualize or withdraw from their fieldwork due to COVID-19. While the process of exiting the field has always interested ethnographers, the pandemic has spurred further thinking about the complexity of this element of the research process. This paper adds to the conversations around leaving a field site by unpacking the different situations that can trigger departure. Using data from our experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork before and during the pandemic to further our understanding of the complexity of exiting the field, we explore the concept of field collapsing events by elaborating on the differences between interruptions and disruptions. It is not the case that one form of stoppage has more weight, merit, or impact on an ethnographic project. Instead, we argue that to parse out the complexities of exiting the field, we must create more clarity around the kinds of exits that ethnographers experience.
{"title":"Tales from the (disrupted) field: Contemplating interruptions, disruptions, and ethnography amidst a pandemic","authors":"Samantha Leonard, Ann Ward","doi":"10.1177/14661381221145424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221145424","url":null,"abstract":"Many ethnographers had to reconceptualize or withdraw from their fieldwork due to COVID-19. While the process of exiting the field has always interested ethnographers, the pandemic has spurred further thinking about the complexity of this element of the research process. This paper adds to the conversations around leaving a field site by unpacking the different situations that can trigger departure. Using data from our experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork before and during the pandemic to further our understanding of the complexity of exiting the field, we explore the concept of field collapsing events by elaborating on the differences between interruptions and disruptions. It is not the case that one form of stoppage has more weight, merit, or impact on an ethnographic project. Instead, we argue that to parse out the complexities of exiting the field, we must create more clarity around the kinds of exits that ethnographers experience.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46584131","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 : 2022-12-16DOI: 10.1177/14661381221145816
A. Simpson
The immersive ethnographic tradition has strong potential to contribute to a deeper sociological understanding of the construction, maintenance and processes of powerful groups. However, ethnography as a method – and sociology as a discipline – has tended to focus more on developing techniques and toolkits for studying what Bourdieu and Wacquant call a “poverty population” rather than elites systems of power. In response, this article builds a much needed ‘toolkit’ for would-be-ethnographers, examining how ethnographic methodologies can be adapted to critically examine the elite cultural fields. It does so by adapting Desmond’s four foci of relational ethnographic: fields, boundaries, processes and cultural conflict. Adopting a relational orientation, this article provides an illustration of how ethnography can be used in the study of powerful cultural fields, using the context of the City of London, and thereby forming the basis for future research.
{"title":"A relational approach to the ethnographic study of power in the context of the city of London","authors":"A. Simpson","doi":"10.1177/14661381221145816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221145816","url":null,"abstract":"The immersive ethnographic tradition has strong potential to contribute to a deeper sociological understanding of the construction, maintenance and processes of powerful groups. However, ethnography as a method – and sociology as a discipline – has tended to focus more on developing techniques and toolkits for studying what Bourdieu and Wacquant call a “poverty population” rather than elites systems of power. In response, this article builds a much needed ‘toolkit’ for would-be-ethnographers, examining how ethnographic methodologies can be adapted to critically examine the elite cultural fields. It does so by adapting Desmond’s four foci of relational ethnographic: fields, boundaries, processes and cultural conflict. Adopting a relational orientation, this article provides an illustration of how ethnography can be used in the study of powerful cultural fields, using the context of the City of London, and thereby forming the basis for future research.","PeriodicalId":47573,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44786879","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}
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