Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/08912416211040560
Peter L. Forberg
In this article, I examine the convergence of the socio-technological processes that enabled members of far-right conspiracy theory QAnon to expand beyond the “echo chambers” of the online fringe and incorporate themselves into mainstream discourse. Drawing on interdisciplinary research methods to focus on how technology is used in practice, I analyze QAnon’s online life through the concepts of algorithms, user experiences, and routines. I argue that QAnon followers’ deliberate manipulation of and incidental capitalization on algorithms gives QAnon’s content momentum that spreads information across communities; that the affordances of the user experiences of different platforms allow QAnons to curate a variety of strategies for growing their ideas and audience; and that the integration of QAnon participation into personal routines helps move the theory offline. Ultimately, a ground-up approach to digital socialization adds complexity to the analysis of echo chambers and algorithmic power.
{"title":"From the Fringe to the Fore: An Algorithmic Ethnography of the Far-Right Conspiracy Theory Group QAnon","authors":"Peter L. Forberg","doi":"10.1177/08912416211040560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211040560","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I examine the convergence of the socio-technological processes that enabled members of far-right conspiracy theory QAnon to expand beyond the “echo chambers” of the online fringe and incorporate themselves into mainstream discourse. Drawing on interdisciplinary research methods to focus on how technology is used in practice, I analyze QAnon’s online life through the concepts of algorithms, user experiences, and routines. I argue that QAnon followers’ deliberate manipulation of and incidental capitalization on algorithms gives QAnon’s content momentum that spreads information across communities; that the affordances of the user experiences of different platforms allow QAnons to curate a variety of strategies for growing their ideas and audience; and that the integration of QAnon participation into personal routines helps move the theory offline. Ultimately, a ground-up approach to digital socialization adds complexity to the analysis of echo chambers and algorithmic power.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"51 1","pages":"291 - 317"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47249971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-31DOI: 10.1177/08912416211031661
D. Cumming, M. Gibbs, Wally Smith
Spectatorship is a core element of esports. Short for “electronic sports,” esports encompasses organized, professional competitive videogaming practices produced and consumed as a spectator sport. Esports’ computerized nature grants it a placeless quality, which creates ambiguities around what authentic esports spectatorship ought to be. Notably, some notions theorized prior to the emergence of contemporary esports imply that authenticity and placelessness are incompatible. We address this conundrum by presenting an ethnographic study conducted at an esports bar; a venue designed for the spectatorship of esports alongside other fans and alcohol consumption. While embodying seemingly placeless qualities, esports spectatorship nevertheless takes place in situated places. We found spectators at the bar worked to authenticate their spectatorship by drawing on conventions of legitimacy, professionalism, and spectacle from elsewhere, particularly spectator sports. Through their spectatorship, those at the bar constructed and affirmed a convention of authenticity for esports.
{"title":"Constructing Authentic Spectatorship at an Esports Bar","authors":"D. Cumming, M. Gibbs, Wally Smith","doi":"10.1177/08912416211031661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211031661","url":null,"abstract":"Spectatorship is a core element of esports. Short for “electronic sports,” esports encompasses organized, professional competitive videogaming practices produced and consumed as a spectator sport. Esports’ computerized nature grants it a placeless quality, which creates ambiguities around what authentic esports spectatorship ought to be. Notably, some notions theorized prior to the emergence of contemporary esports imply that authenticity and placelessness are incompatible. We address this conundrum by presenting an ethnographic study conducted at an esports bar; a venue designed for the spectatorship of esports alongside other fans and alcohol consumption. While embodying seemingly placeless qualities, esports spectatorship nevertheless takes place in situated places. We found spectators at the bar worked to authenticate their spectatorship by drawing on conventions of legitimacy, professionalism, and spectacle from elsewhere, particularly spectator sports. Through their spectatorship, those at the bar constructed and affirmed a convention of authenticity for esports.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"51 1","pages":"257 - 288"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/08912416211031661","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46016784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-31DOI: 10.1177/08912416211031647
Ivi Daskalaki, Anna Apostolidou
The article addresses the question of alternative ways to writing ethnography and more specifically, the ethnography of surrogacy. It focuses on the example of a digital ethnographic artifact that was created in order to host fictional representations of surrogacy practices. The article presents ethnographic material from a recent research project that focused on experiences of surrogate parenthood of Greek and Cypriot intended parents. The digital artifact demonstrates how multimodal anthropological narrations may represent, and simultaneously evoke, sensory experience through the temporal and spatial digital unfolding of interlocutors’ stories. Indeed, the article explains the structure of the artifact and discusses specific digital nodes which depict interlocutors’ testimonies of longing, waiting, uncertainty, vulnerability, pain, loss, joy, and safekeeping before, during, and after surrogacy procedures. In the context of the ethnographic artifact narratives and non-narratives of motherhood, fatherhood, and pregnancy refer to a variety of precarious contexts of placeness/emplacement, legality/illegality, and connectedness/disconnectedness without relying on conventional textual ethnographic writing. Drawing from selected ethnographic examples as they relate to the literature of assisted reproduction, the authors argue that digital nodal narration enables both the cultural contextualization of individual experience as well as its affective and intellectual correlation with similar and antithetical experiences of other field interlocutors.
{"title":"Digital Encounters of Surrogacy: Nodes of a Fictional Ethnography","authors":"Ivi Daskalaki, Anna Apostolidou","doi":"10.1177/08912416211031647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211031647","url":null,"abstract":"The article addresses the question of alternative ways to writing ethnography and more specifically, the ethnography of surrogacy. It focuses on the example of a digital ethnographic artifact that was created in order to host fictional representations of surrogacy practices. The article presents ethnographic material from a recent research project that focused on experiences of surrogate parenthood of Greek and Cypriot intended parents. The digital artifact demonstrates how multimodal anthropological narrations may represent, and simultaneously evoke, sensory experience through the temporal and spatial digital unfolding of interlocutors’ stories. Indeed, the article explains the structure of the artifact and discusses specific digital nodes which depict interlocutors’ testimonies of longing, waiting, uncertainty, vulnerability, pain, loss, joy, and safekeeping before, during, and after surrogacy procedures. In the context of the ethnographic artifact narratives and non-narratives of motherhood, fatherhood, and pregnancy refer to a variety of precarious contexts of placeness/emplacement, legality/illegality, and connectedness/disconnectedness without relying on conventional textual ethnographic writing. Drawing from selected ethnographic examples as they relate to the literature of assisted reproduction, the authors argue that digital nodal narration enables both the cultural contextualization of individual experience as well as its affective and intellectual correlation with similar and antithetical experiences of other field interlocutors.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"51 1","pages":"223 - 256"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/08912416211031647","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47140830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-28DOI: 10.1177/08912416211026725
K. Irwin
Innovations in the trauma-informed care (TIC) field have promised to transform youth-serving institutions by asking practitioners to pay attention to the developmental needs of young people facing maltreatment. Despite notable TIC innovations, our knowledge about childhood trauma tends to be adult-centric, presenting youth as passive recipients of (rather than active agents responding to) harm. How 27 high school students made sense of childhood trauma emerged during an 11-year ethnographic study of students in a school-based counseling program in Oahu, Hawai‘i. To overcome hardships, the teens constructed what they believed to be strong, resilient, and respectable identities, although teens’ identity performances differed. Adolescents’ narratives highlight sociological understandings of trauma survival whereby youth creatively negotiated their sense of self and drew from ideologies embedded in larger institutional contexts.
{"title":"“You Kind of Find Yourself Helpless”: Teens’ Identity Constructions and Responses to Childhood Trauma","authors":"K. Irwin","doi":"10.1177/08912416211026725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211026725","url":null,"abstract":"Innovations in the trauma-informed care (TIC) field have promised to transform youth-serving institutions by asking practitioners to pay attention to the developmental needs of young people facing maltreatment. Despite notable TIC innovations, our knowledge about childhood trauma tends to be adult-centric, presenting youth as passive recipients of (rather than active agents responding to) harm. How 27 high school students made sense of childhood trauma emerged during an 11-year ethnographic study of students in a school-based counseling program in Oahu, Hawai‘i. To overcome hardships, the teens constructed what they believed to be strong, resilient, and respectable identities, although teens’ identity performances differed. Adolescents’ narratives highlight sociological understandings of trauma survival whereby youth creatively negotiated their sense of self and drew from ideologies embedded in larger institutional contexts.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"51 1","pages":"59 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/08912416211026725","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44095549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-22DOI: 10.1177/08912416211022817
Janet S. Armitage
I present an evocative autoethnographic account of reporting workplace sexual harassment that illustrates the decision-making and satisfaction (or lack thereof) with reporting and interactions with and perceptions of compassionate bystanders not only during but also after the actual incident. While reporting is lauded as the key to deterrence and as a successful approach to dealing with the stresses of harassment, it alone does not fully address emotional harms associated with workplace sexual harassment in organizational environments often more compliant than compassionate. In contrast, this article aligns with emerging evidence that views bystanders as underused resources who can deter sexual harassment and bring needed respite to victim’s suffering through compassionate noticing, feeling, and responding. While my account is personal and cannot be generalized to others, it does offer both a familiar and theoretically informed narrative that describes the prolonged presence and engagement of compassionate bystanders in my experience of workplace sexual harassment and reveals bystander compassion as the key to offset the gap where reporting as remediation neither sufficiently heals the victim nor redresses persist sexual harassment in the workplace.
{"title":"“When I Least Expected It”: an Autoethnography of Reporting Workplace Sexual Harassment and Compassionate Bystanders”","authors":"Janet S. Armitage","doi":"10.1177/08912416211022817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211022817","url":null,"abstract":"I present an evocative autoethnographic account of reporting workplace sexual harassment that illustrates the decision-making and satisfaction (or lack thereof) with reporting and interactions with and perceptions of compassionate bystanders not only during but also after the actual incident. While reporting is lauded as the key to deterrence and as a successful approach to dealing with the stresses of harassment, it alone does not fully address emotional harms associated with workplace sexual harassment in organizational environments often more compliant than compassionate. In contrast, this article aligns with emerging evidence that views bystanders as underused resources who can deter sexual harassment and bring needed respite to victim’s suffering through compassionate noticing, feeling, and responding. While my account is personal and cannot be generalized to others, it does offer both a familiar and theoretically informed narrative that describes the prolonged presence and engagement of compassionate bystanders in my experience of workplace sexual harassment and reveals bystander compassion as the key to offset the gap where reporting as remediation neither sufficiently heals the victim nor redresses persist sexual harassment in the workplace.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"51 1","pages":"29 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/08912416211022817","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47752266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-14DOI: 10.1177/08912416211021898
Molly Wiant Cummins, G. Brannon
Researcher reflexivity is not a new concept in qualitative research. However, how/if researchers engage in that reflexivity varies. In this essay, the authors engage in reflexivity about a research project they conducted together. The previous project consisted of semi-structured interviews with U.S.-based mothers regarding their perceptions about motherhood. We then used intensive motherhood as a theoretical lens through which we analyzed the interviews. The project also encompassed mothers’ perceptions during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Through duoethnography, the researchers reflexively consider major dead angles of their project, challenges they faced, and what reflexivity brings to the forefront. They further reflect on their own communication processes throughout the research project and discuss implications for future researchers. As a result, the authors call for researchers to consider their own positionalities and the effects on research more deeply through collaboration and continual reevaluation.
{"title":"Implicating Ourselves Through Our Research: A Duoethnography of Researcher Reflexivity","authors":"Molly Wiant Cummins, G. Brannon","doi":"10.1177/08912416211021898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211021898","url":null,"abstract":"Researcher reflexivity is not a new concept in qualitative research. However, how/if researchers engage in that reflexivity varies. In this essay, the authors engage in reflexivity about a research project they conducted together. The previous project consisted of semi-structured interviews with U.S.-based mothers regarding their perceptions about motherhood. We then used intensive motherhood as a theoretical lens through which we analyzed the interviews. The project also encompassed mothers’ perceptions during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Through duoethnography, the researchers reflexively consider major dead angles of their project, challenges they faced, and what reflexivity brings to the forefront. They further reflect on their own communication processes throughout the research project and discuss implications for future researchers. As a result, the authors call for researchers to consider their own positionalities and the effects on research more deeply through collaboration and continual reevaluation.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"51 1","pages":"85 - 102"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/08912416211021898","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42985564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-09DOI: 10.1177/08912416211013883
Mikkaka Overstreet, Janeé R. Avent Harris, Loni Crumb, C. Howard
In this article, four Black woman scholars explore their experiences in academia through the shared event of a writing retreat. This piece follows the rich storytelling history of Black women scholars who have carved out spaces where they can tell their truths. This work pairs narrative inquiry and autoethnography to address the question: How do Black women faculty create and navigate spaces to promote their success within academia?
{"title":"Facing the Storm: Our First Annual Faculty of Color Writing Retreat as a Microcosm for Being a Black Woman in the Academy","authors":"Mikkaka Overstreet, Janeé R. Avent Harris, Loni Crumb, C. Howard","doi":"10.1177/08912416211013883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211013883","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, four Black woman scholars explore their experiences in academia through the shared event of a writing retreat. This piece follows the rich storytelling history of Black women scholars who have carved out spaces where they can tell their truths. This work pairs narrative inquiry and autoethnography to address the question: How do Black women faculty create and navigate spaces to promote their success within academia?","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"50 1","pages":"862 - 885"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/08912416211013883","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46999487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-06DOI: 10.1177/08912416211019454
Gilles Chantraine, D. Scheer
This article is based on a sociological research, combining qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations, undertaken in “radicalization assessment units” in French prisons. We will first summarize the context of negotiating the research agreement, amidst a climate of panic on the part of political authorities who feared terrorist attacks. Then we will describe empirically the way the researchers were particular objects of surveillance on the prison grounds, in a way that was different, in its nature and unusual intensity, than the usual surveillance of other people who come into the prison. Lastly, we will show that this surveillance spreads beyond the prison walls, for example, the researchers were tailed when they left the prison. A reflexive work would explore all the ambiguities of this surveillance—from protection to control—and at the same time consider this surveillance of the researchers not as a contextual element of the study, but an object of the analysis in its own right. In doing so, this case study more broadly examines the methodological challenges of ethnography undertaken in difficult fieldwork together with a grounded theory capable of integrating into the analysis the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the research process itself.
{"title":"Surveillance, Radicalization, and Prison Change Self-Analysis of an Ethnographic Survey Under Tension","authors":"Gilles Chantraine, D. Scheer","doi":"10.1177/08912416211019454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211019454","url":null,"abstract":"This article is based on a sociological research, combining qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations, undertaken in “radicalization assessment units” in French prisons. We will first summarize the context of negotiating the research agreement, amidst a climate of panic on the part of political authorities who feared terrorist attacks. Then we will describe empirically the way the researchers were particular objects of surveillance on the prison grounds, in a way that was different, in its nature and unusual intensity, than the usual surveillance of other people who come into the prison. Lastly, we will show that this surveillance spreads beyond the prison walls, for example, the researchers were tailed when they left the prison. A reflexive work would explore all the ambiguities of this surveillance—from protection to control—and at the same time consider this surveillance of the researchers not as a contextual element of the study, but an object of the analysis in its own right. In doing so, this case study more broadly examines the methodological challenges of ethnography undertaken in difficult fieldwork together with a grounded theory capable of integrating into the analysis the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the research process itself.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"51 1","pages":"171 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/08912416211019454","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65809229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1177/08912416211021631
Firuzeh Shokooh Valle
Issues of power, inequality, and representation in the production of knowledge have a long history in transnational feminist research. And yet the unequal relationship between ethnographers and participants continues to haunt feminist research. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with the cooperative Sulá Batsú in Costa Rica between 2015 and 2019, in this essay I argue that centering solidarity and working through discomfort creates relationships that can reinvent and endure the persistent imbalance of power between researcher and participant. I conceptualize a solidarity-based methodology that is uncomfortable, tossing between "us and them," the objective and the subjective, akin to Gloria Anzaldúa’s “nepantla,” a liminal space of both fragmentation and unification, of both anguish and healing: a methodology from the cracks. In this essay, I reflect upon my experiences as a Puerto Rican feminist researcher focusing on Sulá Batsú, specifically on my relationship with the coop’s general coordinator. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the coop, including participant observation, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis of their research, briefs, blog posts, presentations, and promotional literature.
{"title":"“How Will You Give Back?”: On Becoming a Compañera as a Feminist Methodology from the Cracks","authors":"Firuzeh Shokooh Valle","doi":"10.1177/08912416211021631","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211021631","url":null,"abstract":"Issues of power, inequality, and representation in the production of knowledge have a long history in transnational feminist research. And yet the unequal relationship between ethnographers and participants continues to haunt feminist research. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with the cooperative Sulá Batsú in Costa Rica between 2015 and 2019, in this essay I argue that centering solidarity and working through discomfort creates relationships that can reinvent and endure the persistent imbalance of power between researcher and participant. I conceptualize a solidarity-based methodology that is uncomfortable, tossing between \"us and them,\" the objective and the subjective, akin to Gloria Anzaldúa’s “nepantla,” a liminal space of both fragmentation and unification, of both anguish and healing: a methodology from the cracks. In this essay, I reflect upon my experiences as a Puerto Rican feminist researcher focusing on Sulá Batsú, specifically on my relationship with the coop’s general coordinator. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the coop, including participant observation, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis of their research, briefs, blog posts, presentations, and promotional literature.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"50 1","pages":"835 - 861"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/08912416211021631","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43931117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1177/08912416211021897
J. Parsons
Every year, hundreds of U.S. citizens patrol the Mexican border dressed in camouflage and armed with pistols and assault rifles. Unsanctioned by the government, these militias aim to stop the movement of narcotics into the United States. Recent interest in the anthropology of ethics has focused on how individuals cultivate themselves toward a notion of the ethical. In contrast, within the militias, ethical self-cultivation was absent. I argue the volunteers derived the power to be ethical from the control of the dominant moral assemblage and the construction of an immoral “Other” which provided them the power to define a moral landscape that limited the potential for ethical conflicts. In the article, I discuss two instances Border Watch and its volunteers dismissed disruptions to their moral certainty and confirmed to themselves that their actions were not only the “right” thing to do, but the only ethical response available.
{"title":"The Power to be Ethical: Controlling Moral Assemblages in Border Militias","authors":"J. Parsons","doi":"10.1177/08912416211021897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211021897","url":null,"abstract":"Every year, hundreds of U.S. citizens patrol the Mexican border dressed in camouflage and armed with pistols and assault rifles. Unsanctioned by the government, these militias aim to stop the movement of narcotics into the United States. Recent interest in the anthropology of ethics has focused on how individuals cultivate themselves toward a notion of the ethical. In contrast, within the militias, ethical self-cultivation was absent. I argue the volunteers derived the power to be ethical from the control of the dominant moral assemblage and the construction of an immoral “Other” which provided them the power to define a moral landscape that limited the potential for ethical conflicts. In the article, I discuss two instances Border Watch and its volunteers dismissed disruptions to their moral certainty and confirmed to themselves that their actions were not only the “right” thing to do, but the only ethical response available.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":"51 1","pages":"3 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/08912416211021897","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46403666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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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